“The privateers have taken hundreds of millions of pounds from our railways and successive Conservative governments have pursued a policy of managed decline which has sold taxpayers, passengers and staff short.”

Welcoming the Labour government’s renationalisation plans, he added: “Now we are going to see the wheels and the steel put back together, an end to the failed fragmentation of our network and a railway brought back into the public sector, where it belongs, to be run as a public service, not for private profit.”