The best people to give advice on how to run a successful railway? The reason I'm asking is as I leaving the Rennaisance Hotel here in Doha tonight I saw a sign saying 'British Embassy - Uk Network rail' pointing upto the 1st floor. My thoughts were what on earth are they doing out here? Then I remembered reading that Qatar wants to build a railway. The problem being Doha is what I would call not a city conducive to have a railway in it. The major road upgrades going on at the moment are a nightmare as it is. Surely if that's what they are doing out here, the Qataris could find someoe better to advise them?

They have done wonders since the end of the Railtrack fiasco, they have missed their targets for train punctuality last year but they were quite tight.

The punctuality targets become even more interesting when you compare them against the punctuality qualifications applied by the train operating companies

Scathing report on Network Rail (and train operators) in the papers today. 23% less efficient that Euopean networks and 30% more expensive (fares and subsidy). Network Rail seem to be the main problem.

So in order to get the rail network functioning properly again, the rail regulator is demanding Network Rail slashes £2bn from its annual budget.

Lunatics taking over the asylum.

"Taking"?

Decades of under investment take time to unravel and they don't unravel by cutting budgets.

Those stats me nothing BTW they just give the Mail and Express something to be outraged about.

They do mean something. They mean people are being ripped off by over paid managements that are perhaps wasting money by negotiating poor deals with major contractors.

Take are local station for example. They have wasted a fortune on it whilst doing nothing to improve the running of the railways and turning the station into an identkit version of an inner city station.

Daft things they have done include:

- putting up a waiting room then demolishing to make way for a new footbridge
- the old station building has a ble plaque commemorating an award for sypmathetic refurbishment. What do NR do? Build a modern steel and glass monstronsity on the side of it with atomated barriers. The operating company then pays two people to stand there. Same on the other side of the tracks. Daft things the barrier building close after evening rush hour. There is no point in them. An absolute waste of money. They don't stop fare dodgers as they are not 24/7. In any event it would be cheaper to have ticket collectors on more trains.

I could go on but cannot be bothered.

The point being huge public subsidy and huge fares do not neceassarily equate to better service. It often just means more wasteful expenditure in this country.

We have this daft, wasteful political narrative that people like you buy into that "years of under investment" mean we need to chuuck cash at things and then "years of profligacy by Labour" mean we need to slash expenditure. As ever, where politicians get involved things just become a mess. RBS is the latest example.

No. That is not the reason why public spending is being cut.

And you know that perfectly well.

I was talking about the railways and BG's comments.

Well it's politicians that have delivered us a privatised energy industry that has been accused of acting as a cartel, a rail franchise system that prints money for the likes of Virgin and you will never get politicians away from industries that are essentially private monopolies such as the railways.

You will always need a regulator because they aren't naturally something that belongs in the private sector where competition freely exists and the rules the regulator enforces will be controlled by politicians. It can never be otherwise and so to me there is no point in them being privatised.

All it does as should be obvious now we have had a few decades of the results is line private companies pockets at our expense. The idea Network Rail or the East Coat mainline is better off run by a private company doesn't wash. They had to be taken back into state ownership due to failings of their previous private owners.

There is plenty of stuff that isn't for public ownership but the statistics in the article do not suggest it would be any better if run differently.

Indeed. And the continuation of a policy of paying privatised companies a subsidy – buying the rolling stock, for instance, and then paying them to run it - is absurd, given what they then charge and make.

The problem, ultimately, is that we have a political elite that is terrified of anything that looks 'public' and convinced that everything that is private is always better, no matter what amount of public funds still needs to be shifted into private hands.

Perhaps if we'd subsidies the railways to the same sort of extent before privatisation, we'd have enjoyed a service comparable with those in, say, Germany and France.

When I raised a railway-related question with our MP (self-professed "right-wing Tory"icon_wink.gif Peter Lilley, he thought he was on ssafe ground locally by talking about how much better things were post-privatisation. I disagreed rather strongly and eventually the other people plucked up the courage to disagree with him. By the end of the evening he appeared a more than a little chastened having found out just what his constituents thought, although I doubt his mind was changed. He still like to look back fondly at the halcyon days of Thatcher.

Ah, the thoroughly despicable Peter Lilley, the toadying Tory conference-pleaser of 1992, with his sickeningly vindictive speech and his "little list" (available for viewing on a well-known videoclip website, if our younger readers don't know of him).

I think that those unfortunate enough to know me we well would describe me as a fairly peaceable sort of chap ... well, I wouldn't be if I ever bumped into that arrogant, snivelling, self-serving, snobbish little @r$e.

If you call his name up on Wikipedia you can see the words of his effort.

I can't be the only one who's heart skipped a beat on reading this!!

While the East Coast main line was in the hands of Directly Operated Railways (after National Express failed to make it pay), it generated a pre-tax surplus of close to £200m, a chunk of which went back to the Treasury.

Customer satisfaction also rose by 2 percentage points.

State operated railways can be fiscally sound and deliver good service. The belief that they can't is just political dogma.

Spot on.

Network rail are a non-profit making enterprise and they are hardly chucked money, you do remember how much money was chucked at Railtrack don't you?

As for the stations they are what makes them money, catering outlets create income in case you didn't know...