Sir: May I add my voice of approval to Ian
Brown's very perceptive piece? During the days when the state ran all public transport there was no move towards integration. Buses only occasionally visited railway sta- tions and when they did only one route was usually available and that went into the local town with no guarantee of bus and rail timetable co-ordination. Therefore, a jour- ney by rail but ending up in remote towns and villages not served by BR involved numerous and time-consuming changes. This resulted in passengers opting for the use of the private car or a taxi. I can cite many such examples up and down the country. New Labour are now proclaiming `integrated transport policy' as a brand new idea which in reality should have been adopted by old Labour when the state took over the running of the railways back in 1948.
There was no regulator in those days. Complaints about late and dirty trains went unanswered or were rebuffed as an inter- fering waste of time by uninterested railway staff. PR howlers like, 'We are improving our service to passengers' when the Brighton Belle Pullman service was discon- tinued were the order of the day and speeds between cities such as London and Bristol only started to match pre-war standards with the introduction of the 125 series of traction and rolling-stock. Had there been a regulator the state-run industry would have had to pay such huge sums in compensation that the Treasury would have had to alter its annual budget forecasts.
In the dark days of bureaucracy gone OTT I remember being told not to `. . be so silly — we don't go there!' by a bossy ticket clerk in Birmingham's New Street Station when I had the temerity to ask her for a train ticket to a destination served from Snow Hill station. Flexible ticketing was then unheard of, but now seems to be a subject dear to the heart of every critic of change.
The series 'Great Railway Disasters' pub- lished in the Independent only emphasises the point that the state has no business ruining commercial enterprises. All these faithfully recorded and embellished clangers were inspired by precisely the same people who ran our railways as a nationalised enterprise. After all, every one of these stories happened before privatisa- tion! To me, it is inconceivable that compa- nies like Stage Coach would have invested such huge sums in taking on railway fran- chises only ultimately to lose revenue and incur the wrath of the regulator.
Alexander Twickel
Tidmington Corner, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire
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