Ministers' privatisation madness continued in full flight yesterday as they launched the sale of Britain's most successful rail service - East Coast Mainline.

After three years of achievement, efficiency and success under public ownership, the service is being handed back to profit-hungry privateers.

The move prompted Labour's new shadow transport secretary Mary Creagh to say Labour was "open" to the idea of renationalising the whole rail network.

And rail union leaders said the privatisation formula was a guarantee of worsening services for passengers and fat profits for privateers.

Transport union RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: "It stinks and it must be stopped and the campaign to prevent the reprivatisation will haunt this rotten government right up to polling day."

East Coast Mainline, operating from London to Edinburgh through centres including Peterborough, Doncaster, Leeds, York and Newcastle, was renationalised in 2009 after privateer National Express proved incapable of operating the network efficiently or viably.

It has since been run by an arm of the Department of Transport.

Under public ownership it has paid £200 million a year into the Treasury and pumped money into service improvements.

It also won the highest levels of passenger satisfaction of any service in Europe.

Now the Tories and their Lib-Dem collaborators are offering it back to privateers with the publication of a "prospectus" inviting bids for the franchise.

But RMT says the franchise is geared to benefiting the privateer not the public.

TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady said the government had "completely lost the plot" over its handling of the railways and was "blinded by outdated market dogma."

Ms Creagh added that German, French and Dutch state-owned railways are involved in firms running Britain's network, and are using the profits - gained through subsidies from the taxpayer and ripped-off passengers - to improve services in their home countries.

Mick Whelan, general secretary of train drivers' union Aslef, said: "The Conservatives are driven by a failed ideology - because the truth is that privatisation of the railways in this country has demonstrably failed to deliver."