In a surreal aside that will baffle most UK train passengers, he insisted that "the private railway has provided a level of investment, innovation, imagination that wouldn't have happened if BR had stayed as it was".
It's essentially an admission that NuLab was never interested in renationalisation, because privatisation has been so completely fantastic it would be silly.
It's true more people are using rail - passenger miles are 30% up on 1995 - but punctuality is poorer, services have been cut or farmed out to community initiatives, trains are less comfortable and late, the fares system is impossible to understand, huge sums are wasted in pointless franchise negotiations, interfaces between all of the players are so complicated it takes forever to plan anything, relationships are often adversarial, and after a couple of high profile disasters the system all but melted down. It's only now, five years later, that it's starting to work as well as it did back then. More or less.
But yes - lots of nice new logos. So, made of win.
[Weeps and bangs head on desk.]
