November 27: Botched rail privatisation to blame, not train firm itself

YORKSHIRE’S railway services are far from perfect, but David Behrens’ anti-Northern Rail rant (The Yorkshire Post, November 21) is misplaced.

The background to Northern’s 11-year tenure as rail franchisee is simple: the Strategic Rail Authority ran out of money and dumped the oldest and worst trains on the network into the North and then invited bids to run a service based on the idea that there would be no growth in passenger numbers and no additional carriages. Some would call this a poisoned chalice.

How this happened in the first place demands another history lesson. Suffice to say that the trains Northern was given (it had no choice in the matter) are ones built as cheaply as possible in the 1980s when the various Thatcher governments were determined to eliminate railways as a means of public transport in all but a few specialised instances.

Northern could have sat back, run the franchise to the letter of the contract and counted the profits – nothing comes free on today’s railway. One of the follies of the botched Major privatisation is that running the network now costs far more than the “deeply inefficient” British Rail.

But Northern chose instead to begin a programme of improvements. A series of clever deals with outside agencies such as Yorkshire Forward levered in a few extra carriages here, a handful more trains there, to help alleviate peak time overcrowding. Northern Rail sometimes get it wrong. But it is not the company victimising rail passengers, rather a succession of governments.

From: ME Wright, Grove Road, Harrogate.

READERS will recall that, pre-election, none of the top brass at Westminster had any idea that Network Rail weren’t up to the job – or so they later claimed. The tempting carrot of railway electrification had a supplementary list of “possiblies” which included the Harrogate and Calderdale lines. I think we may assume that, post-election, this list went straight into the shredder labelled “The North” – possibly located next to the bulging piggy-bank labelled “Crossrail 2”?

It was just pre-election when Harrogate’s unfortunate MP, Andrew Jones, was handed the chalice of Rail Minister. Tom Richmond accuses Andrew of speaking gobbledygook (The Yorkshire Post, November 23) but given that history of mendacity and deceipt, what else is left to him – and is it not some of the finest in the genre?