“In my previous life, I ran an organisation, at Transport for London, where everything that went wrong was my fault.”

That was the rail minister, Lord Hendy, addressing the transport select committee this week. Since he spoke to MPs, an awful lot has gone wrong with the railways in the UK.

On Friday, Storm Eowyn meant no trains ran in Scotland, Northern Ireland or northern England. By Saturday, we imagined things could only get better. Passengers on platform 5 at Newcastle boarded the first train since Thursday to go north. It left on time at 8.41am, as the Scotland-bound passengers settled in for what was scheduled to be an 85-minute sprint to the Scottish capital. The train eventually arrived exactly five hours behind schedule, having averaged just 14mph.

A spokesperson for Network Rail said: “We’re sorry for the disruption to passengers travelling between Newcastle and Edinburgh today. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires between Chathill and Alnmouth.”

“One of the prevailing cultures in the whole railway is that when something goes wrong you look for somebody else to blame,” Lord Hendy continued. “It is almost an automatic reaction.

“That is completely hopeless for passengers and for late-running freight trains. What you want is for people to think, ‘How do we get this fixed?’

“This railway has to get into the habit of saying, ‘This is our problem, and we fix it’.”

Lord Hendy had been summoned by committee chair Ruth Cadbury to explain progress in the government’s plan to establish Great British Railways (GBR) – a single body bringing together track and train. There is an unusual organisation called Shadow GBR, which is preparing to step into the limelight when finally the necessary legislation is in place. The chair of this body, Laura Shoaf, was also invited to answer MPs’ questions.

“If you were going to design a rail system, you would not design it from here,” she said. “This is where we are, but it is definitely not where anybody wants to be.”

Lord Hendy blamed “30 years of balkanisation” for a system in which private train operators are instructed by the Department for Transport (DfT) which trains they must run on track that is owned and operated by Network Rail.

There were, he joked (at least I hope he was joking), “several hundred people in the department working out whether I get four trains an hour from Richmond in the peak hours or six”.

Under GBR, he said: “I want to see somebody who believes when they wake up in the morning that it is their job to fix it, and that they don’t have to enter a meeting with 30 people and look at 400-page contracts to work out what you do when things go wrong, but that they have the power to make the railway service better for the people on the ground this morning, this evening and tomorrow morning.”

With taxpayers pumping £400 per minute to keep the railways on life support, the DfT is certain to take an interest. “You are not going to be left alone to run a railway that requires billions of pounds worth of public subsidy,” said Lord Hendy.

Latterly, the tenure of a rail minister has proved about as short as a mayfly’s lifespan. But if the current one stays in place, at least he understands the basic issue.

“Passengers deserve to have better, sooner.”

Simon Calder, also known as The Man Who Pays His Way, has been writing about travel for The Independent since 1994. In his weekly opinion column, he explores a key travel issue – and what it means for you.

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