BRING BACK BRITISH RAIL? BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR!
USUALLY, they were overcrowded and often late, but unfailingly they were utterly filthy. That, of course, was if the trains ran at all.
Thanks to the power of the trade unions and their frequent wild-cat strikes, rail travel in the Sixties and Seventies was as unpredictable as it was unreliable.
And yet today the era of British Rail is increasingly being held up as a golden age of travel. Labour wants to renationalise the railways, along with other big sector utilities, including water, energy and the postal service — at a preposterous cost to the taxpayer.
Transport Minister Humza Yousaf also thinks nationalising ScotRail might work.
To a new generation of voters, the days of a publicly owned and operated railway, when passengers were at the mercy of the unions and Britain was mocked as the ‘sick man of Europe’, seem like ancient history.
Grumbling about our privatised railways is today’s national pastime, but the truth is they are far better now, with more services and more seats — and much cleaner.
Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if anyone really remembers just how awful BR’s service actually was, so fashionable has it become to think of the railways back then as the last word in public sector efficiency.
For those advocating a return to nationalisation, there is a harsh lesson from history: be careful what you wish for. These pictures are a grim reminder of what the daily commute was like in the Seventies.
Trains randomly cancelled by strikes and people shoe-horned into over-crowded carriages, unheated in winter and too hot in summer.
It meant standing in all weathers on congested platforms waiting for a train that may not have even been running, courtesy of the National Union of Railwaymen or ASLEF.
And this was before mobile phones, so no one could call to warn they would be late — unless you queued for a coin-operated phone box.
In the Seventies, the number of strikes across all sectors averaged between 2,000 and 3,000 every year, peaking in 1979 when almost 30 million working days were lost.
British Rail had wretchedly low standards of punctuality and customer service, not to mention catering that was a national joke. The infamous British Rail sandwich — unappetising and with curling corners — was a byword for the inefficiency of nationalised industries.
It was the era when union bosses, with their absolute power, dominated our daily lives and controlled whether we got to work at all.
Privatisation under John Major in the Nineties may not have become the panacea we hoped for. But do we really want to turn back the clock to British Fail?