Passengers or taxpayers must pay for railways

SIR – Twenty years ago I bought shares in Railtrack, not to get rich but to support railways as a thriving modern enterprise. Separating tracks and train operators looked like a good idea, as it made it easy for operators to offer competing services by negotiating with one central provider of track capacity. As operators don’t own any assets, the barriers to entry are low.

One hope was that privatisation would get politicians out of the way, though obviously this didn’t work out.

Running an intensive rail system – maintaining tracks, trains, signalling, stations, bridges, tunnels, power supplies – is mighty expensive. It is ultimately paid for by the populace, either as fares or through taxation. Investment programmes can cost huge sums and run for decades, so they are not well-handled by governments.

Part of the problem is that passenger loadings can be highly variable (especially on routes popular with commuters and business travellers), with some trains packed for a few hours a day and nearly empty at other times. More trains and track capacity would ease this, but then all those expensive assets would be underutilised for much of the time.

There’s no shortage of facile “solutions”. Unless Jeremy Corbyn has found a way of running trains free of charge, his nationalisation would simply mean the Government paying the same bills as now, except for the 3 per cent profit margin of train companies, which would likely be lost in public sector inefficiencies.

Richard Wellings (Comment, August 27) wrote quite rightly about cutting red tape and encouraging competition between operators. But he then made a proposal to “reintegrate tracks and trains ... to reform our dysfunctional and fragmented franchising system”.

This would create a set of regional monopolies, with huge barriers to entry for any new train companies. Operators would need to negotiate with track owners as competitors, which is what has given rise to recent complaints about BT Openreach. C D Drewe Chelmsford, Essex