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We need to run our own railway
Grant Shapps has admitted that 26 years of rail privatisation hasn’t delivered for passengers, staff or taxpayers. MICK WHELAN, general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers' union, argues that it’s time to bring our railway back into public ownership

WE ARE waiting, with some trepidation, for the publication of the much-delayed Williams rail review and an indication from the Department for Transport of what it has in mind for the future of our railway.

There have been signals — Grant Shapps has been busy briefing his friends in the right-wing papers — of what he might have in mind. 

Adrian Quine was prompted to write a piece in the Daily Telegraph asking, plaintively: “Are our trains to be nationalised in all but name?” 

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