By spooky coincidence, on Saturday night I watched an old episode of Slow Horses in which a passenger died mysteriously on a replacement bus between High Wycombe and Oxford Parkway – and on Sunday I woke to reports that the first service of the new era of rail renationalisation, the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo, had also featured a replacement bus. Nobody died, but it wasn’t a good omen.
Nor was it quite the ‘turning point for the future of our railways’ that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander declared. South Western Railway’s return to state hands this week was in fact the fifth major passenger franchise to go that way – four having already failed under the previous government. Nine more will transition as their contracts expire between now and 2028, by which time Labour’s Great British Railways (GBR) will have seized control of the whole contraption, including tracks and stations.
So this is a work in progress – which in theory should lead to economies of scale, co-ordinated timetables and simpler ticketing. In practice, it’s also likely to be hobbled by incompatible IT, endless track and signal troubles, and workforce intransigence. But in fairness, all this reflects the fact that the Major government’s 1996 blueprint for privatisation, which broke British Rail into 70 companies, was a Treasury-driven dog’s breakfast that enriched undeserving players, bankrupted worthy ones and left commuters deeply disgruntled.
On the other hand, GBR is also a nakedly leftist move to return to state ownership the only privatised industry in which (as its time-limited franchises expire) the transfer can happen without confiscation or compensation. Behind it are unions whose resurgence was marked by a 15 per cent unconditional pay rise for train drivers shortly after Labour came to power.
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