England's Railways - Mucking them up again

ceptimus said:
There are about nine different train companies that operate on the east coast line from London up to Edinburgh and Inverness. How are they all going to share the track maintenance work with each other and with Network Rail?
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Presumably the track (or sections of it) is owned by one of them and the others pay a fee to use it or contribute to the pot for maintenance?

The more fundamental issue as others have stated is that nobody is going to invest in things that have a 20 year payback period (for example) if the franchises are only going to last for 5.
 
Archie Gemmill Goal said:
Presumably the track (or sections of it) is owned by one of them and the others pay a fee to use it or contribute to the pot for maintenance?

The more fundamental issue as others have stated is that nobody is going to invest in things that have a 20 year payback period (for example) if the franchises are only going to last for 5.
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From what I know, Network Rail own the track and effectively rent it out / charge a toll. The revenue raised is for the maintenance of the track, points, signals etc.
 
The saying rob Peter to pay Paul comes to mind, except in this case it is more like. GBH Peter and rob him, pay Paul, charge Peter for police time and health care!

I really can't see a way the proposals - as I understand them - will help with any of the current issues. They seem to add more costs and more points of failure so will reduce efficiency and cause additional issues without fixing any current ones.
 
Greebo said:
From what I know, Network Rail own the track and effectively rent it out / charge a toll. The revenue raised is for the maintenance of the track, points, signals etc.
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Absolutely true and now the government is proposing that the relationship between Network Rail and the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) changes so that they work in partnership for mutual benefit and the good of the rail infrastructure.

If there are nine TOCs using the same track then it's difficult to see how this could be achieved (even if the other major issues are ignored).

As I understanding btw, one of the differences between Network Rail and Railtrack is that far more of the work is done "in house" bu Network Rail because outsourcing everything didn't work very well.
 
The Don said:
Absolutely true and now the government is proposing that the relationship between Network Rail and the Train Operating Companies (TOCs) changes so that they work in partnership for mutual benefit and the good of the rail infrastructure.

If there are nine TOCs using the same track then it's difficult to see how this could be achieved (even if the other major issues are ignored).

As I understanding btw, one of the differences between Network Rail and Railtrack is that far more of the work is done "in house" by Network Rail because outsourcing everything didn't work very well.
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The company I work for is Network Rail's biggest supplier for points, signals, level crossings etc. Network Rail at most replaces track themselves - the rest they farm out.
 
Eddie Stobart (of truck fame) has a rail division that does some work in replacing and repairing sections of track, bridges and so on. There was a TV series a while back that mainly followed the antics of a few road truckers but had a couple of episodes showing the sort of work their rail division undertook. The road trucks used by the rail division are blue in contrast to their iconic green 'normal' trucks.
 
I recall having heard that the current system now costs the taxpayer more in subsidies to the private railway companies than it costed when it was nationalized. Anyone know if this is accurate?
 
caveman1917 said:
I recall having heard that the current system now costs the taxpayer more in subsidies to the private railway companies than it costed when it was nationalized. Anyone know if this is accurate?
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As with all of these things - it depends.

On a pure money-per-year basis then yes, the subsidy per year is higher now in real terms than it was in BR's last years.

The cost of running the railway has more than doubled in real terms since privatisation from £2.4bn per year (1990–91 to 1994–95) to approximately £5.4bn per year (2005–06 to 2009–10)
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http://actionforrail.org/the-four-big-myths-of-uk-rail-privatisation/
(site is partial, but the facts quoted are consistent with those I've read elsewhere)

It gets more complicated on a cost-per-passenger-mile basis (usage has increased significantly) and if infrastructure investments are removed from the equation then it's more complicated still.

That said, a lot of rail pundits think that British Rail with current levels of investment would be doing far better not least because they could also be reaping the benefits of higher ticket prices (more than 25% higher in real terms since privatisation) and lower borrowing costs than commercial rail companies.
 
The Don said:
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Thanks.

That said, a lot of rail pundits think that British Rail with current levels of investment would be doing far better not least because they could also be reaping the benefits of higher ticket prices (more than 25% higher in real terms since privatisation) and lower borrowing costs than commercial rail companies.
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You shouldn't listen to rail pundits though :)
 
I suppose it comes down to whether the profits and shareholder dividends of the train operating companies added to the cost of the franchise bidding process are higher than any money that might be wasted by a nationalized state owned company.

I think that British Rail would make a much better job of it than the current mob.

The government, if it really wanted to help, could make things much better without renationalisation. For a start they could make it illegal for the train operating companies to have more than, say, five different ticket prices for all the passengers making the same journey on the same train. And they could drop this current nonsense about multiple companies cooperating together to maintain and upgrade the track.

I suppose if the government does push through this new stupid idea it will make plenty of money for their lawyer friends following the next major rail accident - imagine the money to be made when five or more companies are all arguing over who is responsible for the accident - which company did what and when, and for what reasons? It could drag on for decades.
 
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If you have to pay more, and the trains are running slower, it sounds like you are just getting more ride for the money. This reasoning is how I came to love Microsoft bloatware.
 
ceptimus said:
I suppose it comes down to whether the profits and shareholder dividends of the train operating companies added to the cost of the franchise bidding process are higher than any money that might be wasted by a nationalized state owned company.
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Genuine question:

What evidence is there that a nationalised, state-owned company would be more likely to waste money than a private, for profit company?
 
marplots said:
If you have to pay more, and the trains are running slower, it sounds like you are just getting more ride for the money. This reasoning is how I came to love Microsoft bloatware.
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Slightly off topic. My wife and I were in Germany in October and were able to travel all day on any mode of public transport (bus, train or tram) for a flat fee of £28 for both of us. A similar length journey to the one we made, but in the UK would cost from £45 each - just for the train part. If I wanted unlimited travel in London when we got there it would only be £131 each for a comparable package. So better models for supporting a public transport system are being used - why can't we adopt them here?
 
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Greebo said:
Slightly off topic. My wife and I were in Germany in October and were able to travel all day on any mode of public transport (bus, train or tram) for a flat fee of £28 for both of us. A similar length journey to the one we made, but in the UK would cost from £45 each - just for the train part. If I wanted unlimited travel in London when we got there it would only be £131 each for a comparable package. So better models for supporting a public transport system are being used - why can't we adopt them here?
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Political dogma, public opinion and possibly a measure of "if you want to get there I wouldn't start from here".

IMO the British Railway system was suffering from decades of under-investment but the problems went further back than that.

From the very start, the British Railways were poorly planned and haphazardly built (why else would you have two competing networks servicing largely the same parts of South East England) which meant that large parts were never profitable (like many rural branch lines). Consolidation under the "big four" may have papered over the cracks between the wars but then the railways were used and abused for the national good during WWII without the necessary investment to put right the wear and tear.

In part this was due to a lack of money immediately after the war but then transport priorities shifted to road (and to a lesser extent air) and so British Rail was starved of investment (and yet still managed to come up with the Class 43 and Type 3) and subjected to a "salami slicing" of cuts for decades before we belatedly realised some mistakes recently.

edited to add...

You may have realised I'm a bit of a nationalised-railways fanboi :o
 
The Don said:
Political dogma, public opinion and possibly a measure of "if you want to get there I wouldn't start from here".

IMO the British Railway system was suffering from decades of under-investment but the problems went further back than that.

From the very start, the British Railways were poorly planned and haphazardly built (why else would you have two competing networks servicing largely the same parts of South East England) which meant that large parts were never profitable (like many rural branch lines). Consolidation under the "big four" may have papered over the cracks between the wars but then the railways were used and abused for the national good during WWII without the necessary investment to put right the wear and tear.

In part this was due to a lack of money immediately after the war but then transport priorities shifted to road (and to a lesser extent air) and so British Rail was starved of investment (and yet still managed to come up with the Class 43 and Type 3) and subjected to a "salami slicing" of cuts for decades before we belatedly realised some mistakes recently.

edited to add...

You may have realised I'm a bit of a nationalised-railways fanboi :o
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But no need to apologise for the highlighted bit IMO!

Taking a german run railway possibly wasn't a fair comparison - when I told the above to one of my colleagues in a German office, back came the dry humoured reply "Well we did have to do a bit of rebuilding of the railways in the 1940's and 50's"
 
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