The crisis in Britain's railway system has prompted calls for the network to be renationalised. Nick Morrison looks at the arguments for taking it back into public ownership.

WHEN transport buffs talk about the golden age of the train, they mean the period when the railways were in private hands.

From George Stephenson completing the Darlington to Stockton Railway, the first public steam line, in 1825, to nationalisation in 1948, there were almost 125 years of progress and achievement.

More than 50 years on from those heady days of steam, there is a distinct possibility that the period of public ownership will come to be seen as something of a glorious period, compared with what has followed.

Figures released yesterday show that cancellations last year increased by 45 per cent, over the previous year, with Arriva Trains Northern, which runs the Trans Pennine service, the worst offender, with more than 16,000 services cancelled. The previous day, it emerged that rail delays over the same period added up to 3,500 years in wasted passenger time. And two 48-hour strikes by Arriva conductors planned for next month will cost an estimated £535,000 a day, according to the Centre for Economic and Business Research.

Europe Minister Peter Hain was yesterday reported as saying that Britain had the worst railways in Europe, while Transport Secretary Stephen Byers was forced to admit that "certain aspects" of the network had deteriorated under the Labour Government. Escalating concern over the network even prompted one former minister, Gavin Strang, to call for the whole system to be renationalised.

But, while the railways may be in crisis, taking them back into public ownership is not the answer, according to David Stewart-David, transport expert and research associate at the Centre for Business Excellence, at Northumbria University. Not least due to the cost of recompensing shareholders of the numerous private companies now involved in our railways.

"There would have been a lot of sense in the first place in keeping Railtrack under public control, the drawback is you would not get the private investment," he says. "And the train operating companies have a very mixed record. Unless you nationalise the lot, the Government would end up with the least attractive ones, and that wouldn't be in anyone's interest."

He says the duration of the franchises handed out to the operating companies when the network was privatised, seven years in most cases, was a disincentive to invest in new engines and carriages. Privatisation also built in incentives to run more and more trains, rather than make the existing service work better first.

Existing problems with the network were exacerbated by the Hatfield crash in October 2000, put down to cracks in the track. The result was that speed limits as low as 5mph were imposed in some areas, while sections of faulty track were identified and replaced.

"That was a huge miscalculation. It was a failure to have confidence in your own safety, and that was something that never happened under British Rail," says Mr Stewart-David. "But, under nationalisation, some of the crises that are around today were around then. There were threats of strikes and new stock that didn't work properly - nationalisation is not going to solve this, it is just going to get everyone involved in more reorganisation."

But nor is injecting large sums of money into the railways necessarily the answer either, he says. Only a continuous flow of investment will give companies the confidence to spend on new stations, stock and track. And only longer franchises will make companies believe that making substantial improvements is worthwhile.

And he says the outlook for our rail network, while not exactly rosy, is not one of doom and gloom either. "In some aspects, such as safety, the crisis is overstated, and there are others, like rail freight, which show quite decent progress.

"There is certainly a short-term crisis in industrial relations, but long-term I would say the track and infrastructure will probably be sorted out in a year or so, although I wouldn't bet on it, and there will still be places where there is chaos."

Proposals to tackle the problems in the railway network are due to be published by the Strategic Rail Authority on Monday, and this offers some hope of improvement, according to Ernie Preston, secretary of the Rail Passengers Committee in the North-East.

But taking railways back into public ownership is unlikely to be of much benefit to the passengers, he says. "You could do it, but whether you would want to is another thing. It would just be looking at the symptoms, rather than the underlying causes.

"Railways need long-term planning and investment. If you want to see improvements in five years time, you need to start now. And, until you accept that these things cost money, you are going to be staggering from one crisis to another, like we have done for the last 50 years."

Nationalising the railways would see private investment dry up, putting the entire burden on the taxpayer - a system held responsible for the deterioration of the network under public ownership.

"It has become quite clear that there are serious flaws in the way it was privatised, but that is quite different to saying that privatisation of the railways was a bad move," Mr Preston says. "People relied on privately-financed and operated railways for more than 100 years, and they served the country well.

"To my mind, there is absolutely no reason why they couldn't do that again, but they won't if they have to do it on a shoestring. Somebody has got to grasp that it is going to take real money to make real improvements."