FEW topics get Britons as hot under the collar as the state of the country’s railways. When trains are delayed—at the slightest hint of snow, or when leaves fall on the track—passengers fire off furious letters and tweets. Pictures of commuters vaulting over ticket barriers or standing in overcrowded carriages fill the newspapers. According to polls by YouGov, more than half of Britons would like the government to take the railways back under state control. This makes Labour’s plan for a publicly run “People’s Railway”, affirmed at its conference this week, a popular policy as well as a radical one.

By some measures Britain’s railways are booming. Since the network was privatised in 1994, the number of train journeys taken each year has doubled (see chart). The growth in passenger-kilometres travelled has been among the fastest in the European Union. But the service has become far more expensive, with rail fares now 24% higher in real terms than in 1995. And as well as being pricey, the service is often uncomfortable: 22% of passengers commuting into London and 16% of those travelling into Manchester have to stand.

This partly explains why so many people want an overhaul of the way the railways are run. But passenger frustration also reflects the fact that privatisation was rushed through and in many ways flawed. When British Rail, the monolithic state operator, was broken up in the 1990s the government stringently followed a European directive to separate the tracks from the trains. The idea was to boost competition by ensuring that different train operators could whizz up and down the same stretches of track. But in some circumstances this led to inefficiencies, with employees of privately run train companies doubling up against those from Network Rail, the state-owned company which controls all 20,000 miles (32,000km) of track.

Investment has risen since privatisation, but so has government subsidy, which adds up to around £4 billion ($6 billion) a year. According to a report published in 2011, costs per passenger-kilometre have hardly improved since 1996. And Network Rail is in disarray. The company, which was brought on to the government balance-sheet in 2014 with £34 billion of debt, is due to publish three reports over the next six months looking at how it can be restructured. In April Sir Peter Hendy, the then-head of Transport for London who has since become chairman of Network Rail, described some commuter services as “like the Wild West”, adding that “They are shit, awful.”

But there is no reason to think that a nationalised rail network would work any better than it did the last time. Although it could make fares simpler than the patchwork currently on offer, it is unlikely to make them much lower, says Christian Wolmar, a railway expert. Unless the railways’ strike-prone unions are tackled, inefficiencies such as overemployment will remain. Nationalising franchises as they expired would also take a painfully long time: only around one-third would be in state control by 2025, unless the government was prepared to buy operators out mid-contract. In the meantime, with no prospect of renewing their franchises, companies would halt investment.

Some suggest that the railways’ main problem lies not with the train companies but with Network Rail. Dieter Helm, an economist at Oxford University, has proposed breaking up Network Rail along regional lines and creating a “system operator” to oversee investment and planning. Others advocate allowing the state to bid for franchises or even letting community groups of trainspotters run routes that are otherwise unviable. Either way, unless the Conservative government gets the railways back on track it may lose the votes of weary commuters.