The Secret History of Rail (Channel 4, 2001)

I arrived at the station quite early I allowed myself lots of time I kept checking the platform both pronouncement of when at the 12:10 we could be baby eventually was announced about 12 o'clock and so I am went to the platform and took my seat ukg it pulled away any problems I just sat down and read magazine I almost ends up in a first class my phone went off so I didn't go in first class in the end so in hindsight I was quite lucky about 15 or so minutes later and well-experienced buying the coffee was shaking before being hit by luggage that was flying around as far as the courage began to tip over as the train went down we held each other's hands just a panic we just grabbed each other he had this look in his face he looked as if he was going to die that's the image that Steve's has been most is self the people on that day and the expressions on their faces as as the crash happened the Hatfield crash basically paralyzed the whole rail network they found hairline cracks in rails all over the country and the trains just had to go slower and slower it took one train nine hours to get from London to Nottingham and I myself spent many hours gazing at flooded Wiltshire fields whilst the London Cardiff train went nowhere the passengers it was a full year of misery but by the end of that year rail track itself was in total crisis rail tracks demise offers a golden opportunity to recast the railway industry in our country and to create a railway industry which is fit for the 21st century which simply isn't the case at the moment the trouble is that on the railway there's been one golden opportunity after another nationalization social-democratic modernizers in the 1970s privatizes in the 1980s and in the 1990s Tony Blair's New Labour Third Way the real story is why none of these very different sorts of politicians has been able to fix Britain's railways if you want a look at this thing mall transport you still can't do better than come to Britain it was our grandfathers who gave it to the world now we're trying something new again thereby hangs a tale there have been many blueprints for the future of Britain's railways each was undone by lack of cash political willpower and the rail industry inability to change we have to start as a cleaner or what they call box divert and then we gradually went from cleaner to pass cleaner where you could go as a fireman when required when required and then from a pass cleaner you've got to a fireman and then he went to a pass fireman which was the same as being a driver if required and then after you'd been a pass fireman for so many years you got made a driver yeah an apt to cue about 20 to 25 years to do that was yes that was he in a practice somewhere but yes Robin it was run rather like the army it was a very hierarchical very traditional and and really very conservative but there was also incredibly old-fashioned and gallant I mean if I had to leave a board meeting in the middle 16 men would stand up and bow me out of the room there was one percent managers were women one of them was very interesting because she said that her boss actually held back her promotion out of kindness if it was raining he would put his arm around her shoulder and said you sit sit in the office in the wall British Rail to be sure had its cultural problems but there were also real grounds for optimism in the mid-1970s I was the financial times transport correspondent I used to come here to Martian Street to see Bill Rogers the transport secretary it was a bit of a dashing figure at the time new man in the cabinet Social Democrat Labour moderate so if anybody could bring industry unions and politics together surely Bill Rogers could to help rogers pick his way through the traffic there was a bright new boss at British Rail Peter Parker Peter Parker's are very persuasive they're charming man and he wasn't outside and he was full of energy and I mean he was in some ways a brilliant point but that other ministers had tried to make earlier and so I thought that Peter might be able to command his board and the union's Peter Parker was essentially a marketing man he brought in a star to pioneer TV advertising for British Rail but could Jim fix it so this is the age of the Train there was a lot of research about what would could be our public voice and I was surprised when they said Savile and I asked fact for a check on the public opinion you know they research if he was doing a tune and he came out with a tremendous pluses that people felt he was a natural man and he wouldn't be doing it just for the money because cause cause of the Train like most things in my life the BR ad campaign was a telephone ringing and somebody said we'd like you to get British Rail a trouble and I said it's a fact yep he did have a kind of straightness about this and he did have a position in the public confidence that's what we were looking for the public to be confident in what we were doing and a message for those mothers with children home from school give him a treat off to the seaside tomorrow with a cheaper way they return the cheap away day return has certainly changed the mood but behind the marketing gloss could he deliver the launch of a disability access campaign offered a whirring clue they should have done as I tell them if paper doors are tell him everything's okay I bet fewer than a thousand British Rail coaches have detachable seats so that passengers like Audie Thompson can travel without leaving their wheelchair you'd have thought the heirs of isambard kingdom brunel might have measured a doorway accurately a big push up onto the and to the trend itself that was okay and I took a big run but they think I'm stuck and that was it then it wouldn't go through into the carriage nightmarish moment and I remember Jimmy's moving into the press afterwards and say look that's just a bit of bad luck it might have been dismissed as that if other things had been going well but they weren't as Parker's marketing campaigns attracted more customers be are needed smarter equipment and better service and to get that he needed to tackle an even bigger problem of the Train coffee is endlessly trying to get the backing of the railway trade unions at a time when British labor militancy was at its peak millions of working days were being lost on the railway as there was a feeling that the railways were whether their own worst enemy in some way and that whatever government tried to do their ways didn't show much sign of improvement the workers trusted their unions more than they trusted the government or their own management so it meant if you got in if you did get into trouble you've got representation I mean if you were telling you and you got into trouble you could look out and got me there were battles over everything from how many people it took to run a train to catering trolleys and litter bins and so they would just use this excuse I remember this one meeting when I just said why are we all talking about the safety of this Charlie it's not about you if you've got another agenda here that isn't the way to deal with round and round in circles and talks is ridiculous language my Union and the train drivers we're going to stop the whole of Britain under 30 mr. Walbert before we ratified the understandings but they're not the agreements the understandings our understandings they are to be ratified in the proper machinery my 3% is waiting on this table now I want to pay it but why don't you honor the productivity commitments therefore you can honor the comte of the productivity commitment by using your established material had three months ago many people in the country will think this is pathetic absolute both of you talking about such my Meucci is terms of reference what is important is how you stack the rail system we talk about that stop button would always say my men are very angry that was always the story my men are very angry there wasn't actually any particular reason why they should be any angrier than anybody else actually but that was the sort of the way in which he conducted his representations to us Peter Parker comes to me and say we'll get rid of 5000 second men's job now red I'll say absolutely impossible your railways will come to a stand then of course makes it very difficult because you can't just say well now let's have your argument and let's see what the substance of it is it just becomes a position of stand up hostility I must say that when I thought that Ray Buckton was coming along on that I didn't really have a song in my heart I knew I had to go through with it I hoped I might have an influence I hoped I would show how foolish they were and how much they were damaging the railways alas alas the railway community which Peter Parker hoped to build and hope to lead never became a responsible body of men but that I think is because they didn't in their hearts believe it was a future that lost all hope but inside a shed in Derby British Rail had a secret weapon in the age of Concorde and cheaper faster cars Peter Parker's brand-new toys tilted round corners perfect for Britain's bendy tracks hey guys it's failed until the dimmer mid seventies we will have trains going at a hundred and fifty miles per hour or more the advanced passenger train project was a stop-start affair always short of capital but inside VR they thought it might just be a world beater this is a brilliant development mostly with aeronautical engineering not railway engineering part of the difficulty the thousand new parts we were all excited but we've never seen anything like it dad so obviously we were trained fantastic thing that would be not all right was this step of running from the electrics to the apt speed 125 other colleague of mine told me you drove the train 153 miles per I'm believe on one occasion I actually went at 171 miles per hour now that was a sort of technology that was going to lead to the Renaissance okay but like most things that British Rail the Renaissance was not running all the time nearly every time you went in your school three mornings a week Monday Wednesday Friday and the same thing would happen very rare got south of Carlisle and it would say broke down gone back to shields devil you go so far and he'd get the phone ringing say there's something got a mess yeah back on to the depot by 1981 the train had been in development for 14 years at a cost of 40 million pounds under pressure Parker took a chance and launched it well they took a party of journalists and other people up to Glasgow overnight and stuck us on the train first thing in the morning and we whizzed off southwards some of us trying to keep our breakfasts down as this train lurched rather crazily round the bends coming through the English countryside I mean they'd had a good night out there's no doubt about that the evening before would have British Railways board great hospitality but that hospitality wasn't reciprocated when they traveled on the train and of course some of them felt a little seasick as I put it it would have been amazing if the journalists hadn't gone to the bar I think they're well capable of holding their drink the press mocked geriatric British rails attempt to cut a - in those days the papers baited BR the way they now torn rail track but the new train was in trouble within a week its tilt and braking mechanisms failed and the government cut off the cash the dream was over this in our opinion nor has a marvelous machine Dicer sward the best thing I ever drove without a doubt Rev sing today the advanced passenger train sits in a siding at crude a venue for children's parties at a higher charge of 40 pounds of time it will show a profit in 7,000 years we could have been the first in the world we didn't have that capacity of seeing the thing through over the years it had been on and off and it's a sad story but a very significant story but I think he was constrained by the unions which he couldn't change and I was constrained by the treasury straightjacket together we were just disappointed as in give the railways a better future labor had failed to fix the railway it had lost it struggled with the economy and the unions and it lost the 79 election what would the Iron Lady do to British Rail where there is discord may we bring harmony whether as Ella may we bring truth where there is doubt may we bring faith and where there is despair they would think Margaret Thatcher had been attacked once when she was in a train as an MP and they were sued no but no one to protect her as I say attacked just passengers have came up and study for rang in her and she hated these open compartments she never wanted to go in a train again she was very very anti train I really don't think you can overestimate the contempt for the old British Rail it really was the standard musical joke I think you can kind of epitomize it by that sort of line that said that the slogan of British Rail was this a Buick system it was with other passengers and she didn't like the public sector and a celebrated occasion she came to lunch and she turned in mystification to the assembled railway executives and said to them but none of you can be any good because he will be working the private sector if he were in her own very different way Margaret Thatcher represented another big chance for the railways now here was someone who would sort out the unions and bring in a harder nosed brand of businessman and eventually there was the lure of privatisation mrs. Thatcher was someone you couldn't quite associate with trains she looked right in a big black limousine she was a believer in individualism and in transport that meant the motorists whose photos didn't even use trains regularly everyone used or aspired to use a car Peter Parker only once managed to get her onto a train when she named an engine after a colleague killed by a terrorist bomb to name a locomotive after Airey Neave is a wonderful idea after all a locomotive has great power and strength so had Eric in a vacuum around the Prime Minister's disinterest strange ideas started to breed and she was surrounded by the sort of cohort of consultants and people like Alfred Sherman who would blind her with daft ideas discovered the railway was very own economic and create enormous amount of pollution using five six times as much gas passenger mine afraid - matter cars there was some quite desperate hectares around because the situation was desperate British Rail was aralia almost a sinking ship or wallowing ship some of the more extreme ideas were extreme but some were not as mad as they sung as a member of the railway conversion Lee what was the railway conversion me we started off by Brigadier light separate offices there's a there's a sort of atmosphere of the railways old hat and they thought that you do well if you got rid of the railway news the railway tracks for roads that sort of thing I'm actually a totally impractical thing to do but and now these things were being said is sometimes seemed like the fastest form of transport in britain was the speed at which transport ministers went through the revolving door of British government in the last 20 years we've had 20 odd different politicians in charge of transport can you remember the name of any of them it's a rotten job further stand the cabinet table and when you lose it you're as likely to be out in the political wilderness as you are going on to greater things it was absurd the railway spent probably six months of its year introducing a new railway minister oh I don't think any Minister of Transport in and out for two years I was could claim that he succeeded I think the measure has to be did once managed to stop things getting very much worse and did one just possibly open a few minds to new questions privatization may be the best way forward every single incoming minister expressed vague enthusiasm for trying to not privatize the railway please get privatisation going within the railway all of them were sat on understand shock Margaret Thatcher thought it was very complicated and there were much easier ones to do that will bring much bigger benefits to customers employees and taxpayers in case anyone should be under any misapprehension so the government has not decided to privatize British Rail but one Whitehall department was about to seize on the idea of privatisation the Treasury could see a way to stop subsidizing the railways in the white hold power League the treasurer is top of the pile the Transport Department invariably right at the bottom like Manchester United vs. Rushden & Diamonds indeed the Treasury from time to time tried to vent me spending money which was rightfully mine they could always prove beyond doubt that any requests for more money were misplaced and if they couldn't prove it they could still order it was a one-sided argument each year there was a huge brow with the after transport how much money would they get next year and the best way of getting money was to promise to sell assets mrs. Thatcher might not let them privatize the railway but the Treasury could still sell off everything else British Rail owned the catering business the hotels and the ferries ceiling when we sold ceiling we have been advised that we should expect to get about 30 million and so when we got a bid in from see containers for I think about 60 million 61 million or something we were in an absolute panic because all the other bids had come in round about 30 million and so we really were in a panic that this would leak and the James Sherwood would get to know that he was paying twice what anybody else at often we thought we've got a really good deal here six years later of course we put investment in it I want to you know mention that but six years later we sold half of it for three hundred million pounds we got it wrong we should have done it more carefully taken longer had better advice I'm gonna we gave away public assets if you offered a miserable Railway Hotel in a town that hasn't been refurbished for 50 years with a low custom obviously don't pay much for it if you're able enough to see through that that if you smarten it up and advertise it and market it you couldn't make a mint out of it well you know good luck to you it was C was kind of it was like throwing you know bits bits of your livelihood off the back of the sleigh of the Treasury wolves it was complete chaos it was the worst way of running a business we're leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven and a half wonderful years and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very very much better state than when we came here eleven and a half years ago well that was the turning point it was the turning point because John Major needed no convincing he'd already made his own mind up that rail privatisation was top of his agenda we were conscious that we needed to do things to show that we still had a cutting edge that we weren't just a consolidating government we had a purpose and the railways were one of the industries that had not been privatized we were conscious they were there so we turned our attention to them I once removed British Rail for good from the stand up comedians joke book and to turn them into the envy of the world for major and Lamont Chancellor's past and present the question was how to privatize should the train be separated from the track we in the Treasury were certainly keen on the maximum competition there were various ways in which that might have been done as I recall it malcolm rifkind was not so keen on that and he really wanted to recreate the regional companies John Major I think sometimes oscillated with the clock ticking towards the general election someone had to break the stalemate we have to have a resolution met to fight the general election at the end of the day number ten said we've had enough of discussion this is how we're going to do it which is the separation of the infrastructure from train operations Jonathan Hill from the policy unit literally walked between departments with different drafts to make sure that there was a rapid conclusion we had five years 1992 you arrive there as the junior minister were they ready with a plan for privatization well John McGregor asked Sir Patrick Brown the permanent secretary where the bill was that he and his staff had got ready for the privatization of the railways and Patrick as I understand it sort of said well the thing is Secretary of State we didn't actually think you'd win after the election there was nothing there really apart from the very short paragraph in the manifesto and the process had to start from that and becoming incredibly compressed as a result one result of the rush was that no one took time to consult the only people who knew how the existing system actually worked we weren't opposed to privatization per se and in fact many of us thought privatization was a good idea what did worry as was that in fact the government was embarked down a path which we thought left much to be desired in terms of the organization and structure they were trying to introduce I made it quite clear we weren't playing politics for this we were implementers and we would implement whether what we are implementing was was not common sense in terms of managerial operation that was one thing they'd have that story they'd rejected it if it was unsafe we wouldn't do it that was quite clear why on earth don't they do it sensibly and why don't they just come and talk to me and I'll tell them how to do it both quicker faster more effectively etc but that didn't take place the politicians wouldn't listen to the railway men so would they listen to their friends in the private sector I wrote to to John major I wrote to Kenneth Clarke and I got very nice letters back and the letters really said well you may be right but if we don't go through with our present plan now without changing it we will never get the railway privatized before the next election the Labour Party and its popular new leader appeared to be threatening to reverse rail privatisation but anyone thinking of grabbing our railways built up over the years so they can make a quick profit as our network is broken up and sold off I say this there will be a publicly owned publicly accountable railway system but meeting John Major's timetable was no easy matter this was the toughest privatisation yet twenty eight volumes this thick were carted into my room for me to read and co and go through and so and we were dealing with something like the transfer of six hundred and thirty thousand title deeds which we had to do in a year contracts that that are an absolute mountain of paper as you know stacked ten feet high or four ones what one's office inevitably corners were cut there wasn't the time to privatize the railways properly it was a rush job and it was badly done and we're suffering from that today it was one heck of a rush we knew exactly what the timetable was the last possible date for the election was May 97 and the prime minister made it quite plain that we were to proceed with great speed but frankly it was a rush but the public bought the rail track story the share issue was a success seven times oversubscribed did the ministerial team celebrate the odd bottle did actually see its cork flying high into the air in Martian Street when that particular bill actually finally made its way to the statute book the feeling of euphoria and hopefulness that we had in 96 when it started when rail truck first became a privatized company in an industry it was an exciting time for us all was so much to look forward to it was a new beginning for us all we actually felt at last so the railways were being recognized that at last had been put on the same level as the NHS in education that people in power had realized that money needs to be put in to give the public what they want which is a first-class railway system because we believed that the younger investment of over many years in the railways in general how many good could come out of privatisation and when he getting pumped into rail track as such and we believed in the content believed in the people I work for we wanted to take part in that and the feeling was would do everything to make it work and we had a chance to join the Shearer save scheme to show loyalty to the company by invested in ourselves which is what I in hundreds of other colleagues did I joined the investment in 1996 it was a five-year share save scheme put in hundred and seventy five pound a month which was all that we could afford hopefully the years to come it would help pay the mortgage off and secure a good future of my children it really wasn't that difficult you know to spot what was going to happen to Britain's railways in the 1990s everybody knew that when the economy grew demand for the railway went up armies of consultants crawled over all of this they prepared all of that documentation for the city for the privatisation and you know not on a single page does it say if this works and if the Chancellor's economic forecasts are correct then there's going to be this huge extra demand on the railway when it when it went when you've been dealing with the railway that was actually not going anywhere I mean the idea that there could be 50% increase would have been seen as a lunatic scenario I think if you look back at prioritization there are doubtless things that we didn't do as well as we could have done particularly if you look back from today and certainly the thought that rail usage was going to grow by about 30 percent between privatization and the turn of the century wasn't something that we were anticipating demand literally took off I think that that must be good for the country but it wasn't particularly good for some of the traveling public who had to put up with overcrowding and congestion what a tyranny that it should be commercial success that propelled the railway towards its next crisis the system didn't have enough track or trains it was going to break here missus dey's has been most is something people I'm acting and the expressions on their faces I remember the time exactly it was 1231 the call went in the on the car phone in my cars on my way to a lunch saying that there had been a derailment and saying where it was five minutes later the call came again saying that there were casualties and telling me exactly where it was and we reversed and went straight out to the side critics say that crashes at Paddington and at Hatfield were both a result of the way the railway was privatized that fair there's been a train crash in which the passengers died every year since 1902 with the exception of 1998 and they are caused by human errors but privatization made it harder not easier how did it make it harder well the railway is a system there is a reason why all the railways in the world other than ours are integrated and that is because they are easier to manage all the parts of the system are interdependent and if you move one bit it has an effect on the other bit and splitting it up into different pieces and forcing those pieces to act in different directions based on a set of contractual incentives and does not facilitate the optimal management of the system I think it was probably a matter of three or four hours that was all it took for the industry to grasp the essential point that Hatfield had demonstrated the breakdown the deeply deeply deeply worrying breakdown of the relationship between maintenance and operation between the wheel and the rail which is just what Bob Reid and his British Rail team had told the government from the beginning we were particularly concerned that we should maintain an integrated management of this facility and we should build privatisation in a way in which the the the control of the whole network would not be lost did Bob Reid have any other advice for the government to ignore I felt they were light and engineering expertise I felt they could have done was a good more senior engineers in the person who got the top job in there was not an engineer I felt for a real track it would have been better that we got a top engineer working directly for the Chairman making sure that the engineering standards were in place but they didn't want to go that way had a candidate for them but than what accept them the engineering chain was fragmented a privatization the split between maintenance and maintenance contractors and rail track did break the engineering track chain and the split between the wheel and the rail by breaking rail track or from train operators and also to some extent the split between the train maintain errs and the Train operators that had all fragmented the engineering and made the whole thing far harder to manage as a system and that was exploded the architects of privatization were interested in financial not mechanical engineering they wanted to maximize cash for the Treasury and phase out subsidies but it didn't work the railway continued to soak up public money the Treasury's own plan had ended in failure after Hatfield as the network seized up so did the complex regulatory system the rail regulator flagged the strategic Rail Authority had no strategy and no authority ministers held summits but saw only fog and it was the end of Gerald Corbett at rail track it is an impossible job the sheer number of stakeholders the demands that are placed from one to contractual matrix the fragmentation the sudden growth under investment for years and years all the cultural problems this massive safety issues the public scrutiny the minister's number-10 the Treasury three different regulators Lord Cullen the Select Committee it is an impossible job with the best will in the world he was no longer master of the situation by the time privatization hit the skids Tony Blair was in Downing Street on a ticket of improved public services Chancellor brown had the hell theist economic performance since World War two surely this government could put the railway right Deputy Prime Minister Prescott headed a super ministry which included transport he appointed Alistair Morton to deliver a strategy for the railway this is going to take years and it's going to affect the next 30 to 50 years so it's got to be thought through it's got to be negotiated and it's got to carry everybody with it as opposed to being a battlefield now that argues in exactly the opposite well exactly against the Tony Blair grain where he wants to see a lot of presentational and apparent improvement in a very short time span and you can't get that in rail when the basic problems are so fundamental new labor made old mistakes in less than five years there have been seven people in charge of transport the Prescott Morton plan wasn't rated by the Treasury Chancellor Brown never even met Alistair Morton to discuss it and it was only after Hatfield that the prime minister seemed to pay attention by then it was too late the company at the heart of the private railway was in crisis came about haha stay as usual usually spend a Saturday mornings sitting around looking for stories then my boss Ward gods have got a got a call simply saying the biggest bankruptcy since fairings is gonna happen on Monday and that was all we had well we formed a hit list Marconi British Airways cause possibly thought about Marks and Spencers but now they're doing little bit better and react was quite near the bottom because you just don't think of some basically quasi government company your skin is gonna go pop so about eight of us start bashing all the contacts making hundreds of calls the first decent break came I think at about half past eleven got a phone call from someone who didn't know who it was but knew it was a company that recently falling out after thirty one hundred so that basically told his course or rail track I called direct up communications around tracksuit Clark she said no comment which kind of sent alarm that sends a alarm bells ringing ahead and I kind of pushed on it got quite pushy with her actually she said something along the lines of even if I did know I wouldn't tell him so we're kind of halfway there but we got out all the directors phone numbers were the ones we could get none of them were at home so we lose about or their daughters or their sons who all said daddy's at Houston and a meeting or husband's it used to be so again you think rather than rather strange time to over meeting I made a call to Joe Moore to refuse to talk about biotech at all he said that I was a private company I should direct my questions to our track she was very very edgy very as unity we gave up trying to talk to her but I didn't formally intended to understood that website was bankrupt and was effectively being nationalized as she simply said if you run their story all that not media Railtrack the company which runs the country's rail network dramatically collapsed this morning the end of the line came out the transport sector Stephen Byers turned down a plea for yet more government cash and applied with rail tracks we put into administration I wish to make a statement concerning rail track to describe to the house the worsening financial crisis facing rail track which led the government to petition for a railway administration on the 7th of October I say this there will be a publicly owned publicly accountable railway system 92% of realtruck employees participated in the company's share scheme actually found out on the radio on the Sunday evening absolutely devastated I've invested in some of my own money ten and a half thousand pound over the five years which is an awful lot of the money that I won only and thirteen thousand per year I was in in eight and a half thousand when actually started to share save scheme so I'm not a fat cat when I looked out my signal box I could see the land that I owned as a shareholder that was part of the assets of the company as far as I was concerned my assets were secure the government stands behind the rail system but not individual rail companies and their shareholders who need to be fully aware of the projected liabilities of the companies in which they invest and the performance risks they face it was the bedrock of my children's future my children my wife and myself of for the house and everything that was what we based everything on for not only for that five years but in all the years to come to be enablers to pay off the mortgage and like I said for the children's education that man and discovered the stolen power future the wider question for the future is whether the buyers plan which talks of a non profit successor to rail track is thought through or is it like privatization another rushed uncoordinated job I think they're flailing about I didn't think they thought throughout the points I've just been making in advance of putting the rail track into administration they had various bits of paper that sketched out various ideas but the ideas didn't stand up when you looked at them closely with some knowledge company not for profit is a meaningless statement rail track isn't is a risk-taking company it has to put money and effort at risk and when things go wrong it always costs more money as well as more effort and things do go wrong if you don't have equity and the government's proposing in fact 800 million to a billion which isn't much in the scale of this industry if you don't have that you've got to build up reserves as fast as you can the only way known to man to build up reserves is to make profits so I don't actually see what a company not for profit in this context is going to look like there's the reason why the bias plant or any other model can't be made to work so long as the politicians are clear about their role since this 1970s at least ministers have been unable to resist the belief that they are directly responsible for the management and operation of Britain's transport system they must stand there in front of the public taking the heat for the performance day-to-day of the service and therefore telling the server's how to run itself better tomorrow which is a ridiculous thing for a politician to do in the end the lessons of railway history are blindingly obvious first except that in a crowded Island the railway is a vital public service which will always need subsidy second make a long-term properly funded plan and stick to it and above all protect the railways from that deadly cycle of neglect panic and cabinet infighting which has been the mark of British government in the last 30 years there's no sign at all that the Blair government has got this message Britain it was our grandfathers who gave it to the world

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Length: 49min 6sec (2946 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2015