I love travelling by train -at the perfect height for seeing everything out of the window and you can read, listen to music etc while you travel. You also get more of a sense of the distance your travelling. I always seem to manage to strike up a conversation with fellow passengers and it's nice to talk to complete strangers for a while...other people's lives are so interesting.
As to re-nationalizing -imagine that would be difficult -if it were for me though we'd go back to the age of steam too!
