Warren Buffett is without doubt no fool. It's rare to hear praise for a financier but the recent programme on his life and techniques has been mentioned by more people than anything else I can think of recently. So when Mr Buffett invests 26 billion Dollars in something ( that's about a third of a banks worth ) it's wise to pay notice. So what is it that has received the attention of one of the most highly regarded long players? Why railways and freight ones at that.

Now that was, as with most things railway, met with a certain degree of, well one wouldn't say derision, this is Warren Buffett after all but certainly the financial pages reached for their puns and stereotypes and talked of trainsets and such like.

Perhaps the experience of the UK railways might explain a lot of this sort of attitude. As I swept out of Crewe this morning, certainly a town with a bit of railway heritage one gets to see a fair bit of crazy uk railway investment. There sits the APT, the much derided attempt at high speed passenger trains by British Rail. The last example sits in the heritage centre watching the Virgin Pendilinos sweeping by, using much of the technology developed for the APT and then subsequently ruled out by a rather politically inspired Railway safety Board.

Further on you pass a small line of locomotives, parked up with moss growing on them. In storage is the official classification, Dumped is probably a better description. The first four are 1990 vintage and the last is a class 92 ( yes I know I've spotted, I'm not ashamed...) they were the massively expensive locomotive that were designed to pull things throu' the Channel tunnel. Everything is duplicated, and they are designed to run across most of the power supplies and signalling systems of the UK and Europe. So here is 92011 mouldering away on the edge of Crewe depot waiting for some indeterminate fate.

It sounds like the kind of thing that would make Mr Buffett probably look elsewhere when his eye probably passed over the UK rail sector for possible investment.

Tags: trains investment

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