Cobbles said:
"Comfortable rolling stock like the Vermin Voyagers"
They're perfectly comfortable in first class - almost as comfy a seat as a decent car.
Virtually any train is comfortable in first class. You pay for the extra space. For those of us who haven't that luxury, the Voyager is incredibly cramped. I've rarely been on one that wasn't overcrowded (several times to the point where the buffet had to close because you couldn't get to it), and the seats are far too upright and too close together. Such is what happens when you try and replace an eight-coach train with something half the size...
The Voyagers are IME noticeably noisier and harder-riding than the 125s too, mainly because of the underfloor engines.
"And as for value"
I agree, it's frequently cheaper/more expedient to fly.
Primarily because the railways are in such a state. That said, I've not used the Pendolino service (which itself is an updated version of BR's old APT project), but I read recently that it's forced some of the airlines into retreat on the London-Manchester route.
"You should stick to subjects you know about"
I've spent about £2,000 on rail travel since January - that's a lot of rail miles.
I've spent a lot on furniture recently, but that doesn't mean I know much about the furniture business.
"BR was't perfect by any means, but the railways now cost about five times as much to run as they did under BR"
Presumably due to the levels of fare subsidy rather than expenditure on infrastructure.
BR managed during the 80s on a subsidy of something like £1-2bn annually. That covered everything: infrastructure maintenance, rolling stock - everything not covered by fares which, as Simon Hughes (himself a former rail manager) points out in the link above, themselves covered 76% of costs. Nowadays, fares cover only 42% of costs whilst the railways are subsidised to the tune of £5bn+ per annum, plus whatever they can raise privately (the subsidies quoted above are at constant 2005 prices, btw). That's a vast amount of money for not a great deal of improvement.
The problem is that the 'contractual web' through which the railways are run is incredibly inefficient. Huge amounts of money are wasted in sorting out the relationships between companies and paying the various penalties built into the contracts; research and development within the industry virtually halted at privatisation so expertise has to be sources from outside, and large amounts of money are simply being taken out of the industry by several of the companies involved. infrastructure projects are now far more costly than they were.
BR was run on a shoestring, which is why stations were dilapidated and rolling stock often elderly (though one should point out that the Mk1 slam-door trains around London ran until last year...). But equally, by the early 90s Britain had a higher proportion of trains running at 100mph than anywhere else in Europe, the InterCity 125 had proved an enormous success and they managed the East Coast Main Line upgrade on time and within the budget. Compare that with the costly fiasco of the West Coast Main Line upgrade over the last few years. Meanwhile, punctuality rates have only recently returned to the levels they were at before the Hatfield crash in 2000, which themselves were lower than in the early '90s, and there's a huge and unsustainable mountain of debt building up over at Netowrk Rail. The railways might look reasonably stable at the moment, but sustainable the situation certainly is not.
I've barely started! 
