There's a patriotic case for renationalising our railways

The second reading of the Caroline Lucas’s Bill to renationalise the railways is scheduled for this week, and the Green Party MP has suggested the policy may not play well in The Telegraph. I don’t see why. Polls repeatedly show big majorities in favour of re-nationalisation, and the argument for it can as easily be couched in patriotic as socialistic terms.

I favour it, and I would re-introduce the British Railways logo of the Fifties: a British lion straddling a wheel, the “Cycling Lion”. I grew up in York, when it was a true railway city, and my dad worked for BR. I preferred the York of those days, when the young men were more likely to work on the railways than in coffee shops, whether on the trains or in the carriage works. Whereas three of our current operators are owned by the German state railways, Deutsche Bahn, we not only ran our own trains back then, BR also sustained a domestic railway engineering industry.

The case for renationalisation can also be made on the politically neutral ground of simplicity and elegance. If we had a unified railway, and fares were too high – as they are under the privatised system – we would know who to blame: the government. The government would be running the show, instead of making panicked interventions from the wings, as with its capping, this week, of the operators’ ability to raise fares.

Ever since time was called on Brunel’s pipe dream of the broad gauge, British railway tracks have been of uniform size, facilitating national coherence. It seems perverse to subdivide management of these lines. It’s like dividing up flowing water, and before BR the tendency was always towards simplification, resulting in the amalgamation of 120 companies into the “Big Four” in 1923.

It is partly because we have abandoned these economies of scale that our railway seems expensive to run. Another factor is the profit-taking of the companies. Under BR, £2.4 billion a year came from the public purse; today the figure is closer to £4 billion. The privatised industry argues that this higher cost is down to the fact that many more people are being carried than in the days of BR, and a big investment programme is attempting to keep pace with soaring demand. It is Network Rail, the infrastructure company, that is responsible for this heavy lifting. The Government determines its policy and backs its £30 billion debts, so it is effectively nationalised anyway. As for the operating companies, they might occasionally lease new trains from the rolling stock providers. More often it’s a case of a new coat of paint on the trains of the previous operator or new fillings in the sandwiches. The main innovation of the supposedly dynamic train operators has been the extreme marketisation – that is, complication – of fares.

One of those Big Four companies I mentioned was the Southern Railway, and it employed John Elliot, the first man in Britain to be designated a “public relations officer”. Elliott said that the ideal train was the Brighton Belle, which always left from the same platform at Victoria or Brighton, ran on the hour, took an hour for its journey, and cost a constant price. Railways ought, above all, to be comprehensible.

We have unlearnt that lesson. The complication of fares makes booking a ticket like doing a maths exam, not least because you often think you’ve got the wrong result. So I frequently take the car instead.

It has been argued that one benefit of re-nationalisation would be the creation of a unified “guiding mind” for the railway. We might then be able to decide about high-speed rail, which is being challenged in the Supreme Court next week. Is HS2 necessary in order to regenerate the North? To increase the speed of North-South travel? To boost capacity? Or is it a waste of 40 billion quid?

Our current railway mind is struggling with more basic questions. In spite of its loss of nerve this week over fare rises, government policy is to make the passenger pay for the railway investment programme. And so the users of the most environmentally friendly transport mode are penalised for using that mode. It’s a mess. Bring on the Cycling Lion, I say.

'Night Train to Jamalpur’ by Andrew Martin (Faber & Faber) is available from Telegraph Books at £12.99 + £1.35p&p. To order, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk