HOW IT CAME UNDONE. Earlier this year I reviewed On the Wrong Line: How Ideology and Incompetence Wrecked Britain's Railways, which was very critical of the way in which British Railways became the part-private, part-subsidized, and part-public attempt to provide the rail equivalent of a road network it is today. But British Railways were not fragmented simply to implement libertarian fantasies about what a rail system should be. Stephen Poole, who worked for British Rail up to one of its restructuring, wrote about his experiences in Behind the Crumbling Edge, a not-at-all-favorable portrayal of the nationalized railroad that becomes Book Review No. 25. The railroad Mr Poole hired out on was very much the general purpose common carrier, still serving Britain's legacy heavy industries including the then-publicly held collieries and steelworks, and blending loose-coupled unbraked slow freight trains with express passenger trains and all manner of commuter and branchline local passenger trains, often shepherded from station to station under manual block rules. There was ample potential for things to go wrong, and it did. That operating staff (not necessarily train crew men in militant unions) bought into the view of the railroad as a social service agency not necessarily committed to precision transportation did not help. That's not to say the railroad's administration didn't recognize there were problems, but getting things changed brings to mind university policymaking on a bad day (see p. 183.)

Schemes such as Driver Only Operation and Penalty Fares, which were good ideas in essence, were largely the brainchildren of managers who moved from post to post and who wanted to leave their mark as they went along. At one time you couldn't really hope to be able to use their mark individually because of the nightmare of negotiation and consultation required before change could be contemplated.

Not surprisingly, things went wrong. The word "muddle" turns up frequently as a description of what the railroad attempted to do. One suspects, however, that Mr Poole is a bit skeptical of the thinking that started with the perfectly valid observation of motor and air carriers competing with the railroad being carried through to the suggestion that the railroad itself be restructured in order to provide railroad units competing with other units. (In my view a restoration of competition by creating independent companies running on competing lines, perhaps going so far as to re-introduce competition between the Midland and the North Western might have made more sense than the creation of service-specific operating companies. Mr Poole does not spell out his preferred view, although he refers to some "mismanagement" in the transition.) Given all that happened on British Railways, Mr Poole's acceptance of an early pension, comparing the old system's investment in some recent management training with East Germany's investment in Berlin Wall guarding in 1985, shows much more grace under tough circumstances than I would be capable of showing in public.