WHAT is it with this country and its railways?

We led the world in the great Victorian age of rail - with York playing a significant part in that.

Yet today our railways are very much a second class service.

A recent study revealed that we are way behind our European neighbours in terms of things like speed and punctuality - while paying through the nose with high fares.

The Government seems to have decided to put most of its eggs in one basket with the £50 billion HS2 high-speed route from London to the north.

But in Yorkshire we won't begin to see the benefits of that until 2033 at the earliest.

We have argued that a more immediate - and arguably more important - boost to Yorkshire's economy would come from electrifying the Transpennine route between York and Manchester.

That would cost a fraction of what HS2 will, but would shave 15 minutes off the journey to Manchester while increasing capacity.

Yet it has been a frustratingly stop-start project.

Improvements to the route were 'paused' in June. Now Whitehall has announced that the programme is on again - but it will be three years later than originally planned.

We welcome the fact that electrification will now go ahead. But the further delay just underlines once more how poor we are, in these days of rail privatisation, at getting the rail infrastructure we need.

We seem determined to take the slow train to the future - falling further and further behind our European and Asian competitors in the process. Whatever happened to the 'age of the train'?