Upturn in TPE’s fortunes is a good advertisement for public ownership

One of the strangest aspects of the current structure of the railway industry is that effectively, four train operating companies have already been nationalised, as they are run by the government’s Operator of Last Resort.

They can be considered as the vanguard of the ‘renationalisation’ policy that is at the heart of Labour’s plans for the railways. Except that there is an inherent problem - they have been taken over precisely because they were failing in the private sector.

The four franchises - LNER, Northern, Southeastern and TransPennine Express - are the testing ground for the operation of franchises as part of a government-owned organisation.