How Britain’s trains were derailed Foreigners can get us back on track

Labour partly won the election on a promise to renationalise the railways, all under the banner of Great British Railways. The mangled status quo of semi-privatisation is clearly no longer sustainable: compared to similar European countries, our railways underperform to an extraordinary degree. That’s clear, if nothing else, in the development of high-speed rail (HSR). Britain hasn’t added a single mile of high-speed line since November 2007, when the 67-mile dedicated link from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel opened. Since then, we’ve had five general elections and seven Prime Ministers, but not a single mile of new HSR.

It took well over a decade to approve the HS2 project, which is still almost 10 years from completion — it is finally projected to open in 2033, over a quarter of a century on from HS1. The Spanish have had HSR since the early Nineties, enjoying almost 2,500 miles in total, much of it added in the last 20 years, even as British politicians twiddled their thumbs. France, for its part, has about 1,700 miles, while Germany boasts over 1,000. Despite growing pressure from reforming groups like Britain Remade, which publicises the endless systemic barriers to getting infrastructure built, there seems to be remarkable resistance among transport planners to learning from other countries.

When John Major’s government privatised British Rail in the Nineties, it separated private ownership of the track and infrastructure from private ownership of the train-operating companies. This approach had very few precedents anywhere on earth, and, sure enough, problems quickly arose. Railtrack, the company that initially held responsibility for maintenance, collapsed after a spate of crashes around the turn of the century, ascribed to poor repair and monitoring. It was later revealed that fragmented privatisation had led to a severe loss of expertise and institutional experience right across Railtrack, as experienced British Rail engineers weren’t retained.

Nor is the curious parochialism of British railways limited merely to technical issues or a consistent failure to deliver large projects. A constant bugbear of many British rail passengers is poor punctuality, and a lack of information about delays and other problems. If you pass through large London railway stations, you will occasionally see senior rail company managers enduring a “listening” session, with passengers invited to come and ask questions or express their frustrations. While I admire the intent and the willingness of high-ups to meet the public rather than leaving harassed station staff to their fate, it’s hard to see how this is much more than cosmetic. Persistent unreliability is a problem of systems and culture, and there are other countries, other rail operators, that operate much better in this area than Britain.

That’s clear enough from the statistics. The most recent figures suggest that only about 80% of British long-distance trains arrive on time. By contrast, the Baltics, Scandinavia and the Low Countries all enjoy a rate of 90% or higher. Spain and Austria are in the same boat, and even Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, manages 89%. Further afield, the Japanese railways are famously proud of their punctuality: delays of just a few minutes, which British passengers would barely notice, are treated as serious failures in Kyoto or Osaka. How exactly the Japanese achieve this is unclear, but it appears to be a combination of powerful cultural norms around service and excellence, and a demanding management style where individuals are rigorously held to account.

In fairness, there have been stories of fact-finding missions abroad by British rail bosses and politicians. The late John Prescott visited Japan during his time as Transport Secretary. Executives from Avanti West Coast, the firm that currently operates the West Coast Main Line and is 30% owned by Trenitalia, are said to have visited Italy for consultations, while British officials also visited the Nordic countries to discuss rail operations there.

The difficulty here is translating useful observations into concrete improvements. But that would require serious changes in mindset, attitude and working practices; it certainly can’t be claimed that technical barriers are an insurmountable problem. Consider something like wifi, with one recent report finding that Britain has among the worst onboard access on earth. Having travelled by train, I can entirely believe this. But other railways, many of them in places we might once have regarded as less prosperous or sophisticated than ourselves, provide first-class internet as a matter of course. Eastern European nations, which have only experienced real prosperity in the last two or three decades, have not had the time to become complacent about their wealth and comfort. They therefore understand the need to keep developing and innovating in infrastructure and service.

Not that all of Britain’s railway woes are technical. Long-distance rail travellers in, say, Italy, will hardly fail to notice the high quality of the food on offer. Trenitalia menus advertise “light recipes packed with flavour” and dishes created by culinary luminaries like Carlo Cracco. In practice, that encompasses everything from salads and charcuterie to beer, bubbly and fresh Illy coffee. It’s a far cry from the lukewarm sausage rolls and pre-packed sandwiches typical of British railways — but surely it shouldn’t be impossible to prepare some decent English fare in a train galley.

Other amenities are clearly better elsewhere too. Finland, for instance, provides play areas in some carriages. That’d obviously be useful in Britain, especially when childcare is so pricey. At any rate, introducing such perks here would require not so much a leap of technology as a shift in mindset, an openness to learning and developing rather than a “computer says no” assumption about how things are done.

Comparisons with other countries might also involve reflection on the kind of society that shapes the passenger experience. In a sense this is the hardest challenge of all. Culture is just so hard to prod in a positive direction; people get stuck in their ways, and find it hard to move the assumptions and perspectives which dominate beyond the station forecourt. Yet, shifting the dial isn’t impossible, if the will is there, and this is yet another arena in which British offerings can improve — especially if the newly renationalised Great British Railways can truly grasp the public’s imagination. One option is that GBR launches with explicit commitments to specific improvements, dovetailed with a public plan for how they’d be delivered. This would establish a clear expectation of accountability from the start.

Money, of course, is always a factor here. Running a railway line at a constant profit has always been tough, ever since the first routes were built 200 years ago. In the laissez-faire Victorian era, companies were forever going bust or being swallowed by larger competitors. Even now, private companies struggle without various forms of direct or indirect subsidy, partly explaining Starmer’s commitment to bring trains back under state control to start with.

The principle behind nationalisation — that the railways are something akin to a public service, and a fundamental good even if unprofitable by the laws of the market — is clearly largely true. Yet here, again, it would be good to see Labour look across the channel as they grapple with this bewilderingly complex policy area. Though both are state-controlled, France’s SNCF and Germany’s Deutsche Bahn enjoy different structures: while the former is entirely owned by government, the latter does have some private ownership, as does Trenitalia in Italy. Japan has an almost entirely private system, but a very impressive one that requires little subsidy, not least because private firms can also develop housing and other services on the land they own. Nationalisation, in short, is not a magic bullet. Among other things, it can incentivise under-investment, something Starmer should be conscious of as Great British Railways chugs out the station.

Beyond all this, though, I think there’s one more reason to examine the neighbours: to decide what railways are actually for. A weakness of Keir Starmer’s style is that he’s focused on procedures, not outcomes, perhaps unsurprisingly for a human rights lawyer. But ultimately, it’s very hard to quantify the precise benefits of a well-functioning rail system when constrained by a spreadsheet mentality. The gains are diffuse. They show up in different domains, in different ways, at different times. To commit yourself to achieving them requires stepping away from “process brain” and thinking about the common good, unseen costs and benefits, and gradual advances in public health and social contentment. Given the way Britain’s been run for the last several decades, that’s perhaps the fog that needs lifting most.

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Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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