Whitehall still hoped and worked for something more radical. A "blue paper" (no lines west of Exeter) was leaked and disavowed before it could turn white. A white paper (bus substitution) was escorted into the file marked "Too difficult". The Serpell review (no lines north of Glasgow) was published in 1982 and dropped like a red-hot shovel. A strike that would have closed the network without scratching Ascot was seen off. The war was being won.

The radicals now pinned their hopes on privatisation. This was the ruling party's nostrum — but to the Treasury, the railways and the mines were two declining industries, so let them decline on someone else's hands and at someone else's expense. The effects, good and bad, were unforeseen. Railtrack was run like a property company and learned about engineering the hard way. Network Rail, its "not-for-profit" successor, borrows against a government guarantee. Some of the franchisees have outwitted Whitehall, and some outwitted themselves.

Even so, the privatisers should have had more faith in their nostrum. As a spur to management, it had been sufficiently proven. The operating companies were able to lease new trains and to run them faster and more often — and still to find that they were overcrowded. Whitehall has had to bless novel ideas for lines around and under London, for electrified main lines, for a new high-speed line. Railways have turned out to be a growth industry.

The guerrillas duly draw the moral, but skim over the last part of the story. It will need telling.