The government has had to take over yet another railway – and yet it still balks at full nationalisation

theguardian.com:

I t should not really have taken Einstein to work out that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Nonetheless even this basic truth seems to be lost on the Conservative government and its relationship to the railways.

The lesson to be learned from the collapse of the TransPennine Express contract – the latest railway to be effectively nationalised by the government – should be all too obvious: relying on the private sector to provide an efficient, cost-effective and reliable railway was a fundamental mistake. Raw capitalism does not work in an industry that is heavily dependent on massive investment, that is a natural monopoly and provides an essential public service. The privatisation in the mid-1990s created a system of pretend capitalism, which involved the fragmentation of a coherent but complex industry into a series of interdependent companies motivated by private profit rather than public service.

If there is one thing that terrifies Tory politicians, it is the notion that British Rail was actually a successful, efficient and enterprising state owned and operated organisation. Time and again they resort to cheap jibes about bad sandwiches and the wrong type of snow, rather than examining the reality of an organisation that ran the system with less subsidy and provided a better level investment.

In a rational world, the taking back in-house of TransPennine Express, the fourth contract to be renationalised since 2018, would finally make ministers realise that the game is up. Yet, clearly they do not know their Einstein. Mark Harper, the latest in a long line of transport secretaries who have tried vainly to get a grip on the railways, emphasised in his statement that the