You're 4 years old now, the issues that are present now are we're dealing with high inflation. Some of it was caused by the pandemic, some of it was unnecessary. Some of the inflation here in the UK was caused by Lis Truss, she cut higher taxes without adjusting public spending, this forced the banks to print money, the technical term is quantative easing. The other cause of high inflation was sanctions against Russia because of their invasion of Ukraine.
When I was a child, I remember the prime minister John Major privatised the railways and Margret Thatcher thought it was a bad idea, she thought private companies would try to shut down non profit making routes and would fail to make any long term investments in the networks improvement. Margret Thatcher privatised many publicly owned companies but she thought it would be daft to privatise the railways. She was right.
From the start of the '90s till today the railways have drifted away from the rest of Europe's standards, British Railways are now the slowest, most unreliable and expensive to use in western Europe. The operators won't invest in technologies like trains that can run on two different types of power systems, it is cheaper to just have a diesel train so that is what many rail operators do, they use the cheapest fix so they can maximize profit and they don't get much competitive pressure because the other operators are in another area. I think the only exception I'm aware of is Thameslink, they bought trains that can run on both overhead power lines and 3rd rail, they can switch between the two so they made sure all their trains can run fully electric. They also have digital signalling systems and things like that.
