Re: Publicly owned business
>Then it closed down two thirds of the rail network, stripping out the inter-city lines and designing a train network focused entirely on the needs of the capital.
To correct your history - Beeching was Marples' pet rottweiller. Marples was a (Tory, of course...) minister who made a lot of money from road building.
The whole fiasco was a result of his naked, cynical self-interest.
>British Rail was a byword for incompetence and poor quality.
BR had a brilliant engineering department, which produced the 125 - which is still one of the most popular and comfortable trains today. It also experimented with the APT, and would likely have got it right after another couple of iterations.
But BR was consistently starved of funding. So instead of high speed rail competitive with the French TGV, and proper electrification (planned since the 1960s, but never invested in) BR had to make do with crappy hand-me down trains. And those 125s on a few premium routes.
After privatisation, rail subsidies increased, and fares skyrocketed. But safety went down, so a lot of people died in disastrous accidents (Paddington, etc.)
>This is the nature of nationalised public services
But unlike privatised services, they don't routinely gouge their customers. Or sometimes kill them through negligence.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
