When we’re in Wales, we are very dependent on the train service to collect visitors from Bangor station (occasionally Bodorgan) travelling from London. 

Over the last decade, the service has declined from being somewhat unreliable to lamentable with only a small number of through trains every day, sometimes cancelled. 

I may have exaggerated my memories of the service in the 1990s, but I seem to remember being able to catch a 5.20 on a Friday evening from Euston, being able to eat supper on board, and arrive for a weekend away at 8.20.  It is probably not quite as simple as this, but it feels like a systematic decline which hits not just the likes of me, but the wider sense of connectedness, because, of course, the cost has increased in direct proportion to the unreliability. 

North Wales is now probably further from London psychologically than it was in 1858 when the Chester and Holyhead Railway merged with the prestige London and Northwestern Railway to run the Irish mail service to Dublin.  The mail service was reliable.  So were the trains.

I mention this partly because I have a very vivid memory of travelling from London to Cambridge with someone senior in the Treasury in about 1998 who explained how privatisation would revolutionise the train service.  It was bound to be so much better because it was underpinned by economic theory.  There would be more investment, stimulated by competition between the franchises.  Everything was bound to get better.

I can’t help wondering what went wrong with this very simple idea.