So now we own our train set again – and at a handsome profit for Toll, which walks away with about $670 million plus some valuable fringe benefits, including what amounts to a six-year State subsidy for Toll’s New Zealand trucking operations (but nothing for our own private operators) and a healthy increase in its share price.

We’re left holding a rusty set of rails, nails and last-century rolling stock – plus a bill to fix them that will run into the billions.

But at least this is a strategic asset according to the Cullen Doctrine, because some of the deal is bound to include sensitive land.

When was the last time you used a train (harassed commuters are not eligible to answer)?

Thought so. And guess what? Almost everything you buy arrives in the shops by road, too.

Silly questions, agreed, but sadly the overall answer is that the railways are of little strategic value to anyone. What earlier occupants of this country believed to be useful has been rendered obsolete by economics, geography and technology. The bright leaders of Dunedin tore up their little light railway. Now, they are trying to re-create it. Smart people around the world mourned the ruin of their local rail lines, and are now spending millions to rebuild them as part of an intelligent local public transport network. We see absolutely no sign of higher thought in this respect in New Zealand.

Instead, a blunt buy-back. As for take it or leave it, Clark and Cullen have done the deal and we have been left with no choice but to accept it. This never formed part of a Labour or National manifesto promise to electors.

The so-called asset is, in fact, a gigantic liability seeking a solution that is well beyond the ken of cave-dwelling politicians who freely spent this money to buy a scrap-heap, knowing full well that they would never be held accountable.

The last time the State ran the railway, it “employed” more than 20,000 people and it didn’t work. Toll leaves the platform with fewer than 2000 employed, and it still doesn’t work.

The Government has spent many months wrangling with Toll over the price tag for buying back what was originally built with taxpayers’ money over more than 100 years. What is disturbingly absent from all the thinking behind the buy-back is even the slightest hint of what the Labour-led Government plans do with its corroding train set.

Less surprising is the absence of an apology for the politicians’ sale of our property in the first place. However, the original sale was a tacit admission that government could not run a railway, although it certainly can run a piss-up in any brewery or wine bar. What’s changed?

Will they turn much of it into tarmac for trucks, and develop the near-urban lines for fast, light railway services? Will they offer bits of it to model train enthusiasts? Will they electrify the lot, and plug it into wind farms (expect lengthy delays when the wind drops)? Or will they leave everything to grow expensive weeds between the sleepers? Most probably, the latter.

Anyone who uses State Highway 1 north of Wellington, or who suffers the nightmare of Auckland highways, knows that this lot can’t even plan or maintain a decent road system – let alone run a railway.

Anyone who has visited France, Japan or Malaysia can see what a state-of-the-art railway system can achieve. It’s quicker to take a train from Brussels or Paris to London than it is to fly – thanks to massive state funding, and a ruthless rail-roading of anyone who stands in the way of a high-speed track. France (and much of Europe) is lucky. It’s richer, it’s much bigger and it’s much flatter.

But we have neither the money nor the topography to even think about such infrastructure. Labour has neither the brains to create a joined-up transport policy nor the money to turn one of the most expensive single collections of scrap metal ever purchased into a profit centre, or a genuine national asset.

In buying back the railways, Labour has merely handed a poisoned chalice to the next government, and a massive and ongoing bill to the rest of us. Given the back-tracking widely expected over regional fuel taxes on road users, it’s looking very much like “Slow Ahead.” The signals are bad.