thanks for the figures re rail you sent; I've spent an hour or so
going through them but as you say they are not much use. For one
thing, you have to wonder how accurate figures can be for 2009.

On the radio today I heard someone say the total rail subsidy was £22
billion.

My idea is to nationalise all these companies and remerge them as
British Rail but with the caveat that there should be no train fares
for passengers.

If you think this is nutty, check out

http://www.infotextmanuscripts.org/k...ne_letter.html

Using the figure above, and assuming the burden of this subsidy were
to be met by 20 million people, that works out to around £1100 per
head,
or around £21.16 per person per week.

Let's be uncharitable though and say the entire cost including fares
came to around £40 per week. That sounds one hell of a tax bill, but

a lot of commuters are paying a great deal more than that anyway

there would be a massive reduction in costs - no ticket offices,
ticket inspectors or audit staff, no prosecutions for "fare dodging",
a lot less in the way of security.

And with a totally subsidised service, a lot more people would travel
by train, leave the car at home.

Okay, this would mean more trains, but off-peak most of the trains are
80% and more empty, and it costs nearly as much to run an empty train.

Think of all the other gains too, less traffic on the roads, fewer
accidents, less congestion, better quality air, far less for the
country to spend on oil and imports.

You could extend this to domestic bus and coach services for not much
more.

If someone really did the homework on this, the only real objection
would come from vested interests.