Derailed : trains, transport and the British crisis

In March 1995 two giant continental companies merged their capacities to form Europe's largest railway equipment firm.

The combine would provide jobs for 22,000 workers in 40 countries.

That same month in York, one of Britain's largest rail equipment factories was preparing to shut down, with 800 workers made redundant.

No new order had been placed since 1991.This work argues that Britain's transport problem reflects peculiar dysfunctions in its natural heritage, an insular culture which finds it difficult to square technology and finance, tradition and politics.Margaret Thatcher's ideal of a "great car economy" is neither economically nor environmentally vialble, yet the production of a satisfactory alternative requires political reconstruction of an order far beyond the scope of a nation that appears recently to have suffered a "collective systems failure".

An expression of this breakdown exists in a comparison on British and German railway privatization schemes: for all the criticisms of German inflexibility, they have made rapid progress.

Britain, on the other hand, has stumbled into a complex railway "reform" which seems programmed to produce not just a transport, but a constitutional crisis.