251–260 of 383 posts
If you want to see a good train service look at Japan. Went there for a holiday and used the train service all over. They are a classic example of what a train service "should" be like. Fast, efficient, cost-effective. The only time trains was a little difficult was in the super-peak hours on the underground in the very dense parts of the cities. I think the world should learn from Japan in many aspects.
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As someone coming from a country (Italy) with nationalised railway I always found the trains in the UK to be pretty great. Sure, you have a few delays but it's eons better than what I had in my country. I never understood why people were complaining about trains in the UK. Italy added a private offering some time ago, which I personally never tried, but my friends back home always praise them for working - unlike Tre…
The trains in the UK seem ok in terms of the number of services and reliability, but they're so expensive. It's almost always cheaper to fly or rent a car than it is to use the train for anything approaching long distance.
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I'm sorry but this article is bullshit. Go and actually check the train prices (because I did) now. Book Sheffield to London 1 month in advance, comes out to £70 odd return (nearly 4x more than article states) with a first class upgrade for an extra £70....Paris to Leon 1 month in advance? £20 odd return with another £20 first class. Idk if something has changed but you can't quote this article anymore. Train prices…
Everything is more expensive in the UK - salaries are higher too, compared to Europe.
Compare somewhere like Lesparre (population about 5,000 and 40 miles from Beudeux), which has about 10 trains a day taking 90 minutes.
With Cononley (25 miles out of Leeds) with 4 trains in each direction the next hour.
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Where does the subsidy for Branson's lifestyle come in? Branson hasn't been involved in the UK rail network for a couple of years. If I look at Manchester-London in a weeks time with a non-flexible ticket it costs £45 return (actually for £45 it's pretty flexible - you are just limited to one firms trains, a bit like that BA fare, and can't travel in the morning rush hour) https://i.imgur.com/CNCzmKu.png That's less…
A fair price would be a £45 return ticket London to Manchester if I bought it at 9am tomorrow at the station. This would bring the UK rail prices more in line with most other European countries. £300 is gouging.
You can take the 08:46, arriving in Manchester at 12:13 - an average speed of about 60mph.
The £300 is an option that few choose, because that journey gives them major benefits. The money raised from that is plowed back into the railway and used to subsidise services to Harrogate, Holyhead and Hungerford
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The trains in the UK seem ok in terms of the number of services and reliability, but they're so expensive. It's almost always cheaper to fly or rent a car than it is to use the train for anything approaching long distance.
It's very strange. In the UK you often pay a fortune to sit on a nearly empty train. This doesn't even seem like pricing optimized for profit, let alone general carbon reduction across all modes of transport.
Can anyone summarize the background of this decision? Has there been passenger backlash against the current system?
Reduce the staff, or reduce the staff salaries. Either way, unions get involved and there will be strikes just like the "good old days". More retail in and around stations perhaps?
I look forward to being able to just a buy a single ticket from X to Y and one that perhaps doesn't cost 5-10 times as much as it would to drive.
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I lived on a Southern line and alternative was Thameslink with uncomfortable trains (crammed seats, no tables for coffee or anything - at least they were running mostly empty as nobody wanted such discomfort). Trains always late, I almost lost my job because of that. I had to get a car and drive 100 miles each day because train journeys were not sustainable. Has anything happened to Southern? I doubt.
Why didn't you use Southern? When are you talking about? There was a lot of investment in the (laughably named) Thameslink 2000 program, which was put in place to dig the route out of the mess that the nationalised rail network had left it in by the 90s, it started in 2009 and is still undergoing improvements
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The undiscussed upside of this "privatisation pantomime" is that government's are committed to making it work. That means it gets investments and bailouts. Compare that to publicly owned services who get nothing. The real question here isn't who owns X, it's will the government invest in X...
It's a classic tactic: underfund government services, then point to how they don't work as a pretext to privatise.