It would seem that the government's Network Rail agency is incapable of managing a railway line, despite more subsidy being spent upon it than there has ever been lavished before upon any similar agency. The argument is clear. The railway should be properly privatized tomorrow, lock, stock, and barrel, to leave one owner in charge of one railway, like it used to be back in the day of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a man who ran a better railway under Great Western over one hundred years ago, than the government-toadying clowns of First Great Western can manage today, with their drive to keep to Whitehall's lateness timetable spreadsheets at the cost of customer service.
Will a proper privatisation happen? Will we go back to what we had before the interference of the 1945 proto-communist Labour government?
Alas, there's fat chance of this until the entire thing really does come to a permanent grinding halt, worse even than the mess in the NHS. And where the failure of the government-controlled Railtrack was a reason to bring in the government's fully-owned Network Rail, the failure of Network Rail will lead to nothing but yet more subsidy for those legions of tax-consuming friends of the government based in the Euston area, especially if they can bung the Labour Party a few quid, from their ill-gotten government gains.
Crooked? Useless? Stupid? Obvious? Just tick yes to all of the above.
2 comments:
Hopefully the Carling Cup shambles will have made a few converts!
As a regular commuter from Henley to London Paddington, I get the Carling Cup shambles every day.
One day, the 8:04 from Twyford actually arrived in Paddington, ON TIME. Crikey, I nearly leapt out and gave the driver a kiss.
I've actually had enough of the service from Henley, and from March 1st I'll be driving to Reading and getting the 'fast' trains from there.
Well done, Tony, doubling my weekly road use mileage by providing such a useless local train service.
Oh well, at least if my extra carbon dioxide output has any effect whatsoever on the climate, it will help keep the incipient Ice Age at bay. You see, there is a method to the socialist failure to be able to run that simplest of command economy toys, a railway.
Let's just praise the Lord we don't have a 'National Food Network'. We'd all be dead of starvation by Friday. But at least the potatoes would be recorded as having been delivered on time, by the one man left alive at the central potato depot.
You see, as long as the Whitehall spreadsheets add up, everything is Ok.
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