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 issues that we've had with privatised rail going away - those issues being incredibly high fees, understaffed and underpaid workers, under maintained infrastructure, and a lack of real investment in areas with little to no infrastructure at all (the north).
Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.
The ScotRail brand was operated by the private company Abellio, who lost the contract due to long term failure to meet its requirements of reliability etc - was in trouble before the impact of the pandemic.
>doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda
Spot on. Only I venture it is worse. More public money to business friends. The point of public transport is to allay the burden of cost to the public, having no choice but to travel for work. I'll say that again - no choice (zero work where they live) and physically travel to work.
Despite the pandemic, an extreme example of people forced to stay home to work, the number of people that had to continue to travel to work was surprisingly high. And, as ever, the people with the least suffer the most. This is a PR exercise by any other name. The devil is in the details, as is being pointed out.
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 turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working
More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried.
Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.
Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up with only two carriages.
£100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.
The last time I had to travel from London to Bristol and back, I rented a car from Heathrow airport and it cost me a quarter of the price the train would. It takes the same amount of time, but the car is more comfortable and worse for the environment. The system is so broken in the UK.
Problem is that there is massive pent up demand. Cheaper tickets mean more people travelling longer distances to work when there isn't capacity. The last thing we need is even more regular commuting to London from outside greater London.
This demand is caused by high house prices and lack of opportunities outside of the SE. Trains are a sticky plaster that gives lots of subsidy to middle class commuters whilst local bus services are cut. Distance is also environmentally problematic regardless of mode of transport.
Something like 160 pounds at peak time from Nottingham to London. Service is good but it's just inconceivable that private individuals would be paying that, all the travelers are on expenses or are self employed contractors/consultants. When I started working and up till about 2005 the same journey was about 40 pounds - a massive increase!
This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries.
My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.
Same here, but newer trains no-one was really asking for, and tickets about three x what you were paying (about £290/month and no seats from my stop in, 25 minutes.) The line -- Thameslink -- got so bad the government took over paying the compenstation rebates for distrupted customer journeys while letting the operators continue to trouser all the fares in addition to something a 4 billion pound operating payment regardless of how badly they performed.
This is pure, Tory mansion-building stuff and apparently exactly what everyone who bothers to vote in this country wants. Yay.
£100 a month not bad. My season ticket used to cost £4400, for a 25 minute ride to London waterloo, and tube to Hammersmith. Still cheaper than £28 for the day!
To be fair they were clean and well-maintained. They also had the benefit of being flushed through with fresh air - a result of the doors not forming a seal around the edges.
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!
Indeed. At the time of privatisation, I commuted to Oxford from a small village that was 20 min train ride away. Privatisation encouraged me to make the switch to the 45 minute cycle ride, which I suppose was good for me. I do remember seeing the automated departures table being 80% filled with notices of cancelled services or trains that were over an hour late.
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.
Cheap, certainly. Also slow, and comfortable's in the eye of the beholder (I can't read in a road vehicle, so not for me). The Paddington services are much better these days, and there's also the excellent (new) Marylebone service. I live just outside Oxford and wouldn't dream of getting the bus.
My experience of road travel in the south was that delays were too frequent for journeys crossing the M25 for me to depend on it. That's from before good consumer traffic analysis apps; maybe those improve things enough.
A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.
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.
If privatisation of essential services is a crime (it’s not, but it should be), privatising the subsidies and directing them to private companies is much worse.
If one has a basic right to healthcare, education, and freedom of movement, then all those things should be provided by the state.
I had to get from the West, to London, and then to the north last week.
Wiltshire to London: ~100miles, £24
London to Derbyshire: ~120miles, £158
I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt about peak times, but I started my journey at 10:30am. The prices make no sense; unless viewed through the private entities ability to gouge.
Whenever I'm in Europe and buy a ticket I spend an extra 20secs at the ticket machine thinking I've made a currency conversion badly before realising, no, European trains are great value and UK trains are an exercise in exploiting a captive market.
> this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department
Sounds like it's designed to further distance government and it's ministers from any sort of accountability. Just like any government owned corporation.
Don't expect the people who lined their pockets during privatisation to lose any money. Do expect Tory party donors to do well in whatever actually happens.
So, during the 1948-1995 nationalized period, train ridership was in almost constant decline, and from the 1995 privatization, train ridership started a steady and steep increase.
Reduced subsidies (per journey), massively increased passenger numbers, improved satisfaction and (apparently) a slower rate of season ticket price increase than under British Rail would appear to be some of the positives.
Given the currently UK leadership, I can't imagine this going to be anything other than a nightmare of bungling and corruption that I will be reading about in Private Eye in years to come.
The infrastructure had been renationalized for quite a while. Its the Operators that have still been private, which in general can be made to work. In Britain it didn’t work well.
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.
"that"? The account given of the effect of demutualisation in the article I linked to is not controversial. Obviously my claim that the policy of a political party was immoral is, but I know Tories who agree with me about this.
Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.