TEN years ago today British Rail's entire infrastructure, including 23,500 miles of track and 2,500 stations, was taken over by Railtrack.

It was the first stage of the Conservative Government's most controversial privatisation.

Ministers hailed the sell-off as a railway revolution which would inspire vast improvements emerging from massive private investment. Critics said it was a bodged job, a recipe for chaos and disaster.

Hindsight proved the critics right. After ten years of delays, cancellations, overcrowding, ticket price hikes and a series of terrible, preventable accidents, rail privatisation can be acknowledged as one of the biggest mistakes in British transport policy.

A decade later and Railtrack has gone. Its closure was messily precipitated by the Labour Government, years after the party lost the bottle to fulfil its Opposition promise of renationalisation.

In its place came not-for-profit Network Rail. Mercifully, this saw an end to Railtrack's impossible task of balancing rail safety with shareholder value, which had such tragic consequences.

So where are we now?

Unbelievably, still in chaos.

Network Rail today took back its maintenance contracts from Jarvis after vehement criticism was levelled at the York-based company.

This move has been in the pipeline for six months. Many of the same managers are in place at Network Rail who ran Railtrack. The contracts takeover should have been planned to the last detail so today's transfer was seamless and painless.

But no. Confusion reigns. Some maintenance staff turned up for work today "not knowing who was in charge or what they were supposed to be doing," a union claimed.

And the threat of strike action hangs in the air. That means passengers face further chaos and safety fears. Ten years and billions of taxpayers' pounds down the track, and Britain still cannot run its railway.

Updated: 11:03 Thursday, April 01, 2004