I’ll believe it when I see it, but the news that Virgin Trains could “disappear” from the rail network within a year has given me as much succour as the prospect of Theresa May disappearing from power. With home, family, work and friends arranged at various points along the west coast mainline, I have been, to all intents and purposes, a captive of Virgin’s malodorous Pendolino service for my entire adult life.

The best thing that can be said about them is that they get you there. As a regular rail traveller, however, it’s what they do to your soul along the way that really matters. For the duration of a Virgin trip you are trapped in a red, plastic, Bransonian dystopia.

To paraphrase the political economist Karel Williams, Virgin has privatised its profits and nationalised its losses

Go to the toilet, and you are greeted by a disembodied voice telling you how hard it is to pass the audition to be a Virgin Trains toilet. The high-backed “airline” seats encourage claustrophobia and discourage anyone from talking to each other. The only way to escape the pervasive smell of raw sewage throughout the train is to enter “the shop in coach C”, where instead you might encounter the aroma of breakfast baps being microwaved, which, as a consolation, only smell like burps.

In 2012, the company spent £3.5m trying to fix the problem, having traced it back to the fact that the train’s waste units were positioned next to the air conditioning system. Whatever they spent that money on, it didn’t work. They still niff like a used nappy.

The worst of it is that Virgin Trains has tried to paint all this not only as an improvement on what went before, but as the apex of what it’s possible to expect from rail travel. For the social anthropologist Marc Augé, in his 1992 book Non-Places, making trains more like planes reminds travellers “of the need to live on the scale (or in the image) of today’s world”.

But what if you’re there, holding your nose, unable to see out of the window because your seat stops short of it, and thinking, “‘Today’s world’ is not really where I want to be right now.” It’s not yesterday’s world I want to live in: I remember the end times of British Rail. I want tomorrow’s: free of management cant and PR speak, knowing I’ve paid into a service that’s there for me and for all of us, that doesn’t treat us like children after Skittles.

As Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty has noted, Virgin’s franchise has been a case study in parasitism, with Branson seeking out “industries sheltered from too much competition” in order to “pull subsidies out of taxpayers”. (Branson didn’t like that being pointed out one bit.) To paraphrase the political economist Karel Williams, Virgin has privatised its profits and nationalised its losses. The only commendable thing about travelling on the west coast line during this period is that the journeys got shorter – and that had nothing to do with Virgin, given that the west coast mainline’s upgrade was decades in the making and funded by government.

But even taking differing perceptions of what – and for whom – the railways are for, privatisation has still represented extremely poor value for money. In his recent book The New Enclosure, the geographer Brett Christophers reveals how Network Rail, a fully public body since 2014, spent £220m reacquiring 100 freight sidings and yards from private operators to deal with “unforeseen growth in freight traffic”, after the Department for Transport “gifted” them to the private sector in the 1990s.

There are rail experts who argue that, perversely, the sheer unprofitability of the railway makes nationalisation a bad idea. If you look at rail travel as a taxpayer’s burden rather than a social and environmental asset, that will always seem the case.

I remember how grim it could be to travel on British Rail, but there’s one thing you can guarantee: a state operator wouldn’t pay an actor to be the voice of a toilet.

• Lynsey Hanley is the author of Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide