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"A
combination of 'incompetent management and inadequate procedures'
meant that signal sighting committees persistently failed to meet,
while, despite a number of measures being mooted, 'very little'
had been achieved to improve safety... LABOUR
WILL SELL RAILTRACK TO BECHTEL AFTER THE ELECTION -- SUBSIDISED
BY THE TAXPAYER, OF COURSE!!! ... Railtrack has admitted it is in no position to deliver on its promises, with its value decimated after it ignored the broken rail which caused last year's Hatfield crash... In other words, forget those early promises and also assume that the taxpayer will supply a greater proportion needed by the industry, via the Government and its agent, the SRA. JOANNA
WALTERS - THE
OBSERVER 27 APRIL 2001 RAILTRACK
"FACING BANKRUPTCY" EVERYBODY HATES RAILTRACK "Everybody hates Railtrack, the privatised company that makes £1 million pure profit every day while presiding over the collapse of the nation's train system... it has become a money-laundering operation for state subsidies." MARTIN
BRIGHT - THE
OBSERVER, 4 Oct 1998
RAILTRACK ASTONISHED THE GOVERNMENT "Railtrack astonished the government by pressing for a new subsidy of £1 billion at a time when it is reaching only 50% of its punctuality targets for passenger trains." KEITH HARPER THE GUARDIAN, 26 March 1999 TAXPAYERS CHEATED OUT OF BILLIONS "The cross-party parliamentary Public Accounts Committe last night declared that British taxpayers were cheated out of billions of pounds by the privatisation of Railtrack. It said the sale of shares should have been staggered to capture their stellar rise in value after the 1996 sell- off." THE GUARDIAN, 14 July 1999 TAXPAYERS SHORTCHANGED "ON AN HEROIC SCALE" "Rail privatisation shortchanged the taxpayers on an heroic scale because of the speed with which it was done. Those who cashed in were the buyers of the assets, very often former British Rail executives, who became overnight millionaires as they later sold on their businesses at vast profit." MICHAEL HARRISON THE INDEPENDENT, 21 Oct 2000 THE VALUE OF A HUMAN LIFE "British Rail publicly expressed its commitment to "absolute safety" saying that this "must be a gospel... paramount in the minds of management." "Yet
immediately upon privatisation this commitment was
MAXIMUM SAFETY VS. PROFIT MAXIMISATION "It is hardly surprising that the [privatized water] company KELDA should have proposed putting its water and sewerage interests, Yorkshire Water, into a new mutual structure. Under the plans, the customers would become the owners, finance the purchase by raising bonds and finance te debt at low cost from the rock-solid income stream that a utility provides... "The
same principle applies, of course, to the railways,
"Under
a mutual system, investor ownership is replaced by
BETTER TIMES FOR RAILTRACK "Railtrack this week told its shareholders that "better times are to come." So they raised the dividend for shareholders by 5% (underlying inflation is 2%)... "The
Treasury's 10-year plan for the railways is investing
RAILTRACK RENATIONALISATION GAINING SUPPORT "An early day motion on renationalising Railtrack already has more than 70 supporters (in Parliament)" ROS COWARD THE GUARDIAN, 19 DEC 2000 NUMBER
CRUNCHING FRENCH ATTACK RAILTRACK "The French cried "foul" on the British yesterday and attacked Railtrack's threat to pull out of the second stage of the Channel Tunnel rail link. The criticism came from Guillaume Pepy, director of passenger services for SNCF, the French state-owned railway, in a put-down of Britain's dilapidated railway system... Mr Pepy said: "I am shocked. It's nonsense. It's incredible." Mr Pepy, whose company has a big stake in Eurostar, said that the 72-mile journey from Folkestone to London on Eurostar was "sometimes a nightmare."... Jean Francois Bernard, director general of RFF, a publicly owned company but otherwise the equivalent of Railtrack, said: "Because the British system is private, it is bad, and it is bad for safety." SNCF receives £2.1 billion from the French government to run its services compared with the £1.3 billion which the 25 train operating companies get in Britain. RRF [sic] gets £1 billion from the French government to maintain the railways." KEITH
HARPER RAILTRACK
SPARED PUBLIC CRASH ENQUIRY KEITH
HARPER
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