West Coast Trains Misery

I have read from the milder climes of Japan about the failures on the West Coast over the past week. It is genuinely depressing that the UK can't manage its railways. The people at Network Rail as far as I understand are more than competent engineers but I suspect the funding interference from government does not help and they are trying to work within a seriously flawed system setup by the Tories about 15 years ago (yes we do remember).
However, I also happen to know that there is a general attitude in the UK where mistakes and weaknesses are tolerated instead of solved. I used to work for Intercity West Coast on the locomotives and for a time I worked in Crewe at an office that monitored rolling stock failures amongst other things. I remember that each week there might have been 10 - 15 relay failures on the locomotives, some of these causing significant delays or cancellations. The attitude was simply one of acceptance - relays are mechanical, they break, never mind. I can't imagine that attitude during the early days of the railways or in fact in some other countries of the world today. If relays break, you either have to change them on a schedule so they don't become old enough to break or you replace them with a more reliable type. None of this is rocket science or even necessarily that expensive depending on what you do. You could ask several manufacturers for their relays and test them in service. Put them on a train with a second locomotive so that if they break, you can use the spare loco to pull the train instead. They would all be spec'd to work on the loco so the risk of them breaking shouldn't be any higher than the existing relays. Let their test engineers ride with the train so that if they fail, they might find out why and change the design to cope - over time they would become totally reliable.
This of course applies to a myriad of problems the railways face, not just engineering ones but although we seem happy to spend billions of pounds, the underlying quality is simply not there in many areas. Until the railways or perhaps the UK on the whole can change its attitude to quality and start allocating money for reliability improvements for EVERYTHING that is known to fail in service then we will suffer this embarrassment of a railway. Rails crack in certain conditions so you either need to change the makeup of the steel or put more expansion joints in or whatever. If that is not possible, you need to setup emergency teams that can repair a crack in a very short time (as in 1 or 2 hours tops - not all night!!). The same for overhead lines. If you really cannot stop them breaking (although I suspect you could) then you need repairs that take an hour, not 2 days.
As for that plane crash on the West Coast, as tragic as that is, the wreckage should have been removed straight away and the repairs carried out, personally I find it unacceptable that the air investigators get to block the railways with its tens of thousands of passengers for 2 days just because this country thinks every accident needs the full resources of the country to complete.