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Oh aye?
Go and look up two words: Ribblehead. Viaduct.
The TOCs cost more money than BR, for one single reason: the ROSCO.
And the whole leasing thing is a con too.
Oooh, you can almost see the delicious lumps of profit produced by the vermin...
I say deregulation is the answer. If anybody could set up a train service to exploit gaps in the market, without the government blocking them the service would improve dramatically.
As for the franchising set-up, that should be done away with ASAP. Companies should be allowed to invest in the future knowing that so long as they remain competetive, they will keep the routes they are on.
DW
a) they have a decent, well maintained rolling stock
c) they offer a good & comprehensive service
b) the service is properly staffed to avoid delays/cancellations
Yet most companies failed on one or all of the above department. Why? Because they'd rather pocket all the profits than employing extra drivers to run extra services. And the passengers (sorry, "customers" as we are known as now :rolleyes: ) be damned.
And the most insulting part of all is that the majority of companies get the government (i.e. us) to bail them out whenever their incompetence costs them money or they need to invest in the service, and yet whenever it makes a profit they keep it all for their shareholders.
There have been a thousand horror stories; from the company that refused to service a small station at weekends because it was too curved and passengers "couldn't alight safely" (until the company was reminded it didn't seem to have the same problems on weekdays, when there were far more commuters to pick up and the trains happily stopped there) to South West Trains sacking 200 drivers on the very first day it first took charge of the franchise- only to having to ask nearly half of them to come back immediately after it realised it didn't have many drivers left to run the trains.
Profit-obsessed private companies running essential public services = worst idea in the world.
You simply don't understand how the railway system works (or doesn't, in some cases) and it's pointless arguing with ignorance.
If you want to argue that BR was great, then go and do some research on the Settle-Carlisle railway, and the lies that came when BR decided it didn't want to run trains anymore. Go and look up Ribblehead Viaduct, and how BR lied to get the line shut down.
Go and look up how, under BR, there was one return Carlisle-Leeds service, which stopped at none of the intermediate stations and left Leeds before the southbound service arrived. And then contrast to how Arriva increased the service to two-hourly, using modern rolling stock, and then introduced intercity standard coaching stock to the line.
The privatised railways are no worse than under British Rail. The ROSCOs are a national disgrace, and should be abolished immediately, but they are the reason why the railways cost more to run, not the TOCs.
You fail to realise that most decisions regarding the railways are made by the Government already, in the guise of the SRA. Your bete noir Virgin is told exactly which trains it will run where by the SRA; First TransPennine were shafted when they wanted to increase the quality of their services by replacing tired old stock; GNER and First Great Western pay over £200m a year in subsidy to the Government.
The SRA refuses to allow competition, by repeatedly denying the applications of Union Railways. Competition is banned by this Government; only Hull Trains and Heathrow Express are non-franchised companies, and they provide services which were otherwise unavailable.
Franchisees don't have a responsibility to fund things that they cannot get a commercial reward from. That's fair enough.
If they gave First 25 years at TransPennine, then new trains could be bought and services could be extended. But First aren't going to bankrupt themselves investing in a service that they could lose in six years.
many staffing issues are actually caused by poaching. Arriva Trains Northern had horrendous driver shortages three years ago. Why? Freightliner nicked all their drivers.
oh and first time travelling long distance alone this summer, the train that was meant to be taking me to bournemouth abandoned me in central southampton 'to save time' humph
And while there might have been a couple of unacceptable incidents and neglect to some rural areas, on the whole BR did a pretty good job of running and maintaining a massive network of more than 10,000 miles without much incident.
Funny how the average speed of the network is still the same it was when trains run on coal- despite all these fancy Pendolino trains.
I'm sure a few companies have moved in to provided services in neglected areas. But for every such story there are a thousand others where existing services have been cut or neglected whenever profits weren't good.
The piss-poor Virgin trains have become specialists in replacing second class carriages with first class ones to force passengers to fork out extra money. Sometimes to the point of seeing a train consisting of 4 second class cars crammed full of people, with many more having to wait for the following train, and 4 nearly empty first class cars.
But Mr Branson and his colleagues in the trade are expert lobbyists if nothing else- and continue to get cash injection after cash injection from the government, of which they return nothing when the profits roll in.
They have also become very good at pushing freighter services out of their way- as a result there are far fewer freighter trains than there should be and far too many goods are transported by polluting, congesting trucks on the road network.
With regard to staffing- believe me: the immense majority relates directly to companies sacking as many people as they can get away with to cream extra profits.
Virgin's custom has increased by about a third since privatisation, largely as a result of Operation Princess. Of course overcrowding is a problem when that happens.
Standard class carriages have not been replaced with first class carriages, for the record. Under InterCity a cross-country train ran every two hours, usually as 6+1 or 7+1 carriages. Now they're every 30 minutes as 3+1 or 4+1, but admittedly shorter carriages.
TOCs that are profitable return subsidies to the Government. You always spectacularly miss the TOCs such as GNER and First Great Eastern (the Government took this one off First, in their infinite wisdom) retruned huge subsidies to the Treasury.
As for the average time comment, compare and contrast the average London-Edinburgh time with Silver Fox and a GNER 91. Or the London-Glasgow time with a Pendolino or a Coronation Scot.
Freighter services are quite rightly kept off the main line, seeing as the S&C is ideal for freight. Freight is at a highest point for a very long time.
British Rail was shit, lets not wear rose-tinted specs and pretend otherwise. The privatised system has some huge faults, but lets not pass around falsehoods such as "BR was great".
Living in the North, and travelling on rural railways as a matter of course, privatisation has been nothing but a good thing. The trains are now run by local companies, not London government. All the bad things to happen to the railways up here have been entirely due to the actions of the SRA.
That'll be because for every Pound the government gets from a subsidy it has to pay infinitely times more to plug holes in others.
I don't have the figures at hand but our friend Virgin Trains has been gifted so many hundreds upon hundreds of millions of Pounds from the government over the years entire African countries could have been lifted out of poverty.
The fact remains that overall things are worse. In fact punctuality is now far worse than it was just pre-privatisation. Some commuter services are nothing short of a disgrace.
The point is BR used to be not just good, but the best in the world, until the 1950s. The reason it went pear-shaped was lack of investment and a management that was told to cut corners. But if the money is provided, an integrated, government-owned railways will always be far superior to a collection of franchises running monopolies.
Fair enough that BR was getting piss-poor towards the 80s and 90s- but that's not the fault of the system. If it were to be brought back, given all the investment it needs and run by people who were told to look after all passeners in all routes instead of worrying about budgets, it would quick enough become one of the greatest in the world again.
Perhaps this is the crux of the argument we're having Kermit. If you lived in the South East of England you would quite probably be saying exactly the opposite.
:thumb:
Mind you in Southampton (does that count as the South East?), the trains were always utterly awful (I don't remember British Rail), but South West Trains were shite.
So you want to give them loads and loads of tax payer money.
Yes of course we would get a better service if you give them as much money as they want/need
Personally I don't want public services that spend as much money as they can because they will probably spend a lot of it completely inefficently.....
Yep, much quicker than when it was the LMS.
Which is what always happened.
You don't focus on how much the rural trains used to cost under BR, because it wasn't noticed next to the profits made by Network SouthEast and InterCity.
InterCity CrossCountry was a loss-making operation.
VT West Coast got a lot of money because Virgin entered a contract with the Government for upgrades to the WCML, and the Government didn't deliver.
Punctuality is worse.
But that's not a surprise, when about 25% more trains run now than they ever did under BR.
And its not a surprise given Network Rail's (they're the Government, remember kiddies) inability to complete engineering works on time.
But BR only came into being in 1948...
Unless you mean it was the best in the world because of the Big Bad Private Companies the LMS, GWR, LNER and Southern. Oops.
Yep.
I hate to break this to you, but the Government DOES own the railways.
It pays someone to run a service for it. And they do, in many cases better than the service under British Rail.
Yeah, but I don't give a flying crap if some Londoner is five minutes late for work. Boo hoo hoo.
Under BR the rest of the country was crapped on from a great height because BR was run from London, by London and for London. When the SRA stick their oar in it still remains to the benefit of Londoners and to the detriment of every bugger else.
Many of the problems in London stem directly from the Government you are so keen to champion as saviours of the railway. Especially in South London around London Bridge station, and through Blackfriars.
I won't sit here and say the privatised railway is any better, because it isn't, but it sure as hell isn't any worse than it was when the Government ran it.
But with public-owned railways cost & profit is (or shouldn't be of concern). At least when some routes made a profit you knew it all went back into the railways, instead of the pockets of shareholders.
Since shareholders are reaping the benefits, shareholders should pay when the going gets tough.
Yes, and it also got the government to part fund his fancy trains.
You would have thought that a muti-millionaire didn't have the need to ask the government for handouts.
But hey, if the government and the taxpayer is so stupid as to offer handouts and expect nothing in return, why turn such golden opportunity down?
Picking up the leftovers from decades of under-investment toppled up with actual criminal neglience from Railtrack plc.
Fair point.
Still. It worked fine for years afterward, until governments cynically started to starve it off.
In all effect is a private operation though.
And the fact remains that ultimately the only thing private companies care about is making profit. As a result, safety and passenger convenience will always come second, and in addition fares will rise at a far greater rate than they should.
I believe we already have the most expensive railways in the world- Japan perhaps the exception, though their railways shit all over ours in a manner than can't even be described. And yet, year after year after year the Association of Thieves Operating under Cover (sorry, Train Operating Companies) greets us with more inflation-busting hikes. Why, exaclty?
Perhaps in the past it was the London-based management of BR who didn't give a shit if some Northerners were late for the market
Don't think it's much rosier under privatisation for some Northerners...
What goverment? I've been consistently blaming successive Tory and Labour governments since the 60s for knowingly underfunding the railways and ultimately privatising them and sell them to speculators.
Not for the the last 30 years or so- but at least you knew safety was a bigger concern than it is and that the railways weren't run for profit.
What pisses me off here is that the only reason BR became really crap is because it was allowed to go that way, with the ultimate goal of privatising it and then tell punters "see, this is much better now".
All I'm advocating is a full renationalisation, and then proper investment and management. That would be infinitely better- and probably a lot cheaper in the long run- than the best private railways money can buy.
Don't have any at hand but there have been many studies published over the years claiming how Britain's poor transport network costs the country dearly in foreign investments.
The problem is that the money needed to really put it right would now be so great no one would dare to embark on it.
I understand concerns about money being wasted or used inefficiently, by the way. Especially if very large quantities were involved, as they would have to be for a complete overhaul of the railways.
Funny you should mention that.
Lets actually look at the facts, not the RMT spin.
That train service is paid for by Nexus, the Tyne and Wear PTE. They own and operate the Metro, which is a fast underground service between Sunderland and Newcastle. The metro, unlike the heavy rail service, also serves two big towns between Newcastle and Sunderland.
Nexus demanded that the heavy rail train be removed, to be replaced by between one and two extra Metro services between the two cities. Metro and train share tracks, but Metro stops at intermediate stations and the train does not.
Nexus, lets all remember folks, IS THE GOVERNMENT.
Funny how the RMT don't mention that bit, isn't it?
This is exactly what I mean by lies and half-truths being allowed to be propagated, and getting believed.
The RMT are a fucking disgrace, and it is they that are the biggest block to transport improvements in this country.
It's a shame I drove today, instead of getting the train like normal. I'd have loved to have abused Bob Crow, the little odious expletive that it is.
You shouldn't comment on things that are at the end of my road;)
The government are responsible through a network of democracy, quango's and plausible deniability i.e. they are responsible hardly at all.
The fix should therefore be as obvious as it is unlikely to happen.
It was BR when Beeching shut over 2,000 stations and sacked over 60,000 staff? And that was the 60s? I’m not really a railway expert but I’d guess that many of those stations closed could have been efficient in private hands.
Anyway Aladdin you’re the only person I know that speaks good things of BR. Everyone I know moans about the railways now but says they were even worse under BR. Whatever I think everyone agrees that under BR the railways suffered from massive underinvestment and that hasn’t changed under privatisation.
Likewise with the tube. There is no merit in whatever ‘public-private-partnership’ the government forced on London. The tube in recent years has got worse and worse. More ‘signal failures’ and random station and line closures at certain times, more delays, more strikes - higher fares.
If only as a matter of general principle.
Personally I think the train companies should be responsible for the track, as pre-nationalisation.
Virgin trains are slow because Railtrack/Network Rail haven't upgraded the track to allow for higher running speeds. Yet people blame Virgin for something that isn't thier fault. If the LMS was still running the show, this wouldn't be a problem.
If you want the railways to be profitable you have to run a better service. BR, as a nationalised organisation weren't interested in making a profit so the railways were allowed to be run down as the government didn't care. Compare this with the huge investment by the competing companies pre-nationalisation.
Thinking of the trains as a "public service" means they will get treated like libraries and rubbish collection, where the government dictates the service we get. The railways should be thought of as a "consumer product". We pay for it through tickets so we expect a decent service, and if we don't like it we'll take the bus or a car.
DW
TOCs won't buy new trains off their own back without a commercial guarantee that they won't be booted out of the franchise in six years.
TOCs can't bring in new train services without government backing, which is nearly always lacking. Arriva's innovation with intercity coaching stock on the Leeds-Carlisle express was eventually removed on the orders of the Government.
As Slog says, governmental control stifles innovation in most cases. SNCF run reliable trains, but they are very infrequent in most of the country, and even the main TGV expresses run every hour or less. To compare, there's an express every 30 minutes from Newcastle to Edinburgh and London.
Deutsche Bahn are very good, but that's because they're German, not because they're government-controlled.
Maybe we should pay the Germans (or the Swiss, Scandinavians, French or Japanese) to run our railways for us. :chin: