Why are our train services so useless At least Mussolini made the trains run on time.

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A.� An interesting point. As well as delays and inefficiency, there have been terrible tragedies too. Take the Hatfield disaster in October, 2000. Fourteen minutes into its journey to Leeds, the 450-seat GNER locomotive 91023 was hurled from the tracks as it sped round a bend at 115mph near Hatfield. Of its 156 passengers, four died and 35 were injured. It was all caused by a broken rail - which Railtrack had known about for months.< xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

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Q.� Why should such terrible accidents happen in the relatively affluent age of Tony Blair's Britain

A.� Certainly, many of the train companies' problems are inherited from the bad old days of British Rail. This nationalised company had a vast job to do - and fell far short of the mark as more and more people deserted the railways for the road. Whether they did so because BR was so poor is a matter for long discussion.

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This Hatfield train crash was avoidable. The previous December, inspectors walked the track making their weekly check. Since privatisation in 1996, contractors from the construction firm Balfour Beatty, not Railtrack, had carried out checks. That morning, the inspectors were appalled by the state of the track. Railtrack was told to replace it immediately. It was still being done when the tragedy happened - and here lies the problem.

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The bureaucracy that is needed to run the national network also slows it down. There was, in the words of one former senior British Rail manager advising the House of Commons' select committee on transport, an 'organisational malaise' in the railway industry. Another senior manager said of Railtrack: 'The year they took over was year zero. Anything that happened before that, they didn't want to know. Train culture and all the safety that went with it went out of the window.'

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Q.� So, is a rubbishy train system the price we pay for living in a liberal democracy The Italian tyrant Mussolini knew how to get the training running efficiently and on time, didn't he

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'Making the trains run on time' became a defence of the Fascist 'corporate state' on the basis of its efficiency, and the expression is now used only ironically.

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Q.� So whose success was it

A.� Mussolini was stealing someone else's glory. To quote from Hamilton Ellis in The Splendour of Steam (Allen & Unwin, 1965): 'Let me once again demolish that yarn about Benito Mussolini having made the Italian trains run to time. The magician was in fact Cavaliere Carlo Crova, general manager of the Italian State Railways in the 1920s. Undaunted by past mismanagement ... undefeated by war-time chaos and post- war political rumpus, this remarkable man had taken the crumbling legacy of the three old railway companies - Adriatic, Mediterranean and Sicilian - rallied his demoralised staff, and licked the whole into very fair shape ... Completion of the reforms, with their quite abrupt incidence of punctuality, happened to coincide with the Fascist revolution, and so the Mussolini Railway Myth was born.'

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Steve Cunningham