Pan Up
Another Report? What’s the score?
As so well summed up by Roger Ford last month, reports reviewing the railways are not unusual. What is unusual is to see any changes as a result. For reasons I have never understood, it is always assumed by politicians that the people who know best how to sort the problems out on the railway are those who have had nothing to do with them since watching Thomas the Tank Engine as a child. Although maybe you can see their point, as the last few years have seen professional railway folk make a spectacular mess of things.
The one thing you can be sure of is that the system we have been trying to make work for the last 24 years (is it really that long?) doesn’t work. Yes, there have been some successes, but as one ex-British Rail member of a bid team said to me once: ‘Imagine what we could have done with all that money’.
DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL
One thing I am not going to do is to say what I think should happen, as there is no better way to make sure it doesn’t. What I am going to do is to step back from the wishy-washy remit and set out what taxpayers and farepayers have a reasonable right to expect from their railway system, then consider the chances of a given change bringing that result.
