For 20 years, I went off the rails – GBR won't save them

If all that was needed to sort out the country's trains was a nice paint job, then I think we would all be pretty content. The formal launch of the government's rail nationalisation bill has been accompanied by an image, possibly AI-generated, of the railway's new livery for the state-owned operations, and, actually, the paint job isn't that nice at all.

- SEAN O'GRADY

It's supposed to be a patriotic mashup of the union flag, which we probably see a bit too much of these days, to be honest, raggedly clinging to lampposts in Reform UK strongholds. But in any case, the jagged red, white and blue lines and disjointed shapes look like a premonition of a more dysfunctional future for public transport.

I'm not sure how fast the new trains will go, but they seem to be moving at breakneck speed towards a golden age of train travel that, as some of us old enough to remember will know, really never was. I do like the revival of the classic British Rail logo from 1968, which used to be everywhere, and the hint on the nose of the locomotive to the dull teal blue shade that was also once ubiquitous, but I'd have much rather they'd gone the whole hog and restored the full corporate logo and livery of British Rail before it was almost literally scrapped at the fag end of Thatcherism in 1993.