Apparently Network Rail Must Be an Avid Reader...

Regular visitors to this blog will be no strangers to my opinions on the state of Britain's railways. I spend slightly too much of my life either hanging round stations, legging it across stations, sitting dejectedly on a delayed train, sitting dejectedly on the floor of a delayed train, before then returning to hanging around at the station again. And most of this is just getting in or out of Euston. And if you have to deal with an issue where you travelled with more than one train company, you might as well give up. It took several months for the then-Silverlink to decide to refund a ticket I'd bought on the Virgin website, having never made the Virgin train due to the need to stop the Silverlink one and attach a large piece of wood to the window thanks to the brick-shaped hole in it...

But then again, that was Silverlink...

Anyway, it was therefore with great joy and excitement that I saw this today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/30/labour-railway-network-state-control?fb_action_ids=10151870716330371&fb_action_types=news.reads&fb_source=other_multiline

Now, I'm old enough to remember travelling on British Rail trains, although I was too young to know all the jokes about curly sandwiches. But it can hardly be any worse than it is today (see virtually all previous blog posts!). And the *stupid* privatisation system devised by Mr Major costs the taxpayer far, far more money than the BR block-grant ever did. Plus we can all return to being passengers rather than customers. Not to mention the national version of the Oyster Card which could be brought in, whereas at the moment this sort of a setup would see the train companies implode as they tried to divide it up amongst themselves, the maintenance people, the station owners and the people who own the weeds covering the disused tracks.

I know it's only an idea, and yes it is sort of dependent upon Ed Miliband winning the next election (see earlier post for my views on that) and on him actually doing something... but hey, a man can dream, can't he?!