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The problem with Capital Connect is that their newest trains are from 1985 and most of it is 1970ish. Only recently have Capital Connect started to put some money into trying to make the stock better, but most of it is life-expired. It needs Government intervention to put some money in to improve the stock, but this was all meant to be sorted 8 years ago now!
Southern are actually pretty good, especially on the Brighton line. Connex were just corrupt!
But then there have been massive above inflation increases every other year...
In 2003 - 25%.
And another year on we saw above inflation fare rises again.
A year on - yet again, an above inflation increase in fares.
And again...
And not to disappoint ...again.
For a group (without oyster cards) it is almost always cheaper to share a cab than bother with zone 1 singles... The other week with uni friends found exactly that. (And given how expensive black cabs are that shows what a pisstake the tube is).
Compared to other European cities London is an absolute joke; London is expensive enough as it is without visitors/tourists being robbed by TfL. I don't think I would recommend London to any foreign visitor on a tight budget... But then by charging more than double to tourists and visitors - who probably make up 99% of the people without oyster cards TfL/Ken are basically telling non-Londoners to fuck off.
I go to London maybe 3 times a year at most and I have an Oyster.
The main reason why you always get a seat on TGV and ICE is that you are not allowed to board if you do not have a seat reservation. You cannot just turn up at the station and get on the next train, you have to have reserved your seat.
Equally, European train lines are much less crowded, which helps punctuality no end. On most TGV lines- even the main ones- trains run hourly at the most, and most run every two hours. To compare there are now three trains an hour between London and Manchester.
If they halved the frequency of trains and made you reserve a seat on every journey you took in the UK you can imagine what the outcry would be like.
As for the cost, unless you buy the open returns the prices are about the same as on the continent. It costs me about £16 to get from Newcastle to York- about 90 miles- and it cost me about EUR25 to get from Brussels to Brugge.
The only tickets that are really noticeably cheaper are the city-wide passes. Unlike in the UK, they are subsidised by the taxpayer. Late night trains are the norm on the continent, yet if you get a bus after half 10 over here you're lucky.
Disillusioned, I'd agree about non-Oyster usage, but at the same time most tourists will buy a Travelcard which isn't any cheaper than on Oyster. Also, I think Oyster should be cheaper, because it costs much less to run. Using the ticket offices- which cost TfL millions to run- needs to be paid for somehow. Either the passengers who use them pay, or everyone pays. In Hong Kong non-Oyster tickets are more expensive too.
Yeah organised tourists who've planned their trip I suppose... I have an oyster but a lot of people from outside London who visit London rarely don't really plan. I'd guess most paper tickets are sold through machines - not ticket offices (I'm sure TfL would claim otherwise). But since the modern machines take cards/cash and the queues are always way shorter than a ticket office I'm sure that's the case.. Ticket offices might cost 'millions' to run but there's been obvious cutbacks, even at big stations there's often very few windows open... Of course there are hundreds of stations TfL has to man - and run ticket offices for, I don't dispute that this costs millions. (And I'm not surprised that there are some unmanned stations, esp at night).
Of course you could say you can't have it both ways: I'd like manned stations, a better tube network but lower fares. (But I'll settle for a freeze for at least a couple of years). How you pay for it is the problem - but the simple fact is running a tube network as large as LU costs an enormous amount of money and massive government investment is what's needed. The problem is more money going in seems to go on £100k+ TfL executives and pointless advertising campaigns.
As a side note holders of railnetwork railcards (Young persons/disabled/senior) can now claim a discount on the Oyster offpeak pricecap:
Z1-2 £3.10
Z1-4 £3.50
Z1-6 £4.20
Z1-9 £5.00
Z2-6 £2.80
Z2-9 £3.00
Needs to be applied at a LU ticket office.
That's why private companies are ill suited to run essential public services where there is not even competition to keep them in check.
How many more stories of train companies sacking too many staff, claiming trains cannot stop at certain stations at weekends because of the curvature of the platform (despite being okay at weekdays (?)) or replacing second class carriages with first class ones do we need before we realise private companies put the interest of their shareholders first? It's the passengers we should be worrying about.
Ok Aladdin, Why is there no competition on the lines? (I'll give you a clue, it has NOTHING to do with TOC's.).
Some more facts: Train companies aren't sacking staff, please provide a source or some examples to say that train companies are 'sacking too many staff'. Trains unable to stop at certain platforms on a weekend (in amazingly very very very low numbers), because of rules set by guess who.......... Some trains have an increase in first class carriages however overall THERE IS AN INCREASE OF STANDARD SEATS as there are more overall services! Plus its not like the first carriages are empty, try telling passengers on services in and out of Euston at peak time that there is too much first class on a Pendolino, try telling passengers from Kings Cross that a HST has too much First, try telling Norwich passengers from Liverpool Street that there is too much first class. In fact on certain services the Government has dictated that certain trains CANNOT be used as there is NOT ENOUGH first class seating.
On a side note the Pendolino, the Voyager and the Class 91 are all capable of 140mph - who says they can't run at this speed without excessive signalling modification to the whole network? The government in the guise of Health and Safety.
The incident with the trains not being able to stop at certain stations was well reported a few years ago. Somewhere in Wales. It eventually turned out that not enough passengers used the station at weekends to make enough profit, so the TOC said trains couldn't safely stop at that station. Then someone pointed out there weren't such problems at weekdays. Must be magic.
As for first class carriages, Virgin is one of the worst offenders (according to Private Eye at least). It is said to be a common sight to have half-empty first class wagons followed by bursting-full cattle class carriages during certain peak time services. Of course no matter how third-world conditions can get in cattle class, nobody is allowed to move to first class without paying the appropriate supplement.
200 drivers were 'redeployed' or sent to other companies because they were given too many in the BR shuffle, and yes it restored.
As for train stations. Every station now has what is called 'grandfather rights'. Introduced by the health and safety executive, if all the door of the train are not on the platform the train cannot stop there unless they have done before privatisation. This applies to every day of the week - if a 12 car train stopped at Chester (which can only take 9 carriages) before privatisation on a Monday, Thursday and Sunday then it only can now. Therefore a twelve car train cannot stop there on a Wednesday. Thats pretty much it!
On all train companies the guard has the right to declassify first class providing it 'doesn't affect paying first class passengers'. Normally first is either full or the guard doesnt want to get a gobfull of bullshit from some London commuter toff.
But even then, the rail network isn't really competing. Put it over to completely free-market, and the rail network wouldn't last a week, because every other form of transport is cheaper. Which is the issue. People who bang on about the occassional cheap ticket they've got, or the fact that it's the same price in Europe are missing the point. The trains should be much cheaper than a car almost all of the time. You're sharing a carriage with a bunch of other people, it shouldn't cost the same as it would to drive yourself. It should be a choice as to whether you drive your family of four to London, or get the train. And we're nowhere near that with current prices. If railway's an investment worth making, then do it properly, and fund expansion and improvements through taxes, not increased ticket prices. If not, then subject it to the free market and let the fuckers rot.
Depends what you mean by a free market - rail may be subsidised, but as JsT points out it also operates under a lot of restrictions which limit its effectiveness (as well as short operating spans which limits the investment companies are prepared to put in - knowing they could loose it all in a few years).
In likelihood the main journeys by rail (local) will continue, because it's not price that's the main factor for local journeys.
No. In the case I'm referring to the same train, with the same number of carriages, stopped Monday to Friday but then not on weekends any more, until numerous complaints to the press and elsewhere made the TOC in question reconsider.
That was a move prompted by pure greed. Nothing else.
Chiltern Railways abolished first class carriages altogether. I'm not sure if they're the only train company to have done so.
:yes:
+1 :thumb:
Yes, but they weren't sacked, they were moved to another TOC because that other TOC didn't have enough. It was resolved fairly quickly and ever since then South West Trains have been one of the best-performing TOCs.
The incident you refer to with the trains not stopping is at a station in Devon called Dawlish Warren. The station there has very short platforms. Because of health and safety legislation HST trains, which are nine carriages long and too long for the platform, are allowed to stop there through "grandfather rights", i.e. because they were built in the 1970s and stopped there then they can stop there now. Newer trains, including the five-carriage Voyager train, can't stop there because they were built in 2000, after new health and safety laws came in saying that a train can't stop if it is longer than the station platform.
The problem at Dawlish Warren was that during the week the trains were operared by First Great Western HSTs, and at weekend they were operated by Virgin Voyagers. Who's fault is that?
If road users had to pay for the true cost of their travel then the train would be much much cheaper than road.
The problem is that we have a road network that is paid for through direct taxation. With the exception of a few short stretches it is free at the point of use- the cost is swallowed up by income tax and fuel duty. At the same time we have a train network that is supposed to be self-funding and it is charged at the point of use.
The train appears to be a lot more expensive because you pay for that at source, but with the road you pay at the end of the month through your pay packet. It's not a fair comparison because the road costs are hidden.
Start charging car users £1 a mile, and truck drivers £10 a mile, and the train won't seem so expensive after all. And that's roughly the cost of the upkeep of the roads.
If people had to pay the true cost of a lot of things, then most of the people wouldn't be able to afford most of the things they need, most of the time. Therefore opening the rails up to "competition" in the same way as phone or electricity companies is a stupid idea. It's not financially viable as a private business, so it shouldn't be one. And considering it isn't a private business in the free market, and the government wants to encourage us to use the trains rather than cars, then it should be much cheaper than using cars almost all of the time. If they want to artificially influence our travel plans, then the prices should reflect this, which they don't at the moment.
In addition the HST has selective door opening (SDO) which traincrews control to allow only a certain number of doors to open where as Voyagers do not so its all doors open or none therefore its simply not safe to open the doors as people could just fall into the trackbed!
The track speed at Dawlish is so low that any stop is not likely to take much from the schedule, there is no reason for a TOC NOT to stop there unless they are prohibited to do so! I'm not sure how not stopping at station = greed either frankly Aladdin.
To be fair the main failure of the railways is that the Department for Transport is essentially full of knobheads. The fundamental flaws could easily be sorted.
In some cases fares have gone up a large amount but all regulated fares (which is the vast majority of your walk-up tickets) have only gone up 4.5% this year, which is only a percent or so above inflation.
You are right that French fares are more subsidised JsT. That's one of the problems in this country: chronic under investment for decades. Still doesn't negate the fact that the cost of train travel in this country is unbelievably and ludicrously high. That is why the government should raise taxes to subsidise train tickets. It really is the only way they're going to make people want to choose the train over car or plane.
I don't think you could walk up on a flight to New York and get it cheaper than any rail fare in the UK! You would have to pay in advance! In fact a quick look on BA reveals a walkup flight to New York from London tomorrow in first class is £4200, where as you could do the longest rail journey in the UK in first class for £300 (Penzance to Wick)!
I don't understand how increase tax instead would help, everyone is still paying more for service at the end of the day, and you are spot on right in saying that there has been years of investment, thats why Rugby has overrun so badly because it hasn't been touched in the best part of 40 years. Hopefully you can maybe see that despite the privatisated railway the one thing that is holding the whole network back is the Government.