It’s a typical day in the English countryside. The sun is now shining, there is a light breeze, and I am currently overlooking a number of fields with grazing sheep. However, I am not writing this article from a walking path bench, nor from the top of an English hill. I am writing it from an Avanti West Coast train travelling from London Euston to Crewe.
The train has been brought to a temporary halt, with our Train Manager informing passengers that we are being stopped due to a fire ahead on the tracks. It has, incidentally, been raining for most of the day up to this point, which does rather suggest Britain has now developed wet fires.
But this is not an unexpected issue.
I understand when people say we live in a country where some things simply do not work anymore. Nothing symbolises that frustration more effectively than a conversation about Britain’s railways. This article may sound like a long list of personal grievances against our national rail system and, truthfully, perhaps it is. Yet we all know the uncomfortable reality: our trains are just bad.
Whether it is phone signal disappearing the moment you need to make a call, WiFi flickering in and out like a haunted pub sign, delays blamed on leaves, rain, heat, cold, signalling failures, “operational incidents”, trespassers, staffing shortages or “a fault with the train in front”, the experience increasingly feels unreliable, expensive and oddly outdated for a country that once quite literally invented the railway.
British rail travel now operates on the basis that passengers should simply accept mild dysfunction as part of the experience. We all sit there quietly pretending it is perfectly normal for a journey costing well over £100 to include no internet connection, no seats, a delay somewhere near Rugby and an announcement nobody can hear because the speaker system sounds like it was recovered from a crashed Lancaster bomber.
These, however, are only the symptoms. The real question is what caused this decline and, more importantly, how do we fix it?
I am not going to tell you - as some might expect - that nationalisation has single-handedly ruined the railways. Nor am I going to repeat the tired slogan that privatisation means “profits before people”, the default chant of activists who oppose virtually every market-based reform known to man whilst typing from an iPhone ordered on Amazon.
The truth is more complicated than either side admits. Britain is not operating a genuinely nationalised railway, nor a genuinely privatised one. We are trapped in a strange halfway house: private operators running services on state-controlled infrastructure, under heavy regulation, with limited flexibility, little long-term certainty and incentives that often reward mediocrity rather than innovation.
The state owns the track through Network Rail. Government dictates fares, timetables, contracts and specifications. Operators frequently carry limited commercial risk and increasingly resemble outsourced management firms rather than genuinely competitive businesses. When things go wrong, everyone blames somebody else. Ministers blame operators. Operators blame infrastructure. Infrastructure blames underinvestment. Passengers simply stare at departure boards wondering whether their train exists at all or whether Platform 6 is now more of a philosophical concept.
It is the worst instincts of both systems combined.
The public sector’s bureaucracy collides with the private sector’s fragmentation. Accountability disappears into a fog of contracts, regulators, arm’s-length bodies and Whitehall committees. Nobody feels fully responsible for delivering a modern passenger experience because nobody is fully empowered to do so.
And while politicians obsess over who owns the railways, passengers care about something much simpler: does the train turn up on time, can I get a seat, and can I send an email without my internet connection collapsing somewhere outside Milton Keynes?
The most frustrating part is that many of these problems are entirely solvable. Britain does not suffer from a lack of engineering capability or technological talent. We suffer from institutional inertia and a political culture incapable of thinking beyond short-term fixes. Britain still debates infrastructure as though innovation itself is somehow suspicious.
Take connectivity. In 2026, there is absolutely no reason why passengers on major intercity routes should experience mobile dead zones worthy of the early 2000s. Airlines are already announcing plans to roll out on board satellite internet through Elon Musk’s Starlink technology to provide fast, stable connectivity at 35,000 feet whilst travelling at hundreds of miles per hour. If that can be achieved in the sky, why exactly can we not deliver reliable internet on trains travelling in a straight line through Staffordshire?
Instead, passengers are expected to tolerate collapsing WiFi, patchy mobile signal and blackspots which have existed for so long they probably qualify for listed status. Britain should be exploring trackside signal boosting, satellite-assisted onboard internet and digitally integrated rail corridors as standard across the network, not treating reliable connectivity as some sort of luxury feature reserved for people in First Class eating miniature shortbread biscuits whilst loudly opening PowerPoints.
The same applies to signalling. Large sections of Britain’s railway network still rely on signalling technology which belongs in a museum somewhere between steam engines and plague carts. Modern digital signalling could dramatically increase line capacity without necessarily building entirely new routes. AI-powered traffic management systems, predictive maintenance, automated fault detection and real-time operational analytics could reduce delays before passengers even notice a problem developing. Which would admittedly represent a fairly radical departure from the current business model.
We should also think much bigger than simply making existing trains slightly less dreadful. Britain should be piloting autonomous inspection vehicles, smart maintenance drones, modular rolling stock upgrades and integrated transport ticketing systems which actually work. Imagine a railway app that genuinely functions: one payment system across trains, buses, trams, bikes and taxis with real-time updates that are accurate rather than emotionally aspirational. Singapore manages this. Parts of Japan manage this. Britain, meanwhile, still occasionally struggles with the concept of displaying the correct platform number.
Stations themselves should become commercially ambitious too. Too many still feel tired, transactional and detached from the communities around them. Railway stations should function as local economic hubs with good quality housing, flexible retail space, co-working areas, parcel logistics, healthcare clinics, gyms, start-up workspaces and integrated transport connections. Some of Britain’s busiest stations sit on extraordinarily valuable land and yet still somehow manage to feel like Soviet underpasses with a WHSmith attached.
Most importantly, Britain needs to stop viewing transport purely as a subsidy exercise and start treating it as economic infrastructure. Efficient railways do not simply move people. They increase productivity, connect labour markets, support regional growth, attract investment and reduce pressure on roads and housing markets. A fast, reliable rail network is not a vanity project. It is part of how serious countries compete economically.
So what is the answer?
Britain should move towards a competitive rail market built around infrastructure separation, open-access competition and long-term private investment incentives. Government should retain ownership of strategic infrastructure where necessary, but operators should compete aggressively on routes, pricing, innovation and passenger experience. Not just on who can most efficiently apologise for delays over the tannoy.
Why should a passenger travelling from London to Manchester effectively have one dominant operator choice? Why not allow multiple competing operators on more routes, each forced to win passengers through quality rather than contractual entitlement? Airlines manage competition. Telecommunications companies manage competition. Even energy suppliers manage competition, however imperfectly and whilst occasionally collapsing every winter. Yet our railways still operate with a culture that often feels closer to a protected administrative system than a dynamic market economy.
Britain should also establish long-term rail infrastructure investment zones, allowing pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and private infrastructure investors to directly fund upgrades in return for stable multi-decade returns linked to network performance and regional economic growth. We should be creating innovation corridors around major rail hubs, encouraging private firms to trial new transport technologies, AI systems, smart ticketing and energy infrastructure directly onto the network.
If we can create financial technology clusters, life sciences clusters and freeports, we can create transport innovation zones too. There is no reason Britain could not become a global leader in rail infrastructure again other than a chronic national addiction to consultation documents and managed decline.
In other words: stop running the railways as a permanent political argument and start running them as a modern national growth strategy.
Because at the moment, too much of Britain feels like that stationary train outside the window beside me: full of potential, surrounded by beautiful scenery, but frustratingly stuck on the tracks waiting for somebody, somewhere, to finally make a decision.
