Christian Wolmar: Broken Rails [2001] paperback

In the aftermath of the Hatfield rail crash of October 2000 the railway system was reduced to a state of chaos from which it has still not fully recovered. And it was not just the passengers who suffered; Railtrack, the company that actually owns and manages the tracks, was transformed from a stock market star into a financial basket case; most important of all, as this book makes clear, the folly of splitting the national railway system up into a labyrinth of privatised companies all seeking to profit at the expense of the others, was exposed. Setting his analysis within the broader historical context of Britain's railway industry, Christian Wolmar shows that Hatfield, and the earlier accidents at Southall and Ladbroke Grove, were merely the symptoms of the dysfunctional structure that had been created by privatisation.
John Major and his colleagues had destroyed British Rail which, the book argues, was in fact well on the way to creating the most efficent railway system Britain had ever known, and replaced it with a Byzantine system in which hundreds of staff are employed simply to argue with each other about the responsibility for every delay, where knowledge which might improve the efficiency and safety of the network is not shared but jealously guarded, and which requires more public subsidy than the 'inefficient' nationalised system it replaced. The result is the present situation in which the train operators have lost a large slice of their market; the maintenance of the track is in the hands of contractors who grow rich while employing staff who are often inadequately trained and qualified; and, because Railtrack - the one company that is indespensible to the entire system - is entirely reliant upon further injections of public funds, the government now finds itself with all the financial responsibilities it had under the nationalised system while lacking most of the power.