The railways

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Franchise failures
The southern railways on going debacle
The Govia timetable fiasco
Possible scrapping of three year old trains

This should be it for rail privatisation.
Was the rush in building new trains an attempt to turdpolish the benefits of privatisation?

[Harrowby Hall]

It was never really "privatisation" though, Vlad.

I always saw it as an elaborate form of outsourcing. The state still owned the concept and the real estate (if that's an appropriate way of describing the track bed). The operation was fragmented and the fragments licensed to operators and rolling stock companies. The only people likely to make any real money from this crazy system are the lawyers faced with the possibility of hundreds of different contractual arrangements arising from it.

It has discouraged vertical-integration and spawned horizontal integration by letting one operating company acquire several franchises. And perhaps the greatest irony is that the attempt to remove state ownership of the railways resulted in the entry of foreign state-owned railways as operating companies.

But the state is still the operator of last resort. The East Coast Main Line - successor to the LNER and the magnificent locomotives of Nigel Gresley - has three times been abandoned by its operating company. Each time the state stepped in and operated the service until another mug could be found.

Another point worth remembering is that - despite the popular image of a decrepit BR - the nationalised railway, under Bob Reid II, was actually shaking off its inadequacies and finding popular support when the Major government dumped its great idea on the public.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Vlad,

I have been following the East Coast Train line franchise failure and trying to make sense of the whole fiasco, Stagecoach and Virgin are blaming the failure on the government run Network rail who they say failed to upgrade the line.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling says that Stagecoach and Virgin got their sums wrong, if that is right then why are those two companies being allowed to re-tender.

The government is now talking about a new private public ownership, how will that work, if it all goes wrong again ( this is the third time it has failed ) we, the taxpayers will have to foot the bill again.

The last time this rail line was in public hands it made a profit, why not just keep it in public hands?

This whole privatisation nonsense needs to stop, it is time to take back control of our railways, our rail network is far to important to be left in private hands whose only objective is to keep shareholders happy.

The congestion on our roads and the push to limit air pollution should be enough for the great British public to tell the government enough is enough, just like the NHS, our railways need big investment, time to get more bums out of cars and on to train seats, time to take more freight off of our congested roads and back on to railway lines, for me it is a no brainer!

Gonnagle.

[Nearly Sane]

Use of the railways is way up, and use of cars down in the last 14 years. The problem is general capacity. The inbuilt scale of difference means that rail travel isn't likely to be any solution without some huge technological advances - see link below for figures

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rail-factsheet-2017


We are investing huge amounts of money in HST2 but I would suggest that it's solving a 21st Century problem approached in a 20th Century manner with a 19th Century technology. We should be looking to reduce miles travelled and investing in new technology to reduce travel overall.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Sane,

Have you been listening to Mr Grayling.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-44143078/chris-grayling-defends-handling-of-east-coast-line

He talks about a digital railway.

What exactly does a digital railway mean?

Gonnagle.

[Udayana]

I think the idea is that when they have replaced the signalling system more trains will be able to run on the tracks, so more seats.

[Nearly Sane]

Dear Sane,

Have you been listening to Mr Grayling.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-44143078/chris-grayling-defends-handling-of-east-coast-line

He talks about a digital railway.

What exactly does a digital railway mean?

Gonnagle.

I would rather listen to fingers down the black board. Grayling is a fatuous idiot.

My point is that trying to travel is the wrong solution. Instead of spending 40 bn on a trainline. spend a tenth of that on having the best broadband in the world.

[jeremyp]

This should be it for rail privatisation.

The government owns the track and the rolling stock and it sets the time tables. There's not much to nationalise.

Also, what would you replace the privatised railways with? People talk about the nationalised railways as though they were some sort of Nirvana but they were really quite shit.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Jeremyp,

The government owns the track and the rolling stock and it sets the time tables. There's not much to nationalise.

Also, what would you replace the privatised railways with? People talk about the nationalised railways as though they were some sort of Nirvana but they were really quite shit.

Who are these people, certainly not me and I have never read a post from Vlad about the glory days of British rail so who exactly are these people.

Gonnagle.

[Harrowby Hall]

The government owns the track and the rolling stock and it sets the time tables.

Wrong.

The government does not own the rolling stock.

Some rolling stock is owned by TOCs (train operating companies) but most is owned rolling stock companies such as Angel Trains (originally part of RBS), Porterbrook and Eversholt.

[Aruntraveller]

People talk about the nationalised railways as though they were some sort of Nirvana but they were really quite shit.

Yes but todays' rail service isn't really comparable with BR is it? I mean technology has moved on so much in the last 20 - 30 years. I don't know that you can even compare the two systems. Clearly though there is something very wrong with the current set up.

One thing though, and it is anecdotal, but still, I travel by rail when in Germany (state owned) I go nearly every year and it is a very good service. Trains mostly arrive and leave on time are frequent and in comparison to the UK more places are served by rail services. And yet the Germans love to moan about the trains in exactly the same way we do. Maybe we are just programmed to complain about trains!

[Rhiannon]

My daughter needed to catch a train for one of her GCSEs only to find there was no service due to a train hitting a platform. The staff at the station laid on every minicab they could find and the other passengers allowed my daughter to go to the front of the queue to get to her exam on time. Coming home the station staff has organised cabs, minibuses and coaches to replace the trains, and were handing out bottled water. I realise this is just one incident and not much to do with management but they (Greater Anglia staff) did a fab job.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

The government owns the track and the rolling stock and it sets the time tables. There's not much to nationalise.

Also, what would you replace the privatised railways with? People talk about the nationalised railways as though they were some sort of Nirvana but they were really quite shit.

Most of the time the railways were nationalised was under the conservatives and there was even a time when the minister of transport was also one of the countries major road builders.

The private owners of our railway companies are none other than the nationalised rail industries of other coutries.

Another example of why the British people are victims of one of the biggest muggings in history.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

My daughter needed to catch a train for one of her GCSEs only to find there was no service due to a train hitting a platform. The staff at the station laid on every minicab they could find and the other passengers allowed my daughter to go to the front of the queue to get to her exam on time. Coming home the station staff has organised cabs, minibuses and coaches to replace the trains, and were handing out bottled water. I realise this is just one incident and not much to do with management but they (Greater Anglia staff) did a fab job.

Rail staff are unfortunately Lions led by Donkeys.

[Harrowby Hall]

Vlad still doesn't seem to get it.

The railways were not privatised, they were Balkanised. Track was kept by the government and the country was divided into service areas. To some extent, these areas resembled the pre-grouping companies of 1923. Part of the idea was to encourage competition - except that in most cases a single train operating company (TOC) occupied one service area and was in competition with nobody. (Eventually, there was competition of sorts on the East Coast Main Line - Kings Cross to Edinburgh and Leeds. Hull Trains used the ECML - but were only permitted to stop at Doncaster, Retford, Grantham and Stevenage on the ECML proper.)

TOCS didn't own their own rolling stock (in most cases) - they rented it from rolling stock companies. The TOCS were service providers who had been sold a franchise for a limited time and then had to make money out of it. The model was pitched at travel service companies like Virgin Airlines and the First Bus group.

As time went by small (and not so small) TOCs gave up and the stronger TOCs took over their franchises. The stronger TOCs began to look more and more like national railway companies, and TOCs began to operate in combination with each other - the current ECML franchise is being apparently abandoned by Virgin - but Virgin is the minority partner (10%) to Stagecoach (90%) - presumably Virgin is a better brand to operate under than Stagecoach. (After all, stage coaches got held up!)

Companies without rail operating experience found it difficult to run railways and frequently, when they failed, the only potential operators with sufficient experience were the national rail systems of other countries. Letting them in was an act of desperation, Vlad, not a mugging. The British Government (well, the one led by John Major - which invented the shambles) shot itself in the foot so frequently that its wellies could be used as colanders.

The structure devised for the franchisation was a disaster. This was one situation where vertical integration might just have have worked.

And then when other service industries were privatised (electricity, gas, water) foreign operators mopped them up with glee.

With this history of managing change is it surprising that a Conservative government is making such a bollocks of Brexit?

[SteveH]

Re-nationalise them. BR was far from perfect, but it was a damn sight better than what we've got now.

[Nearly Sane]

Re-nationalise them. BR was far from perfect, but it was a damn sight better than what we've got now.

Any evidence?

[jeremyp]

Re-nationalise them. BR was far from perfect, but it was a damn sight better than what we've got now.

No it wasn't. It suffered from chronic under investment. The rolling stock  was mostly decades old. The signalling infrastructure was ancient. If you travelled on a train the food was legendarily bad.