Deprivatisation of railways

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Incognitas

I'd just like to go to one source to get ALL timetable info and how much it will cost to get from A to B.At present I have to go to several sources.Unless one of you souls know of such a site?

Another one is http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/ This also contains fairly accurate information regarding any delays.

[danielf]

Originally Posted by SMHarman

What shocks me is the cost when compared to European rail travel. Just got two tickets Paris to Brussels and back on the High Speed Red Thalys train. £35 each. Costs £14 for a day return to London from Hertford!

Yes, I mentioned this earlier. The cost of rail travel in the UK is absolutely shocking. And I can't understand why. Perhaps rail travel on the continent is subsidised more (most European countries have national railways), but I doubt that's the only reason.

Originally Posted by danielf

Yes, I mentioned this earlier. The cost of rail travel in the UK is absolutely shocking. And I can't understand why. Perhaps rail travel on the continent is subsidised more (most European countries have national railways), but I doubt that's the only reason.

I think Government subsidies is certainly one important factor. The problem is that the UK's railways have suffered generations of "institutional neglect" by governments who weren't interested in them, wanted to close them down, saw them as a way of making a quick buck or as "somebody else's problem".

Consequently the amount of money we're paying for them now is the result of all those years of under-funding and neglect and, of course, the longer you leave a problem, the more it costs to fix.

Privatisation has shown itself to be an utter disaster and what we really need now is a government brave enough to bite the bullet and take them back into public ownership but in a way that will result in them being dealt with in a *sensible* manner.

Labour have sort of got the right idea by introducing Network Rail and making it a non-profit making company, but they did it in the wrong way by "re-nationalising through the back door" and thus pi$$ing off everyone who had shares who got shafted with a deal that was much less than their shares were worth.

IMO the entire network, rail, signals, engines, rolling stock, the works should be run by *ONE* Not-for-profit[1] company which can devote its time and energy into fixing the problem *with* sufficient government money to do a proper job that won't take 20 years to finish.

Only *then* IMO are we liable to end up with a rail system that is worthy of the country that *invented* the thing in the first place...!!

[1] NB Not-for-profit does not mean "doesn't make a profit" it means that any extra money earned goes back into the rail system, not to share-holders or to executive bonuses.

[BBKing]

Lots of interesting points:

Firstly - a disclaimer, I'm a railway nut of many years standing who voted in 1992 tactically to try and prevent rail privatisation. My family are also friends of the Bawdens, who've been campaigning since the Potters Bar accident, which killed Nina Bawden's husband and seriously injured her.

Safety - the big accident was Hatfield. This was the one which demonstrated that Railtrack had lost control of the railways to the extent that the rail condition on one of the country's premier main lines was catastrophically Why did they lose control? Because they trusted to the free market and commercial contracts to ensure safety, rather than the historical way built up since the railways started where engineers would be integrated into the management hierarchy and thus have key input into the management of the railway. This was *deliberately* swept away at privatisation, quite deliberately. It wasn't bad management, it was deliberate sabotage of a working structure for ideological reasons. Railtrack was supposed to be a small, streamlined management structure that would basically supervise contracts and rake in the profits. What happened of course was obvious. With the people who understood the railway gone, the suppliers could charge what they liked and do a poor job safe in the knowledge that they'd get paid and no one would have the knowledge to check, which is exactly what happened. Also, consultants could propose grandiose schemes to save money by using untried technology on unrealistic timescales, and there was no one left to say 'hang on a minute'. Hence the West Coast cock up.

BR was a phenomenally safe transport company. You can point to Clapham as an example of disaster, but you really have to point to all the years where no passengers died *at all* in rail accidents. This is actually continuing today. I think the system is still very safe, but privatisation has unleashed a number of worrying new failure modes that were previously kept in check by good engineering management (broken rails and broken points as at Hatfield and Potters Bar). TPWS is already saving lives, how many we'll never know, which is one of the problems with explaining safety projects to bean counters. The annoying thing to free marketeers is that BR managed to be phenomenally safe as a public company with, in comparison to today, a tiny subsidy.

Railways don't work like other industries. They have such a reliance on engineering and the wheel/rail interface that these have to be at the heart of the whole system. The tragedy of privatisation is that both of these key points were directly targetted as being anathema to the concept of the free market, and destroyed.

Another point which a lot of people don't know - Labour's attempt to gain control over the network was to set up the SRA, which is 900 bureaucrats run by the people (Bowker and Steer) who came up with Virgin's spiffing plans to completely screw up the West Coast and Cross Country by means of a cunningly unviable business plan (basically saying 1) we'll get x% more people travelling and 2) we don't actually need to pay to provide capacity to transport them - spot the obvious flaw there). However, Richard Bowker plays music with Mr. Tony so is immune for now. I could go on about the SRA and the political turf wars with the ORR and OPRAF but I suggest anyone interested purchase this month's excellent edition of Modern Railways.

Oh, and another point, try and find out who owns Network Rail and who controls the billions of pounds of public money that it spends. It appears that the answers are 'no one' and 'no one'.

Alternatives to the car - my girlfriend and son are off to a friend in Darlington next week, by plane. It's by far the cheapest option. My attempts to get her to go GNER lasted as long as it took to get the price comparison and work out how long it would take to get to King's Cross.

[cjmillsnun]

I think you hit the nail on the head here BBKing.

BR used to run one of the safest Railways in the world, and THE most cost efficient railway in the world.

BR had some fantastic plans for the WCML. Witness the APT, years ahead of its time that, when cancelled by the Government, they had just got right. They then planned the IC225, but the government limited production to cover only the newly electified ECML as they thought the cost too great. BR also borrowed heavily from APT technology to keep the costs down, and the Mk4 Coaches are even designed to be capable of tilt.

With safety. All the accidents brought home the ptoblems with privatisation.

Southall. That the train was allowed to enter service with faulty AWS when there were no secondmen available, no drivers trained with ATP or not turning the train so that the end with the functioning AWS system was not facing the direction of travel.

Ladbrooke Grove. Why were the points beyond SN109 set to the DRL to divert the Thames Train away from the path of the HST? Why was an inadeqautly trained with little or no route knowledge left in charge of a passenger train on his own on one of the nastiest layouts in the country,

Hatfield. OMG some disgusting failures. Why were there no speed restrictions on the damaged rail? Why was the line renewal left for the Winter timetable when it was clearly on the brink? Why was the wrong type of train used to deliver new rails so they had to be returned to the yard? why did it take so long for the danger to get back to Railtrack House for the funds to be released?

Potters Bar. Why was the same company that had been involved in the Hatfield disaster and who was clearly partly to blame still looking after maintenance on the same line just a few miles up? Who checked the line and the points and lied about their condition and why?

Great Heck was the only accident where the railways had no blame, and that tw*t who fell asleep at the wheel of his car ought to be shot.

I again say the railways should be publically owned by a similar body to the old BRB and should be vertically integrated so that the wheel/rail interface is restored.

Anybody who wants to know some of the information that led me to draw my conclusions could do worse than read "Broken Rails"

I also agree with BBKing that the cost of tickets is (in general) extortionate and is driving people away from one of Britains only alternatives to the car.

[BBKing]

Spot on there. Unpleasant answers follow:

Southall - Train not turned because GW would have had to pay Railtrack for the privilege of taking an empty train round the triangle at Swansea - under a properly run integrated railway the cost of cancelling the train would have been greater than the negligible cost of turning it, so it would have been turned. Not having been turned, it should have been cancelled as unfit to be in passenger service, but this would have incurred compensation payments and made the figures look bad, so it was run. End result 7 dead, rolling stock destroyed, track torn up, £1.5m fine.

Privatisation caused the previously non-existent pressures to run an unfit train to take precedence over sound engineering advice.

Mind you, the signal that was missed (at yellow) was grossly misaligned and incorrectly designed, which brings us to:

Ladbroke Grove, where a badly designed layout and a badly trained driver missing badly sited signals caused an appalling crash. The layout was designed by Westinghouse and BR in the early 90s under the assumption that all trains would have automatic train protection in case of missing signals. In fact two out of the three types of train on the route had ATP, the exception of course being Thames, as BR didn't fit it to their trains in the years immediately pre-privatisation and Thames didn't in the years immediately afterwards, and the HSE didn't press for it, being too busy nitpicking about footpaths by the trackside and other major threats to railway safety.

The layout at the points was therefore designed on the basis that no trains would go through a red light, so they could be left safely pointing in the direction that was the easiest for the computer signalling to cope with, which unfortunately meant a possible head-on collision in the case of the signal being missed, instead of a possible sidelong collision with a train travelling in the same direction. So cost cutting on the original design, assumptions about the nature of the traffic that were never revisited after privatisation (Railtrack would have said 'Thames has to fit ATP' and Thames would have said 'RT has to make the layout safer' and no one was there to knock their heads together).

Interesting, if slightly irrelevant point about the idiocy of privatisation, the only company barred from bidding for passenger rail franchises in the UK was the only company with any experience of running passenger services in the UK, i.e. BR. In Sweden, which has had private railways a lot longer, the old state railway is still there and running services in competition (and sometimes cooperation) with private companies.

Ding-ding!

Thought this might slot into the discussion at this point:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3600465.stm

Thames Trains gets a £2 million fine for its part in the Ladbroke Grove crash.

I wonder if it will change anything.

Originally Posted by BBKing

Spot on there. Unpleasant answers follow:

I thought that summed up many other companies, that are now ruled by marketeers


I also thought.....

Originally Posted by Graham

NB Not-for-profit does not mean "doesn't make a profit" it means that any extra money earned goes back into the rail system, not to share-holders or to executive bonuses.

was a reminder of what a 'state owned' system could 'bring to the table'

Originally Posted by homealone

I also thought.. [...] was a reminder of what a 'state owned' system could 'bring to the table'

Nope, the point about "state owned" is that all the extra money goes into HM Treasury which allows any government that's a little hard up to "bilk" the successful parts of industry etc to support the bits that don't work properly, instead of *fixing* the bits that don't work properly like any *sensible* business would.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Graham

Nope, the point about "state owned" is that all the extra money goes into HM Treasury which allows any government that's a little hard up to "bilk" the successful parts of industry etc to support the bits that don't work properly, instead of *fixing* the bits that don't work properly like any *sensible* business would.

True, although the Tory government sold off those bits that did generate the money, but didn't fix the bits that were wrong. So now, we have departments that still have problems and have a lack of funding making them worse..

[BBKing]

Where made money under state ownership? TSB? Rolls Royce possibly. Mind you, I don't think the state had any role in running banks or making aeroengines so selling those off was a good idea.

Parts of BR made money of course, which isn't the case for the same services under private ownership, despite higher passenger numbers and higher fares. Lubricating the interfaces and contracts takes up all the cash.

Having said that, a return to a state-owned monolith would be a backwards step - the infrastructure should be nationally-owned, along with maintenance and renewals, but I see nothing wrong in private companies being contracted to run trains by the national organisation (for instance city commuter services), but not a lot more. Train ownership and leasing is ok in the private sector too, means flexibility. Freight is actually doing very well privately, in fact freight trains are often more modern than passenger trains now, so you can leave that alone. Socially necessary services should be state-run though.

The interface between the network company and the operating companies needs to be thought out in such a way that the network company has an interest in the trains running reliably and the operating company has an say in the track maintenance. Quite how you do that (bringing wheel and rail together) I really haven't a clue, but the state railway certainly requires a division that actually operates trains, partly to get the insanity of modern signalling practice ended.

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by cjmillsnun

Great Heck was the only accident where the railways had no blame, and that tw*t who fell asleep at the wheel of his car ought to be shot.

However you can point a finger toward the railways. The French TGV network has a fairly simple cable arrangement around all road bridges. If these cables are snapped (by say a car landing on them) all signal in the area trip to red slowing / stopping trains and preventing or reducing the speed of the collision.

Originally Posted by BBKing

Socially necessary services should be state-run though.

I think the way Virgin and GNER have managed to improve the onboard service is a good thing that would not have occurred without privatisation. However onboard service and rail marketing are both things that could be subcontracted, leaving the driving as part of the combined train / rail network interface.

Socially Necessary services can be subsidised. British Airways still recieved state subsidy to run routes to the Scottish Islands that would never be economically viable. This could be shown to be a successful privatisation of a socially necessary route.

/RantOn

And I love how they screw the regular commuters when things go wrong. I commute from Hertford North, the branch loop near Hatfield / Potters Bar. This loop can take about 10 trains an hour.

After both crashes, my commuter services were suspended to enable GNER to get their ICs through, so long distance services continued, but the thousands of commuters could not get to work. Where is the logic in that?

/RantOff

[BBKing]

Of course if a car lands on the tracks, the track circuit is tripped and the lights go to red anyway (unless you're using the cheaper axle counters which can't tell when a train is or isn't in a section*. Guess what Railtrack used on the West Coast? But I digress). At Great Heck the collision was almost immediate - trains can't slow down and stop in an instant no matter how many idiotic drivers fall asleep and drive onto the tracks or how many signals are put to red in front of the driver - there's a limit to how far you can go to stop the once-in-a-million accident (which wouldn't have killed anyone if there hadn't been a freight coming the other way at that exact moment). Trains are generally tougher than cars, several of which get written off, often with their drivers, every year on level crossings, due to driver stupidity.

*OK, they make a guess at whether there's a train in a section by counting the number of axles that entered it and counting the number that came out. If they match, it assumes there's no train, if they don't, it assumes there is one. Misuse of axle counters caused the 1990 Severn Tunnel crash (the only place in the UK where they were used under BR, as it's too wet to use track circuits).

At the end of the day I don't really care who owns or runs the railway system.I just want a safe,well run and economical service that arrives on time most of the time.Why this can't be provided is not my problem.I'm just the end user and until the safety record improves and the services improve I'm unlikely to use the present railway system if I can avoid it.
I'm certainly sorry for those who can't avoid using it.

[SMHarman]

Originally Posted by BBKing

Trains are generally tougher than cars, several of which get written off, often with their drivers, every year on level crossings, due to driver stupidity.

I've seen some insurance claims on these and they are not pretty. Normally in a car crash you can look at the pictures of the car and work out what it was. Not when a train hits it.

The Train Owner also claims on your insurance for the repairs to the train. Thats a helluva expensive bill. You normally bend the first axel and damage the bodywork (or whatever you call it on a train).

Remember one particular claim.
Question - How fast were you travelling 15mph - How fast was the other car travelling 125mph (train) - Ouch.