The fortunes of the rail industry have been transformed in the little-more-than-a-decade since John Major embarked on the privatisation of British Rail. That much emerges clearly from Tuesday’s rail white paper and rail funding announcements.

Once the main questions facing a declining industry were which lines to close and how to scale back services. Now the dilemma is of a very different order: how to cope with the increases of more than 50 per cent in passenger traffic and 40 per cent in freight traffic since 1995.