The ultimate terror weapon: privatised railways

The train companies have achieved what the Japanese PoW camps never did – they've broken our spirits

If Saddam wants to paralyse Britain with deadly white powder, he needn't bother with anthrax, he should just send a parcel of snow. Christmas cards in the future should portray a typical English wintry scene, snow nestling gently in the barren branches, while a growing crowd of hunched people adjust their scarves and say "Tell Steve I'll be in as soon as I can," into a mobile phone.

And the announcement boards play with us all, tormenting us with information such as "9.25 – Expected 9.36." So you tell your shuddering body it only has three more minutes to suffer, but then it gets to 9.41 and the bloody thing's as distant as ever. But the board is still adamantly displaying "Expected 9.36," and if it could it would probably go on to explain that the train did arrive three minutes ago but in a parallel universe, so it's right and we're wrong because we're in a distorted time/space continuum.

Then a tannoy announcement tells you the 9.25 will arrive in two minutes, then 10 minutes later they repeat that it will be here in two minutes. Which makes you wonder whether the information department has been franchised out to a minicab firm. The boards will start displaying notices such as "He's on his way mate," and "He's right outside," then, "Oh hang on, are you Streatham Hill, blimey he's gone to Muswell Hill. I'll send another driver, he'll be two minutes."

On Tuesday, after I'd waited through 40 minutes of this, a train arrived going to an entirely different place to where I was heading. By this time it seemed churlish not to get on it, so I did, as I would have done if they'd announced "This train stops at a North London crack house only."

Throughout this wait we'd been told regularly how South Central Trains regretted this disruption, but all with a tone of "mind you, what can you expect with nearly a millimetre of snow." Because who could possibly predict such a freak climatic anomaly as snow in January? Perhaps it will be made into a disaster movie, like Hurricane or Earthquake – "The bit of snow in January". In winter they're surprised by snow, in the autumn they're caught out by leaves, this spring they'll announce "South West Trains apologises for the severe delays – this is due to the unexpected levels of mildness." Then a spokesman will appear on regional news saying "But no one could run a normal service in all that mild." If South Central Trains ran a ferry service they'd cancel every crossing and say "We couldn't send our ships out there, it was soaking wet."

The most distressing side of all this is the weary resignation of the forlorn figures on the platforms. You realise the rail companies have achieved what the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps never managed – they've broken everyone's spirit. If there is a terrorist attack on the railway, the tannoy will announce "Thames Trains regrets that cyanide gas has been released, giving no one at this station more than six minutes to live," and everyone would mutter "Tut, phoo, typical. And I bet we don't get a refund."

The rail companies try to compensate for being unable to get anyone anywhere by boasting of petty innovations, such as the scheme to provide boards on which passengers can write down the station they'd like to be woken up at in the event of them falling asleep. Richard Branson, to be fair, was first to consider the problem of sleepy passengers overshooting their stop. He solved it with a scheme in which you could fall asleep for two hours, and when you woke up you would almost certainly be in exactly the same place as you were before.

How has this come about, that with all this technology, transport is so easily disrupted? Could it possibly be connected to the privatisation that every major party thinks is irreversible? Hardly anyone who uses the trains agrees with this, because the service is becoming more useless than most railways in history. If the current rail companies had been operating the trains of the Wild West, the film High Noon would make no sense. The climax would be Gary Cooper at the station with his gun, dramatic shots of the clock showing mid-day, then five past, 10 past, and at 20 to one an announcement that "South Central Trains regrets the cancellation of the 12 o'clock service due to an unexpected level of dust on the track."

So the only useful solution is to extend the rail companies' franchise to the British and American armies before they invade Iraq. Then the war will amount to thousands of soldiers crowded together looking at their watches and waiting for a tank. Vulcan bombers will break down half way through their flight and the passengers will have to get out, then push on to the next one and stand up for the rest of the journey. Harrier jump jets will be maintained by a roofing sub-contractor who promised to do it half-price, the war will be cancelled though statistics will show that 98 per cent of the war was won inside its timetable, and the commander of the forces will resign in disgrace with a pay-off of 70 million quid.