Leading article: Fat salaries in trainland

"TIME flies by when I'm the driver of a train,

And I ride on the footplate there and back again."

Time in Trumptonshire, and elsewhere, must fly by even more quickly now that train drivers have the option of using those idle moments to consider when, how and where to spend their substantial salaries. As we report today, competition among private train companies has pushed salaries for experienced drivers up to pounds 50,000 a year. Soon, controllers (and beneficiaries of underpriced sales of public assets) may not be the only fat personnel to be found working for Connex, Stagecoach and the rest.

For this they have the new free market in the railway industry to thank. Neglect of training has pushed up the going rate for a proper train driver to way beyond the levels previously colonised by those other aristocrats of labour - plumbers - and given little boys new and far more concrete reasons to want to be members of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) when they grow up.