ANYONE who ever had the pleasure of eating a British Rail pork pie during a long journey on a late and freezing cold train will no doubt have shuddered at the news that ScotRail is going to be nationalised.

Scotland’s main railway company will fall into public hands next March when Dutch firm Abellio stops running the franchise and it will then be run by an “arms length” company on behalf of ministers.

Nationalisation of the railways has been the goal of the left and unions for years and hopefully industrial relations will be far more amicable than they were under the private firms.

It’s not that nationalisation is necessarily a bad thing. Major European countries, after all, have public rail networks and they all seem to run like clockwork most of the time.

Some, including France, Germany, Italy and Netherlands even have time to branch out into the UK and pick many of the private franchises that are on offer here.

Perhaps a nationalised ScotRail will prove so successful that it too can end up picking up other franchises in the UK to boost the public purse.

In reality though, the nationalisation of ScotRail should fill us all with dread, given the Scottish Government’s rather patchy record on taking things into public ownership.

Ministers already stand to lose most of the estimated £130m of taxpayers’ money that it has used to bail out three struggling companies .

The loans were used to prop up Prestwick Airport, Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd, the ailing shipbuilder at the centre of Scotland’s ferry building fiasco and Burntisland Fabrications (Bifab), the struggling Fife manufacturer.

It can be legitimately argued that all of the attempts at taking firms into public hands were in the national interest, given their strategic importance.

However, it all does raise alarm bells for ScotRail as ministers and officials don’t appear to be very good at running things, which is, after all, the key priority when it comes to railways.

ScotRail has been nationalised for the past year as ministers took control after ticket revenue plummeted during the pandemic as passenger numbers fell 90 per cent.

The cost to the taxpayer of this is already £425m, which is fair enough as no staff have lost their jobs, despite the fall in passengers.

But if a proportion of the lost passengers never again return to the network then ministers have a major problem as cash for service improvements will have to come from elsewhere or not be done at all.

Under franchise deals, firms are expected to invest heavily at the start in new trains and better services which they then make up at the end in profits from tickets.

But it’s hard to see where the investment will come from in public hands and services will suffer – which is what did for British Rail in the end.