Broken Rails: How Privitisation Wrecked Britain's Railways (Paperback)

The comparison with a Greek tragedy is no accident. It must have been the Furies which drove the Major government and its army of civil servants into their headlong destruction of a once-great national asset. The details are all there, but you should buy the book to experience the full horror of them.

Marred only by a number of misprints, the indexing and references are excellent and comprehensive. This book should be required reading for all who thought that privatisation was the way for the country to get rich quick. Even those who may disagree with the conclusions will appreciate the analysis - and above all, the present Government needs to listen to what is said here!

Wolmar's contribution is useful in setting out the history of Britain's rail network, which led to the mess following the Hatfield crash and the subsequent and perhaps consequent collapse of Railtrack itself. He also succeeds in ruthlessly spearing those who designed the privatisation process and who drove it forwards for their own political ends, when all signals were set to danger.

However, Wolmar was and remains such a vigorous opponent of privatisation per se - in the form it took or any other form for that matter - that his judgement becomes seriously flawed. The picture he tries to paint in this book, in which British Rail was doing very well and all of the good work was undone by the introduction of private ownership, is neither factually accurate, nor reflective of the experience of people who regularly travelled on trains. Did you think BR was wonderful?

His dichotomy of public ownership good, private capital bad is far too simplistic and ignores the rather more important point that whatever the ownership structure, the railways have suffered from chronic under investment and illogical public attitudes to the railways when compared to road transport.

When the state pumps millions upon millions into the road network and supporting private ownership and use of cars, this is perceived to be investment or simply ignored altogether. As soon as even a fraction of the sums involved in motor transport are deployed in rail, the press and public frets about state subsidies.

Wolmar is also hugely confused in his own analysis, even within this fairly short book. At one stage he quite justifiably lambastes those who undertake a simple cost-benefit analysis of safety measures for the rail network, pointing out that the price of fatal accidents is not only the direct loss of life but the subsequent disruption to the rail network and the even greater loss of life which results when people divert to the major alternative, namely their cars. Yet, a few chapters later, he then roundly attacks those who would spend limitless amounts on improving safety, pointing out that each life can be costed and that it makes no sense to spend one sum of money to prevent the loss of life of train passengers, when the same amount of money could produce an even greater safety improvement on our roads.

Finally, I believe that Wolmar is quite right to claim that a form of corporate neurosis possessed Railtrack after Hatfield, which caused it to shut down the UK rail network both unnecessarily and at very considerable cost, to life (on the roads), to the economy and to the entire rail industry. Indeed, Railtrack's reaction to Hatfield ultimately led to its own demise. But Wolmar likes his analysis rather black and white and in seeking to find someone to blame for what was in reality a collective neurosis, he chooses a scapegoat and blames the wrong man.

This book is a terrific read, a generally solid dissection of the state of our railways and a furious polemic against private ownership. But it is also greatly weakened by its faulty and often contradictory analyses and Wolmar's tendency to seek simple explanations when sometimes complexity lies at the heart of the issue.

I finished this book on my regular train from Waterloo, a journey which took one and a quarter hours and which is meant to take just 19 minutes. This gave me plenty of time to ponder the appalling condition in which our rail industry new sits. I would thank - or is that blame - Railtrack but then again, the train operator could be at fault. And there lies the nub of the complexity that faces every rail traveller and who, after all, pays for this shambles.