Danger! Railway rant incoming!

Reading this month's edition of Modern Railways, I was struck an article called 'Boiling Frogs' about the way costs for any infrastructure projects are spiralling out of control. Regardless of whether these inflated costs are paid by higher fares or increased government subsidy, people like me (both a taxpayer and a rail user) will still end up footing the bill.

The article (sorry, they don't have an on-line issue; it's strictly dead-tree only) identifies several factors. One major factor is all sorts of silly rules insisted by the HSE (Health and Safety Executive). Even non-libertarians like me recognise that the HSE is a completely out-of-control bureaucracy, seemingly accountable to no-one but themselves. Patrick Crozier takes them to task over the Potter's Bar accident.

An aside here; why does it now take two to three weeks to reopen a like after a train crash, when before privatisation it used to take a few days? I'm old enough to remember the West Ealing derailment in 1973, when wreckage blocked all four lines. It was only two or three days before traffic was running on the slow lines, while they were still working on clearing wreckage (let alone repairing track) on the fast lines. Can you imagine that happening nowadays? Along with British Transport Police's declaring of crime scenes, the HSE is the major villain here.

To return to these inflated costs, the other major villain is the wheel/rail split. The fragmentation of British Rail into hundreds of separate companies operating trains, owning the trains, owning the track, and maintaining the track was supposed to give us a more efficient railway, according to the architects of privatisation. What rot! I'm now convinced the fragmentation was nothing but a massive job-creation scheme for accountants and lawyers, US-style pork-barrel politics at it's very worst. It hasn't given us a more efficient railway, precisely the opposite. Any would-be efficiency gains have just been swallowed up by this new army of suits.

What is to be done? The effective renationalisation of the unloved Railtrack (the company that owns the track) may or may not be a step in the right direction. I would rather see the wheel/rail split ended altogether, either by renationalising the whole bloody lot (which realistically I have to accept isn't going to happen), or by handing control of the rails to the train operating companies. I realise this is still going to cause problems of track access where multiple TOCs use the same tracks, such as the eight different operators (including two freight companies) using Manchester Piccadilly, but it can't be worse than the present system.