The (deliberately) neglected maintenance of track under Railtrack was appalling.
Regular posters know I'm no fan of privatisation, but I really do think this is unfair.
I don't think Railtrack deliberately intended to neglect track maintenance, or even that deliberately decided to cut corners by doing the bare minimum. The issue was fragmentation. Railtrack knew they had to maintain their infrastructure, and they wanted to maintain their infrastructure. The issue was they didn't know what infrastructure they had, they didn't know what needed maintaining and they didn't know what parts of their infrastructure were life-expired and needed fixing right away.
That fragmentation caused Ladbroke Grove- drivers had been complaining about the siting of that signal, but because they were complaining to their TOC it never got filtered through to Railtrack. Then add in a lack of national training standards, with each TOC largely left to do their own thing, and you end up with a woefully inexperienced driver making the exact mistake the experienced hands had been warning about for ages. It also caused Hatfield and Potters Bar.
The cack-handed and rushed privatisation caused the run of serious accidents in the late 90s, definitely. The people who knew what they were doing had left the industry, and the ones who remained were scattered to the four winds. But I don't think any of it was
deliberate, it was just a rushed mess left by a Government who knew they were on borrowed time and shoved it all through before they lost their wafer-thin majority.
I (arbitrarily) only counted accidents with more than three fatalities and 25 injuries as 'major'.
But drawing that distinction shows how there's even a huge dollop of luck historically. Look at Watford in 1995. "Only" one person died, but the train that did the SPAD and was fouling the up fast was hit by a slower-moving empty coaching stock train slowing down for the same the junction, and not by an express train doing 110mph. And similarly with Winsford, again where the accident involved an empty coaching stock move; if that pacer had had passengers on board, it doesn't bear thinking about.
To answer the original question, I think we have been lucky but- crucially- you make your own luck. As with footballers, it's amazing how the more you practice the luckier you become. I think the railway industry should be pleased with how it has responded to the tribulations of the Railtrack era, and I think credit where credit is due- it can't all be put down to luck. Inevitably the wrong set of circumstances will conspire at the wrong place at the wrong time again in the future, but the more failsafes you have the more ducks have to line up in a row.