BE CAREFUL what you wish for when you want Govia Thameslink to be stripped of its rail franchise in the south.

It is true that the company has had a disastrous time, driving many commuters and other rail users almost to distraction. But would another operator fare any better? I very much doubt it.

Govia Thameslink is part of Go Ahead, one of the largest transport companies in Britain. Among its many subsidiaries are Brighton and Hove Buses, constantly said to be the best bus company in Britain. Its rail holdings are numerous and surprisingly large. It runs about a quarter of the national rail network, easily outstripping its rivals.

Running trains in the busiest corner of the nation is not an easy business. Most routes are crowded with commuters during the morning and afternoon peaks while off-peak routes are usually busy too. The Brighton line is so popular that Govia Thameslink cannot run all the trains it would wish to do so. And the layout of lines is fiendishly complex, much of it dating back to the Victorians era.

The firm has also had to deal with the huge Thameslink programme which has greatly increased capacity through London. But the irony is that new services such as that between Brighton and Cambridge have been postponed because there were not enough staff to run them.

The launch of a new timetable was so abysmal that an emergency replacement had to be cooked up and even this had its troubles. Govia Thameslink is also at the mercy of other organisations such as the unions.

The train drivers’ union Aslef is ruthlessly efficient when it can be bothered. But the National Union of Railwaymen is a law unto itself.

Its members on Southern, also owned by Govia Thameslink, have been holding strikes over having conductors responsible for safety issues such as closing the doors. This conveniently ignores the fact that other trains run without them including some operated by the same employers.

Govia Thameslink are as pig headed on this issue as the union. The strikes are enough to disrupt the network but not paralyse it. Management and unions deserve each other but the poor old passengers do not deserve either of them. Then there is the Government which introduced rail privatisation. You can argue forever over whether this was a good or bad move in principle, and many people do. But almost everybody believes that the system actually put in place for Britain’s railways was a complete disaster.

It was prodigiously expensive, amazingly complicated and mightily ineffective. Companies dare not spend huge amounts of money because they don’t know how long they will be allowed to continue.

In the south, so many are run by Govia Thameslink that all elements of competition have gone. There’s Network Rail which looks after the tracks and often has different ideas from those of the train companies.

Finally there are the passengers who can get fed up and fractious. Some are alarmingly unpleasant to staff who after all are only trying to do their jobs. Would another company do better? Ask anyone who was around when services in Sussex were largely run by Connex. They were reviled at the time.

Or would nationalisation work? Lots of people think it would but not many are old enough to recall the bad old days of British Rail. The nationalised undertaking was given a poor start in 1948 by having stock and stations damaged or neglected during the Second World War. It became a byword for inefficiency and bureaucracy. It was a national joke.

Here in Sussex steam engines in the 1960s were still hauling some passenger trains yet the Brighton line had been electrified 30 years earlier. Back at the birth of railways, private companies built the system and took the risks which were often enormous. It was only when they started to decline a century ago that the first steps towards state control were taken and they did not work well.

In continental Europe, many countries such as France decided to keep their systems in public ownership. French railways are often praised for their efficiency and speed and the compliments are deserved. But go to outposts such as Dieppe and you will find infrequent services ignored by most travellers. Subsidies are high and the French people pay for their system through their purses and pockets.

Here the present system needs refining either to improve franchising or to make sure any public ownership is flexible. Otherwise, we may look back at Govia Thameslink’s tenure as the good old days.