If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Read the community guidelines before posting ✨
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
Absolutely. We of course have appealed for one on many occasions. Hell on one attempt we even did the preliminary work before the government told us to effoff. Still the local TOC's are attempting to put some extra capacity in on the railways anyway!
Why would you build a high speed line to make Paris to Manchester in 5 hours. It already is about that. 2:30 on EStar, ten min walk to Euston then 2:15 to Manc. Makes it about five hours anyway!!
It's not impossible, but it's far from easy, as just to get to New Street station from my house can take up to an hour depending on buses and connecting trains. Plus the added cost makes it unviable.
Not with a through ticket. http://www.eurostar.com/UK/uk/leisure/travel_information/interlining.jsp
From my experience in the West Mids I doubt there is many stations more than 30 mins from New Street, Coventry or Wolves.
"A combination of cheap air fares and poor train punctuality has resulted in a shift from rail to air in the past decade, with six times as many people flying from Glasgow or Edinburgh to London as catching a train."
http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/business/article714703.ece
I disagree. A great many millions of people live within short distance of the London-Scotland route. Naturally the line would stop at, or branch off from major cities along, from Birmingham to Manchester/Liverpool or Newcastle.
Oh yeah, the Brighton to Bedford line'll fuck you whoever you are: commuter or leisure traveller.
There are plenty of free seats at weekends so they could offer discounted tickets then, but they won't.
I'm sure other train operators on other lines offer discounts; to pretend that travelling with Capital Connect does anything other than leave you feeling sore, in every sense of the word, is just plain silly.
If you're gonna have so many stops and such a odd route Birmingham, Liverpool and Newcastle you're aren't gonna get a quick journey zig-zagging across the country.
High Speed lines arent the way forward just yet for the UK when there is so much more that can be done with the UK network providing the government puts their hands in their fucking pockets.
None of the suburban London TOC's (FCC, Southern, South Eastern, South West Trains) offer a great deal of advance purchase, partially because of lack of capacity, partially because the nature of their operation is frequent services over short distances.
I will admit First Capital Connect have suffered a rough deal, and the Government has shafted them. The Great Northern side (Kings Cross - Peterborough/Cambridge) is fine but the old 'Thameslink' section has been shafted, with lack of rolling stock and track investment. The government of course was meant to build 'Thameslink 2000' to sort this all out but of course it's never bothered and FCC has been left to rot.
Why not do both?
Yes I gathered that. But that link says something like £69, if that's a single fare from Birmingham to Paris then I may as well fly.
Under 25's start about £35. Might be worth putting the dates in and trying it
I don't know. Maybe these people will be able to help:
Department for Transport
Great Minster House
76 Marsham Street
London
SW1P 4DR
Ask them to sort the rest of the fucking shit they are causing out too. Good luck.
I think planning a high speed line will be a pain, as well compulsory land purchase, purchasing the rolling stock etc when a lot more can be gained from the current network.
I don't know where to find it now but I have seen an expert report that said for every Pound invested in high speed railways the country would get back 1.8 in increased business and tourism. It's a no brainer as far as I'm concerned.
I'm looking forward primarily to tomorrow when its gonna snow heavily in the North. When the airports and buses fall apart the rails SHOULD be going as normal.
All countries and networks get fatalities. All suffer from delays and breakdowns. But most of the avoidable problems related to profit and/or cost saving (not enough maintenance, rolling stock or staff; lack of second class seating; extortionate price hikes; lack of affordable fares for much of the day) only tend to happen when the railways are run by people whose only concern is to make the maximum amount of profits possible for its shareholders.
There is no real competition on our privatised railways, and no real encouragement to put customers' interests first. Putting for-profit companies in charge of public services with captive users is akin to putting Count Dracula in charge of a blood bank.
Fuel prices are fuckign disgusting at the moment. Almost 10p a litre more than last year. :yuck:
A 'direct route' is about 350 miles (London to Glasgow) and you'd have to destroy towns and cities and tackle the Pennines as well as many other areas of hills. Either you make the route 450ish miles or make most of the line in Tunnel (and hence restricted by speed 80-100mph max), every stop you make you'd lose about 7-10 minutes, all of a sudden it doesn't look all the fast really.
The CTRL (Paris to St Pancras) is about 260 miles and takes between 2hrs15 - 2hrs 30, which shows exactly how much of it is at 186mph.
Most of what I'm trying to say to you is that a) The railways are affected by problems, regardless of whether you have a 20mph trundle between towns or a 500mph high speed link.
Secondly the fact that the Government is choking the railways, its limiting franchise lengths (limiting a companies investment), limited its investment itself in needed improvements and rolling stock and making stupid damn rules which help nobody. Why would the government do anything different ? Under a nationalised railway they continually put no investment in, throttled the existing investment and made no plans for expansion! The railways are far better now under privatisation than they were under government control, I just wish they'd create less red tape and either put the money in or leave the private sector to generate their own investment.
Didn't the Spanish Government campaign on the Euro Constitution by saying 30% of its transport investment came from the EU? Perhaps if we had the money instead of giving it away we'd be able to afford it as well
To an extent that's true. But it depends where you put the money - it doesn't make much difference if you put it between London and Edinburgh. It makes more if you put it between Leeds and Sheffield. But the same is also true of the putting money into roads and airports (and you get even more bang for your buck if you regenerate city centres, build new offices and can attract in the private sector investment)
Also the 80p isn't a tax return it's money into the country, only part of the £1.80 returns to the Government in taxation so the Government looses money.
Given that the UK pays more into the EU than it gets back, it's easy to see why the mostly-rural Spain can afford high-speed trains and we can't.
Of course you also need to factor in the cost of land purchase in the crowded UK. Birmingham starts about 20 miles outside of the city centre, and when you think that the average semi costs £130,000, that's a lot of compulsory purchase orders to pay for.
Like most people, I think spending the £30billion on local transport- CrossRail, Thameslink 2000, Project Orpheus and the like- will be a much better long-term investment. Most of the travelling time you incur is in on local transport and local transport improvements are where the biggest savings will happen. It takes me as long to travel the 8 miles into town on the bus as it does to travel the 60 miles to Darlington on the train.
Aladdin, you really shouldn't take all your facts from Private Eye. Private Eye has many plus-points, but the journalists who report on the trains are heavily biased and simply do not report the facts accurately.
Whilst the privatised network has many flaws- not least the ROSCOs- most of us who have any professional or personal interest in the railways appreciate that the privatised network is better than the nationalised network. Take my local rural line, the Settle-Carlisle railway, which is a UNESCO world heritage site now. Back in 1980 BR tried to shut it by lying about the cost of repairing Ribblehead viaduct. As late as 1996 there was no Sunday train service in winter. Now we have a train every two hours during the day and further investment is on the way.
Trying to argue with you about railways is utterly pointless, though, as you know fuck all about how the railways work.
And fact fans: I'm off to London in a fortnight for a tenner return. The boss is off to London first class return for £90 on Friday and she's travelling on a train that gets in at 9.15am. Only booked the ticket yesterday.
Everything you had said up until that point I found really interesting, informative and made me want to understand more rather than just moaning about the trains. It was all really constructive and helpful up until that point; why the little dig at the end, it just puts peoples backs up.
I'd love for everyone to understand that whilst TOCs make mistakes- First Great Western at the moment is a disaster zone- the whole thing is far more complex than that. And for all the talk of Government being best, bear in mind that this week's problems stem from Network Rail's incompetence. Who are, er, owned by the Government.
http://vbulletin.thesite.org/search.php?searchid=1682921
Indeed. Its pages and pages of Aladdin wading in with 'THEIR ONLY INNIT FOR THE MONEY' and 'BRING BACK BRITISH RAIL'.
Thamelink where pretty crap when I used to commute on them. I'd rather get the train to Victoria and tube it across london then go direct on First Capital Connect.
I dont think Southern are doing that badly, especially compared to Connex :yuck: . I have YP and tend to travel mainly off peak, its almost the same price to get the train or the bus into Brighton at the weekends from where I live now.
The contiental trains are so much better, easy to get seats, run on time, and are very quick.
What happens usually is you and Aladdin polarise and nothing useful gets discussed. You'll trot out how you can get the to moon and back for under a tenner - with enough change for a beer. Aladdin'll then point out a journey where it costs a fucking-stupid-amount.