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My dad was nationalised 70 years ago this week. Or at least on January 1, 1948, his job was, along with those of other fellow railway workers.

It was a new dawn for the nation’s biggest industrial “family” and they had great expectations from public ownership. Railwaymen had demanded nationalisation as far back as 1894. It was the Holy Grail of their unions.

Train drivers looked forward to a “Utopia” where they’d work for themselves, their fellow workers and their country. Even David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill spoke in favour.

“Now, in 1948, our impossible dream was about to come true,” said footplate union Aslef. It did – but the dream was crushed by John Major’s ideologically driven Tory government 50 years later.

Today, the political drama is on replay. Who owns the railway, who runs it and for whose benefit is back up the agenda after 20 years of failed privatisation.

Driven by passenger dissatisfaction and rocketing fares, Jeremy Corbyn ’s pledge to renationalise the railways has huge public support.

The failure of Virgin’s flagship East Coast Mainline from London to Leeds and Edinburgh, which made a profit in public ownership, showed clearly that 1948 was the right solution.

Labour plans to unite track and trains under a single public company. They should look back at how hard the private companies fought to prevent nationalisation – and won higher compensation. That battle will have to be refought.

It’s hard to believe but nationalisation was something of an anti-climax. “There were no great ceremonies,” said historian Hamilton Ellis, “no striking of colours and hoisting of new ones. The only musical honours were the traditional ones of locomotive whistles screaming the old year out and the new year in.”

(Image: Getty) (Image: Getty)

Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour regime was delivering on his vow to take the commanding heights of the economy, including coal, steel and rail, into public ownership. The mines came first, on January 1, 1947.

But the railway was different, a myriad trades, from signalman to sous-chef, ship’s captain to shunter. It reached every corner of the country, a uniformed workforce dedicated to making trains run.

But the new British Railways faced a daunting task uniting the Big Four firms – Great Western; London and North Eastern; London, Midland and Scottish; and Southern.

The system was run-down after the war, and Chancellor Dr Hugh Dalton called it “a poor bag of assets” to buy. A churlish understatement. BR inherited 19,863 miles of track, 7,000 stations, 20,000 locos, 56,000 coaches, 1.2 million freight waggons, 54 hotels, 7,000 horses, 130 steamships, 96 miles of harbours, 51,000 houses, ­engineering works and vast tracts of property.

My railway clerk father Harry, working in Yorkshire for the LMS, was one of a vast army of “nationalised” employees, so big nobody knew how big – but estimates varied up to 649,000. Not all employees greeted public ownership with the enthusiasm of union leaders. Families had served the industry for generations and had strong company loyalty.

The Big Four bosses warned: “Many members of staff will feel sad they will no longer be associated with a company whose achievements and tradition they may feel proud of.”

Recognising this esprit de corps, BR divided the system into regions that mirrored the old firms. On the Great Western, very little changed. Even the carriages retained a unique livery, and locos their brass numberplates. Initial optimism soon gave way to scepticism, if not downright cynicism. As early as May 1948, driver DN Smith of Norwich moaned: “The set-up savours too much of the old system. The same managers, operating the same way.”

(Image: Getty)

(Image: Newcastle Chronicle)

These were challenging times. During the war, the railways had a virtual monopoly but the 1950s brought competition from the private car and lorries. So poor old BR became synonymous with inefficiency: slow, late services, dirty stations, strikes, operating losses.

A 1955 Modernisation Plan was a costly failure, paving the way for the Beeching Plan. ICI boss Dr Beeching was appointed by the Tories to bring BR back into profitability. His 1963 report led to the closure of thousands of stations and route miles, and huge job losses.

Despite being the arch-privatiser, even Margaret Thatcher had no appetite for selling off the railways. Her successor, John Major, had no such qualms. He set about the most-botched privatisation by any Tory government. BR was split between track-owning, train operating, rolling stock and maintenance firms: more than 100, all with legions of executives, all clamouring for subsidies – which went up fivefold. And ticket prices soared to the highest in Europe.

(Image: Daily Herald)

Worse still, with job cuts and lower safety standards came fatal crashes. Southall, 1997, seven dead; Ladbroke Grove, 1999, 31 dead; Hatfield, 2000, four dead; and Potters Bar, 2002, seven dead.

Public confidence collapsed. Despite rising numbers of travellers, the story since has been one of systemic failure. Bungling train operators have come and gone, handing back franchises because they can’t make them pay.

East Coast Mainline is getting out of its contract in 2020, three years early – at a cost of £2billion to the taxpayer. The business model is a fake. The industry has not been privatised but inter-nationalised, with state-owned foreign firms responsible for one in two of our 1.7 billion annual train passenger journeys.

The governments of Germany, France, the Netherlands and even Hong Kong have a bigger stake than UK investors.

(Image: Getty) (Image: Daily Record)

Aslef’s Mick Whelan says: “The Tories say they don’t believe in state control, yet they’re happy to allow Britain’s train companies to be run by state-owned railways – as long as it’s another state.

“We can all see rail privatisation hasn’t worked. We need a Labour government committed to putting our fragmented railway back together as a modern, ­integrated, publicly owned system fit for the 21st century.”

A Mirror reader poll found 86% back public ownership. Among the general public, it’s two to one. This is a vote-winner for Labour.

I can’t help wondering what Dad would have made of this. He was no Labour supporter but he was a committed man of the railway until his death at 54.

He joined the LMS in the 1930s, when the job had genuine respect and the industry was a vital part of the economy, not a political plaything.

A bright future beckons for the railway. Yet 20 years after flogging off the industry’s silver, the ­politicians still don’t know where the train is going. I’m sure Dad would say: “This is no way to run a railway.”