CHEAPER fares, more reliable services and a fairer deal for taxpayers was once the rallying cry behind privatisation of the railways.

Twenty years on the debate has gone full circle and the very same is being promised by advocates of re-nationalisation, while commuters are left understandably bewildered.

The latest calls for railway re-nationalisation come in the face of a looming 1.9 per cent hike in regulated train fares, in line with Retail Price inflation, which will see an annual season ticket between Glasgow and Edinburgh increase by around £71, to £3819, from January.

Anytime singles and returns will also be hit while, in Scotland, off-peak singles and returns will be capped at a one per cent hike under the terms of the Abellio ScotRail franchise.

All other fares are set by the operator.

Action for Rail, an umbrella body for rail unions campaigning for public ownership, says rail fares have risen at double the speed of wages in the past six years – 25 per cent compared to 12 per cent – while the dividends paid to rail company shareholders have increased by 21 per cent over the same period, to £222 million.

The question is: would nationalisation reverse any of that?

In Scotland, both Scottish Labour and the Greens want ScotRail returned to public hands when the existing franchise expires in 2025, while the SNP has vowed to use its enhanced devolved powers to allow Scottish public sector bodies to bid for the ScotRail franchise for the first time.

This limited form of national ownership is the closest Scotland can get without independence since Scotland's railway infrastructure – from tracks and signalling equipment to its busiest stations, Glasgow Central and Edinburgh Waverley – would continue to be owned and managed by Network Rail, a UK Government quango.

The entire ScotRail fleet would also continue to be owned and leased by a handful of private rolling stock companies (Roscos) – a legacy of British Rail – who are in turn owned by overseas venture capital firms and pension funds from Australia to Hong Kong. The arrangement currently costs Scottish taxpayers some £86 million a year.

Neil Bibby, Scottish Labour's transport spokesman, said public ownership means reinvesting passenger profits in the railway.

He said: “Right now we have a government-owned company running our railways. It just happens to be owned by the government of the Netherlands, instead of our own. Before that, the ScotRail franchise had gone to the First Group and money flowed straight from taxpayers and passengers to shareholders."

Passenger satisfaction with ScotRail is above average for the UK, with 87 per cent of travellers content with the service. However, value-for-money satisfaction dips to 59 per cent and only 76 per cent said they had enough room to sit or stand.

In Scotland, passenger journeys are at a record 93 million, up 35 per cent in 10 years, but with increases in rolling stock lagging far behind, overcrowding has become an increasing issue, with just one new seat for every 3,300 extra passenger journeys over the decade.

The Scottish Government argues that Scotland's railways are already receiving record public investment, funding the new Borders Railway, major electrification schemes such as the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Project, station improvements including the pending overhaul of Glasgow Queen Street Station, and 70 brand new trains from 2017.

Transport Minister Humza Yousaf said: “Over the past 10 years we have seen a revival of Scotland’s railways. This transformative programme of improvements to the rail infrastructure is making up for decades of underinvestment, the success of which is evidenced by record passenger numbers."

Unsurprisingly, nationalisation versus privatisation is far from black and white.

Ken Sutherland, of Railfuture Scotland, which campaigns for better rails services, said: "Nationalisation in itself is not always the solution. It's got to be a real management dynamic.

"The nationalised railway didn't always get the investment it needed because the managers maybe didn't speak up and fight their corner.

"Privatisation has been able to rebound some of the investment that wouldn't necessarily come if it was down to the total control of the Treasury, but there's so much of a 'money-go-round' that it's hard to pick apart."

To an ordinary commuter, this "money-go-round" is bewildering. 

Train operators are funded by both income from fares and taxpayer subsidy, but must pay track access fees to Network Rail to use the railway. However, Network Rail – underwritten by the public purse – is also liable to pay rebates to the operators if faults on the railway infrastructure, such as points and signalling failures, cause delays.

Trains meanwhile are leased at a cost to taxpayers, while the operator - in ScotRail's case, Abellio - is responsible for maintenance and repair costs.

Tom Rye, director of the Transport Research Institute in Edinburgh, said competition had brought about "very cheap fares" for passengers who are prepared to book well in advance and travel off-peak, and increased service frequency.

Since privatisation, London-Glasgow trains have doubled in frequency from every two hours to hourly and London-Edinburgh will soon be running ever half-hour. The drive to increase frequency is at the core of the commercial model. Private train companies are incentivised to increase passenger numbers because this is the most effective means to boost profits, and the quickest way to attract more passengers is with more services, faster line-speeds and new trains.

However, Rye said he can "totally understand" calls for renationalisation, describing the British model as "very inefficient and very costly" compared to Sweden or Germany.

For example, the taxpayer subsidy for ScotRail services was around 18 pence per passenger kilometre in 2013/14 - around £7 per trip. In Sweden, it is five pence per kilometre, yet the fares are cheaper too.

Rye said: "In Sweden, it's effectively their equivalent of Transport Scotland that directly owns, maintains and upgrades the rail infrastructure and sets the track access charges, so their structure is simpler and in some cases their access charges are lower. But the key point is that the organisation which manages infrastructure is more efficient and therefore it costs less to improve the infrastructure.

"Because of that, they direct most of their subsidy into the infrastructure which keeps the cost of running the trains quite low, and in turn helps them to keep the cost to passengers quite low. Where they do direct subsidy to the train operators, there is also a much clearer link between paying that subsidy and being able to control the fares."

Without Roscos exploiting train shortages to charge sky-high leasing fees, as happens in Britain, another major overhead is significantly reduced. "That makes a big difference," said Rye. "One thing I think would be useful in the longer term, certainly for ScotRail, is rather than the trains being owned by leasing companies that they're moved back into the public sector.

"That allows you to reduce one of the major costs of operations very significantly which feeds through into fares."

Roger Ford, of Modern Railways magazine, rubbished calls for renationalisation but said ScotRail might benefit from adopting the concession model of Merseyrail and Transport for London, where a company runs the railway for a management fee rather than being driven by profit while the Scottish Government would take all the revenue risk.

But what of Jeremy Corbyn's claim last week that nationalisation would shave up to 10 per cent off fares?

Mark Smith, a railway blogger who used to set train fares at the Department for Transport, said the claims had "shades of the Brexit argument" that leaving the EU would free up an extra £350m a week for the NHS.

He said: "The general consensus is that all these profiteering train companies are naughtily putting these fares up and of course they wouldn't if we got rid of them because they wouldn't need all these profits and dividends. The truth is that the private companies typically make on average 2.7 per cent of turnover.

"So unless you have a really dodgy accountant, you're not going to make a 10 per cent cut in fares by eliminating a 2.7 per cent profit margin.

"The basic mathematics of commuter fares are the same whether you are dealing with a nationalised or a privatised industry. If it costs £4000 pro rata to get a person into work in Central London you can have a £1000 subsidy and a £3000 season ticket, or £2000 each, or you could even have a £3000 subsidy and a £1000 season ticket.

"Whenever I comment to my wife, who is Dutch, on how lovely and flat and pothole-free their roads are and how cheap their train fares are, she immediately says 'yes, but we all pay 45 per cent income tax'. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

"But there is also a material difference on spending that money investing in the railways for better infrastructure, more capacity and more reliability, than spending it to subsidise fares which doesn't improve the railway at all - you're actually subsidising somebody's travel to work so that they can pay for a holiday or that new sofa from DFS or that nice car they had their eye on, that's the truth of it.

"So from a social point of view, you have to think: are we better spending that grand on hospitals, roads and infrastructure or on someone's travel costs."