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Exciting news emerged last week from the world's largest train manufacturer, especially for those of us who love to travel at high speed. China Railway Rolling Stock Corp (whose parent CRRC Group is State-owned) is looking to develop a "maglev" train that will be capable of traveling at up to 600 km per hour twice as fast as the best bullet trains currently in operation. Now, this is only an announcement and no doubt it will be some time before we see trains able to travel at half the speed of sound. But the news got me thinking, all the same, about the dire state of rail transport in my home country. Britain is known as the birthplace of the railways - in fact, it has one of the densest rail networks in the world. Yet little has been done to improve or upgrade this network in decades, and much of the current rolling stock is outmoded and decrepit. The root cause of this is the idiotic system employed by the UK, and almost nowhere else, to run the railways - something called franchising. In a nutshell, this sees private operating companies "bid" for the rights to run rail franchises so that they can siphon off millions of pounds in profit for their shareholders, all the while being paid a subsidy by the government, which amounted to almost $5 billion between 2007 and 2011. In the UK, our current leaders are obsessed with privatization - throwing everything they can to the wolves of the free market. | 
