Labour has made one of its most radical proposals yet in the run-up to an election campaign: to fully nationalise the train network within five years of coming to power. The party has pledged to guarantee the cheapest fares as part of “the biggest reform of our railways for a generation”, bringing all passenger rail into national ownership under the Great British Railways (GBR) body. So, how difficult would the plan be to enact and what does it mean for passengers? The headline change is nationalisation: the ambition that all passenger train operations, at least, should return to public ownership. But the wider aim is that control of trains and tracks – “wheels and steel”, as some put it – is brought back under one unified structure, at arm’s length from the government. The actual railway infrastructure is already managed by the state-owned Network Rail, since the disastrous tenure of Railtrack in the early days of privatisation, and train operations in Scotland, Wales and a large chunk of England are in public ownership. So a fully renationalised railway (bar the rolling stock and freight) is not as big a step as it may once have sounded – and arguably the...