Waste Not Want Not 13.07.07

I glanced at the bedside clock, it was 02.24 and I still had not gone to sleep. I had been tired when I went to bed but my brain wouldn't switch off and as I had settled down to sleep a new thought had crossed my mind and now I was too angry to sleep. The thought was what happens to all the wasted uniform when a rail franchise is lost? I started to do the maths and even with fairly low estimates it was clear that we are talking about a huge waste of money. When you then factor in all the other costs associated with rebranding from new train livery to stationary the amount must be unthinkable. No wonder they want to massively increase rail fares. The more I thought about it the angrier I became, an obscene amount of money is wasted each time a franchise changes hands, how can we possibly justify that when there are other fare more important needs that cannot be met due to lack of resources. I must have fallen asleep at some point, but I awoke when the alarm clock burst in on my dreams an I felt as if I had hardly slept. I learned most about economics from my grandmother who like most of her generation had known true poverty as a child and had endured the hardships of two world wars as an adult. She understood cost and value far better than anyone who claims to be an economist, she thought it was wicked to waste resources (as I found to my cost when I didn't want to eat my dinner). In the present when we are so conscious of our global footprint waste on the scale described above is unforgivable.