Labour’s plan to take rail franchises back into public hands might be popular with younger voters – but far less so among those of us who remember British Rail.
I was not just a passenger on its slow, dirty services in the 1980s – for a couple of years I was employed as an engineer in BR’s research department in Derby.
When I arrived in 1985, the famous tilting Advanced Passenger Train – the very reason the research department was set up in the first place – was sitting out in the sidings waiting to be scrapped.