The Great Railway Disaster: Ben Elton documentary rails against privatisation - should trains be nationalised?

Ben Elton's latest documentary special will see him travel across the north of England, searching for answers as to how successive governments have failed to fix the broken rail industry.

The comedian passes through Manchester, Huddersfield, and the North East, visiting an £85 million line which runs just two trains per hour, and takes a ride on the Transpennine Express - which saw one in six of its services cancelled in March this year. 

Clearly Elton is no fan of privatisation, which happened in 1993 under John Major, when British Rail was divided into more than 100 privately owned companies. But how bad are Britain’s trains really?

NationalWorld’s Digital Trends Writer explains what it’s like to rely on trains in the UK for travel, and debates whether nationalisation is really the answer.

Should British trains be nationalised?

Well, I’m sure it depends where in the country you live - for instance if you’re a Londoner you have the Tube, HS1, and HS2, and in the UK pretty much all tracks lead to London.

But for a humble Digital Trends Writer living in Sheffield without a driver’s licence, it’s a different story. 

Sheffield is, by and large, a great place to live, but the difficulty comes in trying to go anywhere else. Train travel in the north of England (I’ve previously lived in Hull, Newcastle, and Manchester) has been a s**tshow for as long as I’ve been riding the rails.

There has been no occasion in the last 10 years when I’ve arrived at a train station confident that I will get a seat on the train I have booked, or that the train will actually turn up. If it does turn up, there’s always a fair chance it will be delayed or terminate at a station earlier than billed. And then of course getting a refund is its own special nightmare.

The only consistent theme in rail travel in the UK has been a decrease in quality, and an increase in prices.

There was a strange moment during the pandemic when trains were almost empty, so if you had a valid reason to travel, it was a far more pleasant experience than ever before, and it felt like a better world may be possible post-pandemic.

But then things went straight back to how they had always been - packed carriages, expensive fairs, and delays, delays, delays. Train guards are a rare sight leaving passengers, especially young females, feeling vulnerable on certain journeys. You do have to wonder where the hard-earned money you spend on rail tickets is going.

The news that came in 2021 - that the planned extension of HS2 to Leeds had been scrapped - gave lie to the government’s vaunted Levelling Up policies. Anyone who has ever travelled from Hull to York on the rickety Class 158 trains that feel like something from Soviet Europe in their bleakness, will know that the investment in northern rail services has never been at the top of any government’s to-do list.

So it’s fair to say that train travel in the UK has not been great for a long time - and then came the strikes. Let me preface this by saying that the striking rail staff have every right to down tools in protest against their pay and working conditions. But these waves of strikes, which have happened intermittently since the middle of last year, further show that passengers simply aren’t getting value for money.

Almost every journey I’ve taken by train in 2023 has hit a snag - whether it be travel from Brighton to Sheffield impacted by strikes, an overcrowded trip to Edinburgh, and most recently a journey to Manchester airport which, lo and behold, has managed to land on another strike day.

So now we come to the question of whether trains in the UK should be renationalised. I was born after British Rail had been dismantled, but I’m aware of the horror stories of the inefficient, overpriced services of the 1980s and early ‘90s. But it is hard to conceive that any model could be worse than what we have now.

Regardless, nationalisation is already happening. TransPennine Express was nationalised in May this year - has anybody noticed?

Obviously, nationalisation only works if enough money is put into the system, something that’s hard to imagine under the current government and in the current economic situation. The £350 million we were supposed to gain by leaving the EU doesn’t seem to have made its way into our NHS, perhaps we could funnel it into the railways instead.

Maybe it’s a pipedream, but sunlit uplands for our railways are possible. As Ben Elton’s documentary proves, the service is at rock bottom - and there’s only one way they can go from there.

Ben Elton: The Great Railway Disaster airs on Channel 4 on Monday 26 July at 8pm