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You have to ask yourself how many people end up using the cheaptest fare, and more importantly how much does someone get charged if they commit the outrage of buying a ticket for next day travel at peak times (not to mention same say travel).
It doesn't matter if sometimes the train is a bit cheaper. It should be a lot cheaper, most if not all of the time.
Sure, the closer to London, the more appealing it becomes.
Try the London to Scotland route, which is the one being discussed and the one where air travel beats train travel by 4 to 1.
Really? People lie for the sake of it do they? If they say something you don't like to hear, they must be lying.
I reckon they have far better reason to blame the railway operators: for instance for claiming to fork out millions in new trains when the government ends up footing the bill (Virgin). For sucking up hundreds of millions in subsidies and yet pocketing all the profits (practically all operators apart from GNER). For increasing profitable first class carriages at the detriment of cattle-class (Virgin). For pretending their trains are not "compatible" with certain stations due to their curvature in order to justify not serving small stations at weekends- despite having no such trouble at weekedays (some South West England operator). For sacking hundreds of drivers out of greed and having to reinstate some of them the very next week as there was nobody left to drive (South West Trains). Etc etc etc.
Really? How do you work that one out?
I don't think there is a single country in the First World, and not many in the Third World, that would sell long distance tickets and not guarantee a seat. Certainly not unless they they're selling a standing ticket only.
It's an embarrassement and a disgrace of indescribable proprotions. Simple as.
You're missing the point. Nobody should be made to stand on a long distance journey. We wouldn't do that to cattle.
I'm sure some services are okay. But many others are not. There are simply unnaceptably high number of piss-poor services. And there is also an unnaceptable lack of investment. There should be a true high speed line between London and Scotland. The only reason there isn't is because of greed and reluctance to invest. Which is stupid really, because for every Pound spend on the transport infrastructure you get many more in return thanks to increased trade and tourism.
It's nice to see Britain falling behind such industrial powerhouses and wealthy nations as Portugal or Spain when it comes to high speed lines isn't it?
SORRY?
What the fuck more proof do you need lad? SIBERIA is MELTING. The sea level is rising. Freak floods and droughts hit countries in the same year. Mere months apart. A tornado if fecking London. And that is only half of it.
As for 4x4's - I dislike them for a different reason. They are a danger to other road users, and I hate people who have one with no good reason. If you don't needs it offroading abilities, you shouldn't have one. Get an MPV instead.
China and the US (more so the US) are being short sighted. China has begun some (some, not much) action. The US continues its oblivious uncaring path towards the destruction of its own next generation.
MY generation. Motherfuckers. It isn't just hte US that will suffer, this is what annoyes me. The whole World must pay for the US's sort sighted selfish policies. I mean, we can't excuse China, but alot of that is the fault of our own - we sent industry to a backwards (at the time) and cheap labour nation because we wanted to cut costs instead of doing it at home - so the Chinese did it cheaply with little regulation. If we had instead made it in our countries and paid our wokrers minimum wage, we'd most likley be better off. But the foreign workers don't need a minimum wage, they're just silly foreigners!:rolleyes:
Why should it?
The entire tax system is set up to make the train more expensive. Whilst TOCs have to pay a largely commercial rate on their fuel (electricity prices charged by Network Rail have doubled in the last year, which is one of the reasons why GNER have hit financial trouble), airlines do not.
I think many journalists do lie, about every conceivable subject. You know they lie about everything else, what makes you think that they're telling the truth about the trains (especially as most journos don't know one end of a train from another)? It's fashionable to nail TOCs for small issues without breathing a word about lorry drivers and operators or car drivers. That's why six deaths in a train crash caused by a driver error or an engineer's error it is a national scandal, and everyone should spend trillions on making sure it never happens again, but when some pissed truck driver kills ten on the M1 it barely even makes the local news unless he's Polish.
You're right- most other countries enforce mandatory reservations, and if you don't have a seat booked you can't get on the train. They should do that over here, then there'd be no overcrowding at all.
In this country there are no mandatory reservations, and as such at peak times (weekday evenings, Sunday afternoon) there are more people trying to get on a train than there are seats. The reason why this does not happen on airlines or on the Shinkansen or on the TGV is because once the train or plane is full you cannot buy a ticket for that service. There's no overcrowding because you can't get on a train without a reservation.
If Virgin brought in a policy of no boarding without a reservation (like they want to) the media and you would be wringing your panties in knots about how its a national disgrace. You can't have it both ways. You can't compare apples with oranges and then get pissed off when an apple becomes an orange.
As for a high-speed line between London and Scotland, I could see the advantages, but the cost would be astronomical. When 40 miles of the CTRL cost nearly £6billion, the 350 miles from Edinburgh to London would cost perhaps as much as £100billion, and its very hard to justify that kind of spending when it could be put to much better use on hospitals and schools.
The thing Kermit is that I can think of many instances of bad delays, bad service, lack of seat etc that were told directly to me by people I know. Nothing to do with the press.
?Actually you can have it both ways. Too many passengers? Increase trains. Too many trains? Improve signalling to increase capacity. Still trouble? Double up the lines. Problem with adjacent land? Compulsory purchase.
Many other countries appear to solve such problems. If it's not so in Britain is not because it is unsolvable, but because this country appears to have a natural repulsion to the concept of investing in order to have an adequate network.
As ever it all boils down to money.
I don't think it would cost nearly as much. But when you are talking about vital infrastructure, initial investment is secondary. The benefits of it will be there for decades to come. Railway building doesn't come cheap anywhere. But if it has to come out of taxes, so be it.
If there was to be a true high speed dedicated line between London and the North, trains could get to Glasgow or Edinburgh in well under 3 hours. And if tickets were kept at reasonable prices instead of worrying about profitability, even if the taxpayer had to part-pay for it, few people would feel the need to fly- and indeed to drive- to those destinations. The benefits in reduced congestion and pollution would justify the initial investment very quickly.
There isn't the room to extend most urban railways, and that is where the delays occur. And as most of the UK is urban or semi-urban, there isn't the scope to extend. As in Europe, TGV-style trains would have to travel on normal tracks when entering cities. Great if the big cities are 300 miles apart, as in France or Spain, but not so great when the big cities are 40 miles apart. The only way to get major time savings would be to have "parkway" stations- time savings which would be negated by having to get to the out-of-town station in the first place.
A TGV-style line is a fantastic pipe-dream, I'd love to see one too, but it is nothing more than that. Given the cost of the WCML upgrade, and the cost of the CTRL, I don't think £100bn is an exceptionally high estimate. And £100bn on one railway line is far too much money, especially for a time saving of only 45 minutes at most. Infrastructure upgrades at key pinch points, such as Welwyn Viaduct on the way into Kings Cross, would have the same effect at a fraction of the price.
Outside the metropolitan area of London there is plenty of space available for building an extra line. Of the 300 odd miles between London and Scotalnd, what are we talking about that would be in really densely populated areas? 20? 30 at the most?
£20bn would be a lot closer to the mark actually. £25bn at the most I should think.
But in any case it does not matter, because study after study shows that you'd get at least twice the orginal investment back in benefits and profits
http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_railways/documents/page/dft_railways_032563.hcsp
Yep, but it isn't there that you would get the time savings, as any fule kno. There isn't that much difference between 125mph and 160mph.
The biggest gap between two cities up here that I can think of is the 85-mile gap between York and Newcastle. You'd still have to slow down onto "normal" tracks through the cities, as TGV does, or build a parkway that avoids the cities but makes everyone trapise out to it on local transport.
I'd love to see TGV in this country, but I don't ever think it could be justified in terms of cost. And, as in France, I see smaller towns being overlooked and ignored by the development of high-speed lines. Whereas now towns like Peterborough and Penrith get fast and regular intercity trains, either the new line would avoid them completely (as has happened to places like Brive in France) or the train would be stopping every 40 miles negating all the speed increases.
You might get Edinburgh-London down to, say, 3hr instead of 4hr, but I doubt the cost would justify that.
I'd solve the cost problem of public transport by making car users pay the real cost of their travel. Roads should be self-financing, from road tax and road tolls, bus lanes should be improved, and car parking should become more expensive. As it is the Government pays a huge hidden subsidy to the road network, paid for by those who don't use cars.
There are too many problems facing a TGV-style line in this country, not least of all the size of the country. The average gap between stops on the ECML is about 40 miles, and most stops are major stops. That's not long enough to get up to speed and slow down again (on emergency brakes it takes about two miles to stop from 186mph), so the full speed benefit wouldn't be felt.
Sure, you could cut stops out, but why should major intermediate towns have to make do with a second-rate train service because the small number of businessmen who want to travel to Edinburgh at speed? Because that is what happens- TGV is rightly hailed as a success, but towns that aren't deemed important enough for a station are left at the side making do with two or three very slow trains a day.