How it looks on the 7.30 from Edinburgh

The East Coast Main Line may be renationalised, but long-suffering commuters just want it to run on time

It was pretty much business as usual as the 07.30 Virgin East Coast train pulled out of Edinburgh’s Waverley station bound for London King’s Cross yesterday morning. The headlines suggested bad news further down the line with word of yet another franchise collapse and, even, of a second bout of renationalisation.

But as the first-class passengers viewed the snowbound Borders scenery and scanned the menus for their (free) breakfasts, there was no great alarm; after all they’d been here before. If the companies running the franchise do walk away within weeks, as the transport secretary Chris Grayling has warned, this would be the fourth time that the line has changed hands in the 21 years since rail privatisation.

Still, the question remained: how could it be so difficult to run a railway on the Blue Ribbon route between the capital cities of Scotland and England – surely Britain’s most famous line? This was where the Flying Scotsman ran in the great days of steam and where, in the 1930s, the train drivers for the likes of London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) and their rivals at London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) were almost as famous as football players.

But now, after two decades in private hands, we have a situation where this service has been so dogged by ill fortune and/or poor management that the only solution might well be to return it to public ownership. It has certainly fuelled demands by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, egged on by the increasingly militant rail unions, for a full-scale renationalisation programme of all of Britain’s rail companies, as well as the tracks on which they run.

This was always a possible result of what was seen as the botched rail privatisation back in the Nineties, which many MPS of all parties opposed and which one railway enthusiast, the late Robert Adley, Tory MP for Christchurch, predicted would turn out to be “the poll tax on wheels”.

The basic criticism, then as now, was that it wouldn’t work if the track and signalling are owned by one organisation (now the government controlled Network Rail) while the individual rail routes are owned by different private companies. This has led to the often ludicrous situation where the companies claim compensation from government – in other words, you and me – when track and signalling problems make their trains late and then are forced to pay compensation to their customers – you and me – for those late-running trains.

Back on the 07.30, there was no doubt about where the blame lay. One regular business traveller echoed the sentiments of Mr Grayling, who blamed Sir Brian Souter and Sir Richard Branson for “overbidding” when their companies, Stagecoach and Virgin, won the £3.3 billion contract to run the East Coast franchise three years ago. The former owns 90 per cent, the latter 10 per cent.

Now they are incurring the huge losses that have prompted them to give up the franchise early. The successful businessman said: “Their bid was based on their prediction that there would be a 10 per cent, year on year, increase in rail passengers. That was ridiculous, daft. They should have hedged their bets.” He also pointed out that, although rail travel spiked dramatically from 1995 onwards, following half a century of decline after nationalisation, it had now begun a downwards spiral, making franchiseholding increasingly hazardous.

Mr Grayling says there might be a new franchise solution to the East Coast problems, or it could be renationalised, but what there shouldn’t be is another hotch-potch of shortterm solutions. Instead, what must happen is a root-and-branch reappraisal of the railways that comes up with a system in which both track and trains are owned by the same organisation.

The public just wants a system that works and, following huge fare increases, late-running trains and persistent franchise problems many – perhaps most – believe renationalisation is the answer.

Maybe; but because of the mess the railways are in now, two big questions remain. Can we afford the massive bill of paying off the private companies? And do we really want to hand control of this vital service to the RMT and Aslef unions, in their current militant mind-frame?