had more faith in their own nostrum. In the eight years from 1997, freight and passenger traffic both rose by one fifth -- and these were the years of Railtrack's implosion and the collective nervous breakdown. My comment from those times has found its way into Dow's Dictionary of Railway Quotations: 'Railways are a growth industry. Their most sustained attempts to drive away their customers have not succeeded.' No more they will. *Britain's Railways 1997-2005: Labour's Strategic Experiment by Terry Gourvish is published by Oxford University Press, 30.