Outlook: Winsor can't put away his train set

The tall, gaunt bespectacled figure who sat in the public gallery throughout most of the recent Railtrack court case was denied his moment of glory when counsel for the shareholders failed to call him as a witness in their action against Stephen Byers.

Tom Winsor, the ex-Rail Regulator, did not allow a minor detail like that to prevent him from making his views known, however. His written witness statement was miraculously circulating among reporters within hours of the decision not to call him. As the case progressed, he rarely missed an opportunity to give journalists the benefit of his expert opinion.

The trial is now over until the judge returns to deliver his verdict in October " exactly four years to the month since the rug was first pulled from beneath Railtrack and its army of small shareholders. But that has not stopped Mr Winsor. He was at it again yesterday, expounding his views in the Financial Times and on Radio Four's Today programme. Mr Winsor's central thesis is that Railtrack need never have been pushed into insolvency in the first place had its management grabbed hold of the lifeline the regulator threw them at the time.

This lifeline consisted of Mr Winsor's offer to conduct an emergency interim review of Railtrack's financial requirements which would almost certainly have resulted in an increase in the funding available to it.

Mr Byers, fearing that this would leave his plan to replace Railtrack with a new not-for-dividend state-backed company 'up the creek', threatened to neuter Mr Winsor by seeking emergency powers to bring the regulator under direct political control.

The pass was sold and the rest is history. Railtrack never asked for its interim review, assuming it was too late to stop the train crash that was happening before its eyes, and meekly allowed itself to be placed in administration.

Mr Winsor says the company should have stuck to its guns, gone ahead with a request for an interim review and called Mr Byers's bluff on the basis that it would have taken the minister a year to get his emergency legislation past the House of Lords. Remember, the country's rail network was still in a state of trauma after the Hatfield disaster. Would the Government really have risked allowing it to twist in the wind for another year while it fought its legislation through Parliament? Mr Winsor suspects the answer is no.

If that is the case, then the shareholders have been barking up the wrong tree all this time. Their court action seeks to prove that Mr Byers abused his powers of office by deliberately forcing Railtrack into administration so as to avoid paying proper compensation.

If Mr Winsor is right, and he is a lawyer by training who has now returned to practice, then the real target of legal action should have been the former management for failing in their duty to protect the interests of shareholders. Realistically, the chances of winning compensation that way would have been about as high as in the case which has just ended. The shareholders have won the moral argument but unless Mr Justice Lindsay comes up with a sensational ruling in the autumn, then they will have lost the legal one.

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