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Rail Congestion Charges
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Surely some kind of joke
I may have got this wrong, but isn't road charging supposed to encourage us to us public transport? Including trains?
Or is this all just an attempt to get us all using buses?
I may have got this wrong, but isn't road charging supposed to encourage us to us public transport? Including trains?
Or is this all just an attempt to get us all using buses?
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Yes, a bit.
A job with flexi-time sounds like even more of an attractive option (but I bet employers' "core hours" still manage to fall within peak times).
You old cynic you
So we all have to walk. Everywhere.
The governemnt is having a fund raiser for the christmas party at Tonies, I guess. Or grabbing cash because they will lose next time around.
Or fly.
To a different country, and stay there.
I wouldn't put it past em.
the whole setup of this world is upside down and inside out.
greed and incompetence are the order of the day.
does anyone any longer who is in a position of authority/power have any long term vision/goals ...regarding building a better world?
i despair.
It doesn't pay to think about the future. Hence doing so is quite incompatible with the current system. It just isn't profitable to NOT rip people off and make a good public transport system. But, if you can force people to use the current shoddy one by maknig driving expensive...
Bullseye.
Obviously with further imprisonment for failure to pay .......... loop .......loop
after 9:30am ticket prices are cheaper, you can get a one day travel card for £6 or £5.70p with an Oyster card but before 9:30am it's like £7.50p
no thats travelcards, single journeys cost the same (less on oyster cards than paper tickets though)
completly pointless though theyd be better off increasing the capacity and reliability for peak time services, on the tube i dont mind if my trains too busy, cause i know ill be at front for next train in 5 minutes at most
Privatisation, thats what happened.
For all the ranting and raving about "privatisation", it needs to be remembered that the main line carriers into London, with the exception of Virgin's black hole finances, all pay hefty subsidies to the Government. First Great Western pay over £60m in premiums every year, and GNER will be paying £100m a year soon.
London's rail network is so clogged because no Government will fund Thameslink 2000, so called because when it was first mooted in the mid-80s it was supposed to open in 2000. No government will fund Crossrail. Network Rail is effectively a government company, so arguments about private finance are irrelevant, and even if private finance were available to pay for it Bob Crow would only whinge.
The cost of the rail network now are because the infrastructure- trains and maintenance of track- were privatised. It costs £150,000pa to rent a railbus ffs- they only cost that to build in the first place. The West Coast rebuild cost umpteen gazillion pounds, whereas the East Coast rebuild came in on time and on budget. The TOCs always get the abuse, but they don't really cost much more now than they did under BR.
Adverts around here trying to tell me that the bus was cheap made me laugh though. That'd be £2.40 for a return into town, which is three miles away, if that- bargain!
The railways now receive three times the subsidy that British Rail got in its later years, much of that is swallowed up in legal fees, payments form one firm or another for infringement of contract, lawyers to draw up the contracts and, yes, overinflated salaries for bosses who couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery (think Gerald Corbett), never mind a decent public transport system. Motre money is put into the modern network than into BR, and less is got out of it.
The TOCs themselves have been - with one or two exceptions - hopeless. Initially they failed to invest in rolling stock; then they did, and much of it was rushed through the design stage and, predictably enough, the result has been a proliferation of ill-tested, flawed designs. Take Virgin, for instance. They're fine ones to complain about overcrowding - they were the ones who scrapped the old 8-coach 125s and replaced them with those piddling little 5-coach Virgin Voyagers that are always overcrowded, and where the seats are so small and crammed in together that you risk DVT if you sit there too long. And they were all taken out of service temporarily the other week for safety checks after a coupling fractured. Virgin replaced a useful, if dated, BR design with something that ... well, should be copnsigned straight to the scapyard. From what I hear the Pendolino is no better, nor the 'Adelante' trains that First Great Western are introducing.
All of this is before the subject of safety even comes up. Major crashes in 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2002, all attirbutable to varying extents to the way in which a formerly unified, vertically integrated system has been split up into a plethora of self-seeking, myopic private companies. Renationalisation is the only way to sort out the chaos. It is that simple.
Fair enough I think.
I also think that there needs to be a bigger differential between peak and off-peak, to make those who can travel at other times to do so. It was the RPC saying this, not ATOC.
It's not their business to 'discourage' anyone from travelling. It's up to them to provide an adequate service. if they're incapable of doing that, then what the fuck are we paying for?
Which due to under-funding from Thatcher is an unfair comparison.
For the first few months they did.
And nothing at all to do with the huge gap between the last BR orders, and then the private orders?
And nothing to do with the incompetence of GEC Alstom?
No they weren't. It was nothing to do with the coupling.
Though the Voyagers are shite trains.
Why is it? BR was never that well-funded, except for a brief period in the 1950s. The point I was trying to make was that BR managed to do a hell of a lot with a very small budget - well, after the 1950s anyway, where a lot of money certainly was wasted. You can't say that for the privatised system, can you?
.
Some of them homoured contracts BR had already drawn up, but every rial industry analyst will tell you that there was a serious dearth of investment in rolling stock for the first few years after privatisation. All these new trains that are coming on stream now ... well, basically they're making up for lost time.
Yes, up to a point, but that is not a justification for rushing ill-tested deisgns into production.
GEC Alstom aren't great, but then they haven't built all of the enw trains either, so I fail to see the relevance of your point.
Yes it was. There was also this 18 months ago...
A lot of stark assertions, with very little evidence to back any of them up, Kermit...
It did?
All I remember it doing is trying to shut railway line after railway line, all based on lies, particularly in the 1980s. It didn't manage to, but the service over lines such as the S&C was appalling right up until privatisation. For all the arguments about privatisation, on routes like the S&C, Carlisle-Newcastle and Newcastle-Sunderland-Hartlepool the services improved because of privatisation (although in the last case the service to Hartlepool was reduced again because Arriva lost money and the SRA didn't feel the need to subsidise.
I don't think the dearth was as "serious" as many rail analysts make out, to be quite honest. New trains take time to come online, and new trains take time to be ordered because of research needs, and I believe companies like MML put plans in place for the 170s not long after privatisation.
I do think that is a simplistic viewpoint, the Pendolino has been in the making since 1997, for instance. The new Desiros for SWT will replace the balls-up that was Alstom's pathetic attempts to build a reliable train.
The point was that the new trains that haven't worked have largely been by Alstom.
My point was also that trains often don't work when they are first built. The 91s certainly didn't, and they have only gained good reliability since GNER overhauled them from the bottom up.
I wasn't aware of that. I thought you were referring to the failure in the air-con system that caused disruption not so long ago.
The Voyagers aren't perfect, but at least they do generally work. Which is more than can be said for the 47s and 86s they replaced.
Virgin XC get an awful press, and I don't think it is justified. They run far more trains than IC XC ever did, and IC XC's reliability and punctuality was often not much better.