I’m working in Leeds at the moment. It’s about 70miles from where I live, which normally would be a long, but distinctly doable journey in the car. Unfortunately this is England – so I thought that rather than suffer the living hell that is the M62 trans-Pennine motorway, I’d get the train.

Now the trains have a very bad reputation here in the UK. But like the other things that people love to moan about, like the National Health service, the Post Office and the BBC, they’re not actually all that terrible. This is the sixth day I’ve gone to Leeds on this job, and I’ve not really been late once. Plus it’s not too expensive and I can’t really complain.

Except that, like a lot of things in Britain, there’s no attention to detail. Just about every journey I’ve made has had one irritating little thing wrong with it. The train’s been either sweltering or (as with this morning when the temperature was below zero) there’s been no heating at all. The platform’s changed just before the train arrived. A door wasn’t working. The train hasn’t been cleaned. The kind of things that are a bit of a pain in the arse. The thing is, nobody cares.

The railways in the UK were, for some inexplicable reason, privatised about five or six years ago. Unlike anywhere else in the world, a different company is responsible for the track and the trains that run on it. As you can imagine (and as you’d have thought would have been obvious beforehand), that leads to all sorts of problems. If anything goes wrong, it takes the lawyers an age to decide who was responsible, train companies get flak for things that aren’t their fault and so on.

The one good thing that the government has done about this (ignoring the fact they should have renationalised) is making sure that the worst train operators lose their franchise. Which is what’s happened to Arriva Trains Northern, who are the people I travel with to Leeds. They’ll stop operating these trains at the end of the year. Which is probably no bad thing.

Unfortunately, it means that nobody at Arriva Trains bloody Northern gives a toss about the service they’re providing at the moment – and they’re certainly not going to spend any money making it better, are they?

In a nice bit of (admittedly a bit anoraky) irony, GNER, who are the people that operate the service between Leeds and London, recently bought a few spare Eurostar trains. They’re essentially the French TGV, which runs at 300kph all day every day across France. France has a state-owned railway, which according to the prevailing wisdom in the UK should be inefficient, non-customer focused and just horrible. In fact, it’s the best inter-city railway in the world. On GNER’s private railway the Eurostar trains can only go at 200kph. The track’s not up to it.