Fining the Railways

I think we would all like to use public transport if we could. But it is frequently either unreliable or unavailable. The London Transport system does very well considering the strain it is under. Some other big cites manage admirably as well: Vancouver, Munich, Amsterdam, Boston for example. Some whole countries such as The Netherlands and Japan have it right.
What we actually have in the UK is a good rail network, which is suffering because it is old and has no or very little subsidy. The tracks are worn and anyway need to be relaid because of global warming: there needs to be more allowance for expansion in the rail as the planet warms up. In fact, this lack of expansion in older rails is what causes some of the problems – the tracks buckle. One solution would probably be to build new tracks beside the old and rip the old ones out afterwards. This may in fact be easier than trying to repair them all.
This is a problem caused by age and lack of foresight by various governments, not by any incompetence of engineers facing an almost impossible job with little funding.
So what on earth is the point of imposing fines? It won’t get the job done any quicker. It will only cause resentment amongst the workers. And most crucially, it will further remove funding from where it’s needed.
Couldn’t we apply a bit of common sense to this, please?