In his first substantial interview since the West Coast main line ground to a halt over the Christmas holiday, Network Rail's chief executive has told The Times he plans to do better in the future. Much better. He has promised a network that operates seven days a week and 365 days a year. He has acknowledged that “we need to find new ways of doing things”. He has even torpedoed the oldest justification for a lack of train services on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, namely an alleged lack of demand. “We're in a Catch-22 situation,” he admits. “There's no [apparent] demand for it because we don't run trains.”

Iain Coucher's contrition for Network Rail's disastrous engineering overruns at Rugby and Liverpool Street appears genuine. His goal of providing a service “when passengers want to use the trains” is sound, if crushingly obvious and desperately slow to find broader acceptance in his industry. But he is loath to say when such a service will be offered, and is probably wise not to commit himself. The bleak truth is that such noble intentions will remain just that without a cultural and organisational transformation within Network Rail that even a leader known as a hard taskmaster may be powerless to deliver.

“We are measured by perfection,” Mr Coucher said. This is a revealing choice of words, but not quite true. Network Rail, and the railways generally, are measured by comparison with other countries' systems and by the standard customers always apply when buying a service: are they getting what they paid for? By both measures, Britain's system has been found wanting.

The instinct to rationalise failure is part of a culture of excuses so deeply embedded in British railways that it hinders reform as much as it exasperates passengers. The same instinct surfaces routinely in the argument that Britain's rail network is older and more complex than continental ones and therefore harder to maintain and modernise. It may be. If so, the upshot should be harder work and better planning, not softer questioning by watchdogs and parliamentary committees. Maintenance and modernisation are non-negotiable, and their costs have already been factored into fares (up 5 per cent this month) and taxpayer subsidies (now running at £10 billion a year). Comparisons with other European networks - all founded in the 19th century, all continuously updated since - only emphasise the British network's shortcomings.

There is little argument that the network was starved of investment before privatisation and has been a parody of sound administration since. Mr Coucher has the financial if not the human resources with which to reverse the underinvestment. He also believes “there's nothing wrong with the structure” of Network Rail and its position in the industry. It is hard to agree. With no shareholders, no direct contact with passengers, nothing realistically to fear from its “members” and a largely reactive Rail Regulator, Network Rail operates in an accountability-free zone. One result was the Christmas chaos at Rugby. The engineering there had been planned for a year, but only after it overran did Mr Coucher decide he needed 200 more electrical engineers.

Today he calls the British rail network “a fantastic great British compromise”. It is, in fact, an embarrassing British botch. To fix it, Job One is to create accountability at Network Rail.