The midnight train to disaster

THE ridiculous scenes on the railways over Christmas were in fact the result of 60 years of official hatred of rail transport.

The ‘major engineering works’ involved are being done in a rush, decades too late, as overcrowding forces even Britain’s trainloathing rulers to modernise a decrepit system.

Passenger railways in this country survive only because so many people continue to prefer them to roads, despite the painful fares and crammed coaches. The Treasury, the Transport Department and the mighty roads lobby would have killed them off if they could have done, as has almost happened in the USA.

Huge and powerful interests – oil, construction, car manufacturers, domestic airlines – have always seen efficient, affordable railways as an obstacle to their growth.

I’m always amused by the way everyone remembers the piffling Profumo affair, in which nothing actually happened. But the far greater scandal of Transport Minister Ernest Marples is virtually unknown.

Marples ran a company that built roads. While he was Transport Minister, he continued to own shares in this firm until public outrage forced him to sell them – to his wife.

This charmer, who was really responsible for the smashing up of railways usually blamed on Lord Beeching, ended up by fleeing the country on a midnight train (of all things – it’s assumed he couldn’t have got so many of his possessions into a car or on to a plane) bound for Monaco.

Marples’s 1975 moonlight flit was a successful bid to escape a gigantic tax bill. He lived out his remaining years among vineyards in Beaujolais. Hardly anyone knows this.