Our railways require an urgent injection of pride

Predictably, albeit less-than-convincingly, the train operating companies have denied that they intend next year to strip two thirds of Britain's railway stations of the right to sell anything other than local tickets. In itself, the issue is not of huge practical importance. Increasingly, long-distance journeys will be booked through travel agents or the internet.

Predictably, albeit less-than-convincingly, the train operating companies have denied that they intend next year to strip two thirds of Britain's railway stations of the right to sell anything other than local tickets. In itself, the issue is not of huge practical importance. Increasingly, long-distance journeys will be booked through travel agents or the internet.

The number of people seeking to buy tickets at, say, Lee station in south-east London to travel to Bournemouth or Birmingham is never going to be very large. But the very possibility they might no longer be able to do so is symptomatic of so much that is wrong with our privatised rail system.

The constantly vilified operating companies are in part victims of their success. The overcrowding, the cancelled trains, the lack of punctuality are not only the consequence of decades of under-investment. An equally important cause is the boom in rail travel, reflecting a buoyant, high-employment, increasingly mobile economy. Small wonder, then, that with no prospect of a reduction in road congestion, rail travel is projected to grow by 50 per cent over the next decade.

And who knows? Perhaps the tens of billions of pounds which the Government and the companies promise to invest will one day endow Britain with a rail system that will stand comparison with those of countries such as Germany, France and Switzerland. But a system of which we can be proud requires not just adequate quantities of state-of-the art rolling stock, signalling systems which don't break down, and technology to cope with such hindrances as autumn leaves and the wrong sort of snow. A decent rail system also needs people.

What British railways lack above all is the railway culture that exists in the aforementioned countries. It is a culture founded on a pride in the railways held by those who work on them, and a determination to keep the system in tiptop condition for the public. That pride, and indeed the overall health of a rail system, can be measured by the state of its small stations.

Here, smaller stations have been neglected and been taken over by vandals and even drug addicts. Hence in large measure the squalor of our trains, the graffiti, the pervasive sense of delapidation. A further downgrading of local stations, by preventing them selling long-distance tickets, would be another step in the wrong direction and one more reason for railway staff to lose pride in the system on which so many of us depend.