Blocked toilets, broken and leaking roofs, a dingy underpass, draughty waiting rooms and a litter-strewn unlit car park: welcome to our decaying railway stations, the gateways to Britain’s decaying industrial towns.

For years we put up with stations untouched for half a century. Once elegant monuments to sturdy Victorian enterprise, too many now are monuments only to neglect, parsimony and grime. The platforms are patched and uneven. The girders are peeling, the footbridges cramped, the repairs after wartime bombing still botched and visible.

It didn’t matter so much in the 1950s and ’60s: the railways had a tough time in the war, the trains were old and dirty and passenger numbers were falling. Stations were closed, lines ripped up and rail travel gave way to the freedom of the open road. Of course, captive commuters still had to push their way through crowded ticket halls, once the gateways to leafy suburbs. And few people noticed the disparity between shiny new shopping centres and the rundown stations in their midst.

Now they notice. And now they care. Today’s trains are new and the services faster, but antiquated dirty stations remain the single biggest obstacle to the revival of the railways. Some are getting better: smart travel centres, central heating, decent buffets and dot-matrix information boards. Some gas-lit rural halts, used by only a few dozen a day, are still wreathed in roses and nostalgia. But the average big station in an average big town is a malodorous mess, bad for the town and bad for the railways.

What can be done? First, name and shame the worst. Chris Green and Sir Peter Hall, in their withering report for Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, point to Manchester Victoria, Clapham Junction, Barking, Warrington Bank Quay, Crewe and 25 others: busy interchange stations that are a disgrace. Second, force the rail companies to clean them up. Since privatisation, litter on the platform has been simply swept off the edge, as rubbish on the line is someone else’s responsibility. Third, appoint a station manager who runs his fiefdom like the Fat Controller — his face on posters, his phone number prominent, his will iron and his word law.

Most stations are a century old. Those that cannot be cleaned, restored and embellished should be knocked down. We don’t need low ceilings, cheap mosaics and plastic fittings as they thought in the ’60s: we need robust, imaginative engineering that can stand up to crowds and 24-hour use. It will cost a bit. Let local authorities and industry pay. The Victorians took pride in their gateways. So should we.

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