If ever there was an example of the stupidity of government, the greed of corporate lawyers and the hypocrisy of market solutions it has to be the railway system in Britain.

Get this. There is a *single* network which was developed over 100 years ago. Amazingly, all the lines actually do connect up with each other and stop at various nodes (stations) on the network. Bizarrely, central government works to make this network work as inefficiently as possible.

There doesn’t even seem to be a consistent online timetable. For some reason www.thetrainline.com makes arbitary decisions as to whether Virgin cross country trains are available or not. There are one set of trains that information is provided for; and a parallel set of trains for which information is hard to gather.

It is impossible from any of the train company websites I used yesterday to book a seat and reserve a bike on the train. Most of them take more than three rings to answer the phone. I waited between 15 - 20 minutes to get through to both GNER and Virgin yesterday. I lost count of the times I heard ‘Thank you for your patience’. I felt like my patience was being drained from me by an electronic vampire like talking machine. I grew increasingly irritated with hearing ‘Why don’t you try our website?’ - because I had and it had failed miserably. I pondered what the word ‘choice’ really means because if you want to make most railway journeys in the UK there is no choice at all. There are in effect a small number of monopolies which control all the routes. Maybe ‘quality’ would be better than choice?

Try making a basic request as to whether a bicycle can be booked on a South West Train - but don’t do the easy bit - phone up GNER because they provide the connecting train. They haven’t got a clue. Contact Virgin trains and receive inconsistent and mixed messages about times and cycle options (and different prices). Back to GNER who try to sell a ticket from Waterloo to Bournemouth with either a change at Basingstoke or a change at Clapham Junction (although there are many through trains). Try booking a cycle for a train from the north to the south to be told ‘this journey isn’t possible because you can’t take a bicycle on the underground’.

It is staggering.

I note with horror that Alistair Darling was on the front of a computing magazine this week. Please please please - don’t move him from railways to technology. If he can’t make the trains work, how will he cope with IT?