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UK Rail services to come under unified state control

bbc.com

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Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#151

Post by iso1631 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #118
midasuni wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not. I have a choice on the WCML of multiple different providers. Manchester to London walk up far for almost any time can be £300 return for the fast train arriving in london before lunch and getting home before 9pm, or £50 for a slower train with a change. Same with crewe-Manchester, Birmingham-london, Edinburgh-london etc. Quite happy with the competition and no government interference.

£300 for a train ticket and you are happy? Have you been on a train in China, France or even Czech Republic? This parody for 'competition' has given us most expensive fares in Europe and soviet-block quality of rail service. It's a new disease, 'neoliberalism of the brain' that maintains 'free market' even at the cost of organ failure

https://www.seat61.com/uk-europe-train-fares-comparison.html

> the next time someone says (or you read) "Britain has the highest rail fares in Europe", you'll know this is only 15% of the story. The other 85% is that we have similar or even cheaper fares, too. The big picture is that Britain has the most commercially aggressive fares in Europe, with the highest fares designed to get maximum revenue from business travel, and some of the lowest fares designed to get more revenue by filling more seats.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#152

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Y_Y wrote: post #32
rich_sasha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”. It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.

Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.

Actually the Oxford to London bus services have been shutting down because of falling passenger numbers and traffic congestion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#153

Post by AdmiralGinge »

rich_sasha wrote: post #17
carnagecity786 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the…

Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”. It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.

It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.

Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#154

Post by iso1631 »

varispeed wrote: post #138
OJFord wrote: post #48

Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets. There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a p…

They privatised profits, but not responsibilities. I don't know why even a single person thought this was a good idea (unless they were on it for money). I think the privatisation could work if multiple companies could bid for a given journey / timetable slice, rather than having entire routes for themselves with no realistic way of removing them if the service goes bad.

They did privitise the risk too. After the failure of the east coast franchise recently, the government bailled out virgin, but that's not the fault of the system.

If I want to travel from Birmingham to London I have a choice of 3 different train companies, as well as a coach company and driving (either hiring a car with or without driver, or using my own car). That's tons of competition, and it shows given the choice.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#155

Post by apexalpha »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #145
pydry wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to monetize is property development and rent around stations. That's how it works in Japan, where private companies sell tickets at a loss and still make profits. In the UK that land got sold off to private equity and the like who are making the real dough while they funnel some of that into donations to the Tory party.

Yes in the Netherlands the railway operator makes a lot of money from their train stations as well. A train station in 2021 is basically a big shopping mall in a prime location with massive foot traffic.

The Dutch Railways even made a slim profit in the UK in 2020 after getting €1,5 billion in subsidies from the UK government through Abellio.

No idea how this new nationalisation will work out for either party, though.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#156

Post by tomxor »

Reason077 wrote: post #147
tomxor wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but: > The government says the new system should look more like Transport for London, with multiple operators under one brand, offering greater accountability when things go wrong. If it introduces more accountability, it's basically doing it's job. Multiyear contracts do not mean no accountability. I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with…

> "I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with little to no recourse." In my experience, the UK rail system has been running fantastically since Covid began! I don't think I can remember even a single delayed train since March 2020 and certainly no overcrowded ones. So it seems like the real problem with the trains was always the passengers ;)

Isn't that a bit like saying it's not the ISP's fault that they aren't delivering even 50% of the throughput they promised? if only there weren't so many subscribers - this is literally what happens on cheap mobile internet with high contention ratios, when it's sunny outside, the throughput and stability shoots through the roof.

It might be "one line", but the number of trains, carriages, staff and general stress on the infrastructure is based on the number of people using it - if not managed well, or resources are stretched to thin to squeeze profits, it's not the passengers fault. COVID simply created a sudden and unusual surplus of resources for them.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#157

Post by tonyedgecombe »

scatters wrote: post #62
carnagecity786 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the…

High fares (and they aren't that high) aren't a result of privatization; they're because of a lack of subsidy. In the UK, despite the obvious environmental benefits, subsidizing rail is politically awkward because it's regressive.

Yes, it's hard to argue I should be putting my hand in my pocket to pay for the train fare for my neighbour so they can earn a London wage.

People do complain about the fares but the trains are full so it's questionable whether they are too high.

If I'm looking at it from an environmental perspective I'd argue the other options (cars, planes) are too cheap.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#158

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Sosh101 wrote: post #25
carnagecity786 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the…

"Great British Railways" -eyeroll-

Well they can't call it the United Kingdom Railways now the UK is falling apart.

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#159

Post by chalst »

gadders wrote: post #84
mvzvm wrote: post #5

Good. This is wildly overdue. The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail ) was a crime of the highest corruption. Edit: Link broke? Edit 2: Thank you @bogdan https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

Where on that wikipedia link you cited does it say it was a crime and corrupt?

Wikipedia doesn't make such claims in so-called 'in-wiki voice', since they are contested.

Rail privatisation was enormously complex. If you want to see a clear example of Tories using economic liberalisation to achieve political ends in immoral, a much better example is demutualisation of the building societies.

https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-co...

Re: UK Rail services to come under unified state control

#160

Post by tonyedgecombe »

mrow84 wrote: post #67
steve_gh wrote: post #54

Note: I have spent the last 7 years working in consultancy, much of which has been involved with both Metro Rail (eg TfL) and Heavy Rail in the UK. There are certainly some messy aspects to UK Rail, but the current system was not nearly as bad as made out by some posters , and there are some very good arguments against further centralisation. A lot of the problem as I see it has been the misalignment between Network…

This isn't an area I know anything about, but is it correct to say that the points you are making are in some sense orthogonal to the nature of the ownership, i.e. public or private? I struggle to see how much meaningful competition can be achieved, so remain unclear about the value of private ownership, but it strikes me that decentralisation is perfectly within the realm of possibility for a publicly owned entity.

Network Rail which the GP was mostly talking about isn't privately owned.

Rail Track, its predecessor was privately owned but it collapsed in 2002 after the Hatfield train crash. Following that it was bought by the government to create Network Rail.

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