We British are curiously emotional about our railways; many of us are fondly nostalgic for a misremembered age of locomotives, luggage vans, restaurant cars and peak-capped porters. Their privatisation 20 years ago was viewed by some as a fat-cat seizure of a national asset, while others believed that private enterprise would free the underfunded railways to compete and improve. Whatever we may feel, they are never far from the headlines, as we saw last week when Virgin won the contract to continue to run the West Coast mainline, and the prime minister announced that China would help to build new high-speed lines.
John Major's privatisation in 1993, something that even Margaret Thatcher refused to contemplate, was hugely controversial, with the Paddington and Hatfield disasters just a few years later seeming to confirm the worst fears of the policy's opponents: big profits would be made at the expense of passenger safety and fares would rise but services diminish.
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