UK Trains: Off The Rails

Date : 14 October 2001

To : The Editor, The Business

From : Nagindas Khajuria

Subject : UK Trains

UK Trains: Off the rails

Sir - The government plan to set up a not-for-profit trust in the place of Railtrack should be reconsidered. To gauge their interest in talking a stake in the new group, the government should approach all the 25 Tocs (Train Operating Companies) for a vertically-integrated operation. Your front page story (7 October) states that it has already approached, probably National Express for exactly such an operation.

These Tocs should be reduced to four private successful rail companies with responsibility for tracks and signals over the next 25 years. Railtrack's mistake over the past five years was that it spent too much time, money and effort in developing stations rather than tracks. The mistake of the Tocs was to create 25 companies from one (British Rail), company instead of, say, four or five. The result is a jungle of complex fare structures, lack of punctuality, fatal accidents, blaming each other, etc.

The government has neither the time, the money nor the managerial ability to run Railtrack. Why should be infrastructure not be released to the Tocs?