It is a tale of incompetence, greed and delusion, driven by the conviction that profit and share value is the only true measure of success and that the ability to chair a meeting or read a balance sheet is always worth more than the ability to understand how machines and materials will best serve human needs. The bizarre story of those multiplying billions, reconstructed here from dozens of interviews and documents, some never before made public, ran parallel to the bloodier history of fatal accidents on the railway since privatisation, and contributed, in equal or greater measure, to the ignominious end of the Railtrack era. That is £3bn more than the White House considers Nasa will need to send men back to the moon. A project that was supposed to cost roughly £1.5bn will, by the time it is finished in about 2008, two years late, have consumed almost £10bn, much of it from the taxpayer. These railway workers are engaged in the single most expensive non-military task ever undertaken by Britain alone: the modernisation of the west coast main line. The men are to pack fresh ballast in under the rails with hand shovels. A bulldozer on rail wheels purrs up on the other line and begins pawing at the stones. Using thick, weathered, yard-long metal-capped staves, they crank jacks which raise a stretch of rail, along with its concrete sleepers, up off the bed of stone chips the railway rests on. Against the extreme green of fields and the whipped grey of rainclouds their synthetic orange work suits shine out violently, like figures in a psychedelic episode. On a mild, wet February morning, a work gang of 10 men moves around a stretch of railway line near the village of Goostrey, between Crewe and Manchester airport.