Thomas the private tank engine. (Economics).(Railtrack)(Brief Article)

A GREAT DEAL of ink has been spilled, not only in Britain but also in Australia, about the Blair government's decision late last year to "deprivatise" Railtrack, the private company that owned and operated Britain's track network following privatisation in the mid-1990s.

No one disagrees that privatisation was badly done--a national system that is necessarily tightly-coupled was fragmented into policy-makers and regulators, train operating and rolling stock companies, a track operator and sub-contractors responsible for track maintenance (but not accountable to Railtrack). It is unclear whether the fatal train crashes at Paddington and Hatfield were really the result of privatisation or decades of under-investment in safety--many can still remember the Clapham rail disaster in 1988 when British Rail was firmly in charge. But in the public mind, the fault lies with privatisation.

Now the critics of public-private partnerships only have to invoke the word "Railtrack" to make their point about profits at the expense of safety--so that when Blair was part-privatising the national air traffic system last year, unions labelled it "the Railtrack of the skies". But the British attitude to the private provision of public services is more complex than this. The simple truth is that in no country in the world, including the United States, is the general public more comfortable with privately-provided public services. Here the Eddystone Light is still operated by a private organisation. Here private lessees of streams (for angling) sue government agencies to stop them polluting the water. Here 885 km of coastline, 207 historic houses and 60 villages and hamlets are owned and protected by a private body, the National Trust.

And as much as they may damn the Major government for the inept manner in which it carried through rail privatisation, there is a dim recollection that once the railways were run much better--by the private sector. This national memory of the pre-1946 railways is preserved not only by the anoraks who line the railway tracks to count the passing of the trains, but also by the BBC and parents who patiently read their children Thomas the Tank Engine repeatedly at bedtime--because Thomas the Tank Engine is a private train.

THE FIRST of this long series was published in 1945, the year before nationalisation, and at that stage there was only a Fat Director. After writing these initial stories, the Reverend W. Awdry made a model of one of the engines for his son and by the second series, this new train had become Thomas the Tank Engine. Awdry painted on the side of his prototype the letters "NWR". In his later chronicles of the Island of Sodor, the mythical island where the engines lived, these letters came to stand for "North West Region", but Awdry said that it originally stood for "No Where Railway".

Nationalisation was not recognised until the third series, published in 1948, where the Fat Director became the Fat Controller. But if Awdry ever contemplated the nationalisation of the North West Region, then he ...