WHEN the then Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was campaigning in Darlington during the 2019 General Election, The Northern Echo told him about the appalling service offered by TransPennine Express which was preventing people from holding down jobs or getting to college.

In these “green” days, it was driving them off the rails and onto the roads to sit in queues with all the other peak time commuters.

With exasperation, he said: “It is nowhere near good enough for the area that invented the railway.”

He promised to do something, and now, at last, three-and-a-half years later, the Conservatives have moved. They have effectively nationalised it, as our privatised railways are stealthily taken back into public ownership.

At least it means that the private companies will not be creaming off profits while running such an abysmal railway – in January and February, a quarter of TPE’s trains were cancelled and in March it was one-in-six while its chief executive, Graham Sutherland, gets £3m-a-year for presiding over such chaos.

But will, on the rails, this improve the service?

It’ll still be the same rolling stock running on the same rails with the same number of drivers.

Rearranging management structures will not address the inescapable truth that if we want reliable public services, we have to invest in them.