Wednesday 1 July 2009

Adonis the Red

A (little bit) of rail nationalisation as the government takes the troubled East Coast mainline into public ownership.

Railway enthusiast and Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis is not in all respects the most red-clawed of nationalisers, but he may also end National Express's other two other rail franchises - Easy Anglia and c2c.

"The government is not prepared to renegotiate rail franchises, because I'm simply not prepared to bail out companies that are unable to meet their commitments," Adonis told the BBC.

2 comments:

Robert said...

So they take it from one group of losers into another....

Unknown said...

In '47-8 we paid over the odds for a clapped-out, near-derelict rail system. As I recall, numerous former directors (including Tory government ministers) carried golden tickets for the rest of their lives.

Today, we wait until the private companies go belly up, then pick up the assets for free. As long as each company sequentially fails, this looks like a decent and profitable racket.

Another success for the market economy!