REGULAR readers may be surprised to learn I always had a soft spot for one nationalised industry, the railways. This is mainly because once upon a time the Anglo-Scottish routes ran excellent restaurant cars. On the return journey, it was best to take the second sitting for the sake of the more picturesque scenery along the track that would please the eye in the same sort of way as the palate was about to be agreeably tickled. Then from Warrington or York you could settle in, select from a menu with ample choices, order the freshly cooked food and find something promising on the British Transport Hotels wine list. By the time you crossed the border you were feeling in the best of spirits as the hills of Bonnie Scotland rose round you. By the time you reached your destination you got the feeling it had been a perfect homecoming. Those were the days.

BTH was a fine organisation with, as the jewels in its crown, the greatest hotels in Scotland. Turnberry bathed in the balmy light of the western sea while Gleneagles sternly held its own against its backdrop of Highland grandeur.

I used to give my young journalist colleagues the advice that, if stuck in a strange place, they should head straight for the Station Hotel, which would always be the best in town even if the local line had long been closed. Again, the restaurants were reliable and in the cities, at the Grand Central in Glasgow and in the North British or Caledonian in Edinburgh, they remained superior to the local competition in that pre-Michelin era. It was worth joining BTH’s wine club as well, in its day a further innovation, so you could have again at home what you had tippled on the train. I used to say to myself: long live these socialist hotels! Long may they serve the discerning bourgeoisie!

But then came privatisation. While the hotels were all sold off, in general they have maintained their standards. Yet the rail network has gone from bad to worse, and the restaurant cars have vanished altogether or at best been reduced to a squalid “buffet” crammed with tattooed men drinking beer out of the can. We should recall that British Rail, the monolithic state-owned operation of an earlier era, had been one of the country’s most reviled institutions. Apart from BTH, everything seemed slow, dirty and inefficient. You might have thought privatisation could hardly produce a worse result, yet it did.

I’ve described my best sort of journey under the old regime, so let me describe my worst under the new. There was a time some years ago when I needed to commute regularly between Edinburgh and Manchester. While the two have a direct rail connection, it did not terminate at Manchester Piccadilly but proceeded to Manchester Airport. So it was chock full of families with screaming kids on their way to package holidays, or else, on the way home, of blotchy Scots with peeling skin.

Often there was standing room only, for three hours. If cattle had been treated like these human passengers, the carriers would have faced prosecution. The experience became so vile that I preferred a longer route, down to York and across the Pennines, in slow and shabby trains that, by comparison, felt all the same like Pullman cars.

When I try to analyse this history in economic terms, it is a trifle tricky to interpret. In the last decades of the 20th century, the numbers of passengers on British Rail fell by one-third: poor service put paying customers off, and quite right too. After privatisation the number of passengers started to rise. Since 1995 it has in fact doubled, to an average of 4.5 million a day at present (though rail still only accounts for 10% of all passenger mileage). But how is this to be reconciled with the performance of the frightful Abellio, inflicting such misery on Scots commuters?

And what about the failure of Virgin, which led last week to the effective renationalisation of the East Coast line? This case is especially interesting because the line has never really made much money since it opened in 1846 and, if it is to exist at all, perhaps it can only do so in public ownership.

Elsewhere the pressures of competition have without doubt brought us some improvements, though they tend to be small and incremental, so less noticeable to a daily commuter.

The main problem facing UK train operators is one that other industries would love to have: too many customers. To the growing pressure on the inherited structures and facilities the only answer is investment. Just now we see plenty money being spent at Waverley Station in Edinburgh or at Queen Street in Glasgow, as we push past the building sites wondering if it will all be worth the trouble in the end.

We are just as bemused with the apparently irritating plethora of fares offered by train companies. It derives from innovations in yield management pioneered by British Rail – basically, raising or reducing prices to match higher or lower demand, rather than having one standard fare from A to B. That is good economic sense and It does appear to stimulate traffic while limiting public subsidy.

Not only the passengers but also the managers benefit from rail restructuring, achieved at the cost of complex negotiations between different service providers. The managers are freed from the dead hand of centralised control which was the hallmark of British Rail. Critics of privatisation claim such autonomy and accountability could be matched under public ownership. Possibly, but for the most part it has not been.

Again, however, the situation can look quite different if we cast our eyes abroad. It is true the UK’s growth in demand for rail travel has been exceptional. Other European countries have shared to some extent in it but, with nationalised networks, they have coped better.

High-speed trains in France, Germany and Italy are a thrill to ride. Spain and even Poland, though compared to us much bigger in area and poorer in resources, have more of the necessary track than we have managed to build so far. For us, the problems seem insuperable.

In a smaller country, it hardly seems worth the trouble and expense to construct a line from London to Birmingham, for a saving to businessmen of maybe 10 minutes. Please don’t ask about faraway Scotland.

It all just seems a huge guddle, without clear solutions. Even now we don’t really know enough about public preferences. From the 1960s car ownership became commonplace in the UK. Families gained freedom, collectively and individually, and before long the car was dad’s pride and joy while also allowing his teenager kids to assert their independence.

But this golden age of automobility ended in the 1990s. As we grew worried about the environment, road building ceased to keep pace with car use, and the dream of the open road was obscured by the fug of urban congestion.

Nowadays mobile communication is the technology that changes our lives. It is a shift relevant to how we travel too. We can easily reach for our phones or laptops on a train. We can use our phones in a car, but not comfortably or indeed legally.

Maybe the fault lies in ourselves. We love trains, loathe rail operators and mostly use our cars. Otherwise we want a public transport system that cannot really be delivered: one that as nearly as possible is door-to-door, and at a modest cost.

I think I see a solution like that coming, only 20 or 30 years down the line. It’s the driverless car. Meanwhile, stay calm and await further announcements.