Just after the first Eurostar train arrives at the wonderful St Pancras station today, Network Rail will be giving a briefing on the cause of the Grayrigg accident earlier this year which killed a passenger. These two events combine to show the extent to which we have neglected our railways, a British invention, in contrast to our foreign neighbours.

The Eurostar's arrival - effectively just a publicity event as passenger services do not move from Waterloo until November 14 - is a decade late. The French had their high-speed line in place when the tunnel opened in 1994, but we did not even have a route laid out, let alone the financing or a definite commitment to build it.

At the opening of the tunnel, however, President Mitterrand made some disparaging remarks about how one could saunter through Kent seeing the Garden of England while whizzing through northern France, and that spurred the British politicians to commit to build the high-speed link.

Now, at last, we are getting our 68 miles of high speed line, but there are no plans to build any more. Meanwhile European countries such as France, Spain, Germany and Italy have all got more than that already and, crucially, are all committed to constructing extensive networks.

One argument used by government ministers against the building of new high-speed lines is that the existing railway relatively good. This is true, but the Grayrigg accident demonstrates that we still do not always get the basics right.

Network Rail will be offering a complete mea culpa providing great detail on how a set of points was allowed to deteriorate so badly that it caused a derailment. Yet, this is the sort of accident that just should not happen in the 21st century. Railways are a mature technology and the sort of maintenance programme required to prevent accidents like Grayrigg is not rocket science. Rail safety is about doing the same job, day after day, week after week, month after month, and having the management systems in place to ensure the work is done.

Network Rail is supposedly a private sector company, though it gets most of its money from taxpayers. The interesting point to watch will be whether the top managers, who admit that the accident was entirely the company's fault, will suffer a cut in their bonuses as a result of these failings.