dailymail - One in five train services could be axed as treasury tightens purse strings

[Ianno87]

Above me there's a driver manager. Above him there's a lead driver manager. Above him is an area lead driver manager. Above him is an operations delivery manager. Above him is the area head of trains and stations. Above him is the area director. Above him is the managing director.

Just saying.

Do you know what they all do, exactly?

 

[Llama]

I know that between them they can't order me a new pair of trousers.

 

[paul1609]

Isn't it likely that the biggest reduction will be in London commuting, so probably the largest reductions will be on those services.

I agree but unfortunately London is where the whole rail industry earns its money.
Southeastern is by far the smallest of the "dc" franchises but by revenue pre-covid was bigger than LNER.
If there are no central London offices to commute to in all likelihood there's no London office to make expensive anytime trips to from Manchester or Leeds either.
Much cheaper for companies to provide a hire car and meet at the conference centre at Reading services on the M4.

 

[thedbdiboy]

Surely that 20% will closely correspond to the cessation of profits/dividends paid by the TOCs to their shareholders.......with franchises ending, those payments will reduce

I think answered elsewhere, but for the avoidance of doubt anyone who has fallen for the guff about vast profits and thinks that the end of the franchise model will solve any shortfall in revenue is in for a nasty shock about the realities of railway finances

I don't think the rail industry should "surrender" and accept reduced passenger numbers as a "fait accompli". It needs to pull out all the stops to get people travelling for both work and leisure purposes again otherwise all the investment in new rolling stock and infrastructure that has been made over the past few years will have been for nothing.

So many services have been added to the network in the past 20 years that fortunately there is scope for careful thinning and cost control without destroying the viability of the network. The key is to allow it to be done in a way that reflects actual needs and not as a one size fits all one fifth reduction on all routes.

I agree that Serpell options A & B were more radical. However, the cuts proposed under Serpell option C (all 3 variants) envisaged a <20% cut in annual passenger mileage, albeit lightly used rural routes would still be pruned significantly.

Serpell was nearly 40 years ago, so I'm afraid the economic and societal circumstances it reflects will bear no relation to the answer in 2021. Bear in mind that rail funding is fundamentally dependent on wider economic considerations - the Thatcher government of 1979-83 had no concern for decarbonisation and as for 'levelling up' - well they were embarking on the programme of industrial closures that would create the need for 'levelling up' 35 years later.......

 

[CW2]

I agree that Serpell options A & B were more radical. However, the cuts proposed under Serpell option C (all 3 variants) envisaged a <20% cut in annual passenger mileage, albeit lightly used rural routes would still be pruned significantly.

The methodology of Serpell was deeply flawed. For example he suggested terminating West Highland Line services at Crianlarich, as there seemed to be a fair traffic flow south of there, but less so north. That rather overlooked the fact the traffic flows went to Oban or Fort William, and that Crianlarich is the middle of nowhere.

What is needed now is a centralised guiding mind for the industry, to help overcome decades of fruitless "competition" which has overfilled the network with too many short trains running too often.

 

[Bald Rick]

Personally, rather than close stations, I'd look at the ridiculous crewing inefficiency we see on UK railways in comparison to abroad.
I've used this example and I'll use it again as it is local to me, but there are many many others with much bigger savings. Why does Plymouth need seperatw traincrew depots for Croscountry and GWR? By pooling resources, there is a lot of fat that could be trimmed. Both clerical and in staff on the ground. I just think its daft that when a train needs taking to Laira depot, but its an 802 and GWR havent a driver to spare, but XC have yet he cannot touch it.
Ridiculous and inefficient. And one of the problems with privatisation that could be remedied now rather than cutting stations or services...

Certainly something to look at, but not with that approach.

 

[Bald Rick]

Biggest selling newspaper in the country

Third behind Metro and the S*n, or second behind the S*n if you limit it to papers people buy. Still scary that they shift over a million copies a day

It was also the most visited English language newspaper website in the world, although I gather not anymore.

My post-COVID timetable plan.

In metro areas, every 15 minutes.
In urban areas, every 30 minutes.
In intercity/rural areas, every 1 hour.

Every train to be 8 cars maximum, with extensions to 12 cars in peak time.

Simples.

I thank our lucky stars that you don’t run the railway!

 

[bramling]

Suspect a lot of people will be holidaying abroad again if it's possible.

You bet. Plenty of people will have experienced the great British weather. This is (partly) what killed off the domestic tourism market in the first place. Only die-hards (like me!) do UK holidays.

 

[Norm_D_Ploom]

Third behind Metro and the S*n, or second behind the S*n if you limit it to papers people buy. Still scary that they shift over a million copies a day

Press Gazette didn't report the Sun & Times but the DM was in 1st place at just under 1m in the last quoted figures.

 

[ChristopherJ]

"I thank our lucky stars that you don’t run the railway!"

Why?

That's the timetable pattern where I am in Salfords, Surrey.

I have a 15min bus (Metrobus), a 30min train (Thameslink) and our premium service (Gatwick Express) is currently suspended.

PS, I just figured out who this is, hello RF.

 

[6Gman]

"I thank our lucky stars that you don’t run the railway!"

Why?

That's the timetable pattern where I am in Salfords, Surrey.

I have a 15min bus (Metrobus), a 30min train (Thameslink) and our premium service (Gatwick Express) is currently suspended.

Not sure that London - Birmingham or London - Manchester would manage with an hourly service, even in the immediate post-Covid period.

Very unlikely in the longer term.

 

[Andrew1395]

Please, where do trains run excessively frequently?

London to Birmingham. Half hourly from Euston for most of the day is enough.

 

[Bevan Price]

Would anyone care to speculate how much the Treasury will cut from the road building budget for all the new road schemes recently proposed by Boris et al? Zero ??

Cutting 20% quickly from day to day railway operations seems hard to achieve. Stock lease fees still have to be paid. Maybe they could propose actions that would provoke union hostility leading to prolonged strikes. The government would pretend to be annoyed, whilst rubbing their hands with glee at the reduced wages bill. And I suspect we can probably expect long "delays" to any new electrification programmes, and "improved railway" schemes in Northern England. The tory leadership probably realises that lots of their Commons seats from "the industrial North" are just temporary, and many will be lost now that Corbyn has gone, so it does not matter if they upset "The North" a bit.

 

[irish_rail]

But in that example it is efficient in that you don't have the costs of keeping XC crews trained on GWR's fleet / routes and vice-versa.

And things like Admin staff (roster clerks, driver managers etc) are roughly proportional to headcount anyway - you need the same number no matter how your are organisationally split.

I do seem to recall that when TfL rail split off Greater Anglia on the Liverpool St - Shenfield route, a few extra drivers were required overall due to slight loss of productivity in splitting up crew diagrams, but it wasn't more than a small handful extra.

You would have a pool of drivers employed by say NR. They would all be rostered to work all services and traction (with exceptions of little used tractions like 57s). So all drivers at Plymouth would drive voyagers, 802s and HSTs and have rostered work on all of them.
Plymouth probably isn't the best example, but at depots in places like Manchester , I wonder how many depot administarators could be cut out. And inevitably if more staff have more route and traction knowledge then fewer staff overall are needed to cover the service.

 

[Ianno87]

London to Birmingham. Half hourly from Euston for most of the day is enough.

Enough for what? Meeting capacity, stimulating demand, or driving revenue?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Enough for what? Meeting capacity, stimulating demand, or driving revenue?

All three.

 

[coppercapped]

All logic would say that’s the right approach, but the reduction in costs would be disproportionately small




I’ve asked a few people this question over the years, but never got a proper answer. Yes, the TOCs have a profit margin of around 2% according to most people, but what’s the profit margin of the railway industry as a whole?

Negative. The Government spends billions on 'the railway' every year. It is a non-profit making organisation...

 

[Ianno87]

All three.

Just look at ridership growth since 3tph was introduced in 2008.... Clearly 2tph does not do this to the same extent.

Plus the fact that 3tph to Manchester and Birmingham is a very, very efficient use of the Pendolino fleet.

 

[Greybeard33]

The Mail on Sunday article linked in the OP made three claims, which are not necessarily compatible with each other:

A fifth of rail services could be cut next year because Ministers are struggling to control a ballooning multi-billion-pound taxpayer bill.

Whitehall officials are looking at plans that could see rail capacity slashed to around 80 per cent of pre-pandemic service levels.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is reported to have approved a modest £2.1 billion to ensure services keep running during the next financial year, constituting less than a quarter of the £9 billion estimated bill for the year to March 2021.

A 20% capacity cut is not necessarily the same as a 20% service cut. For example, cutting a service operated by a 11- car 390 reduces capacity more than cutting a service operated by a 9-car.

The £2.1bn is presumably the additional subsidy approved, since the total rail subsidy was more than £4bn pre-Covid. But it is impossible to predict whether or not a 20% service cut could reduce the required subsidy to this level, since that depends on how much patronage, and so farebox revenue, recovers over the next few months.

It seems possible that the Treasury will push for fare increases to increase yield per passenger. In combination with frequency reductions to reduce costs.

 

[Purple Orange]

Just look at ridership growth since 3tph was introduced in 2008.... Clearly 2tph does not do this to the same extent.

Plus the fact that 3tph to Manchester and Birmingham is a very, very efficient use of the Pendolino fleet.

I am almost positive that the 3 tph issue would not be as nearly as prevalent if Liverpool had 2 (or 3) tph. In fact Birmingham has 7 tph (Although only 3 fast), yet that never gets raised.

 

[yorksrob]

Routes - that depends on your definition of a route. I’d be surprised if any physical lines of route that have more than a parliamentary service are closed. I can see some ‘service routes’ being removed, ie where there is overlap with other services. I can also see a cull of the Parliamentaries.

Re stations, well that’s a different story. Where stations are very lightly used (in my view, those with fewer than 10 passengers a day in non Covid times), and they either cause a timetabling constraint or cause a disproportionate use of resources, then they should close. This is not ‘the thin end of the wedge’, but some cold hard analysis on socio-economic benefit.

Well, I'd have to consider each case on its merits. Most lightly used stations are on routes where the stop doesn't make that much difference. I can't imagine Doleham, for example would yield enough savings to merit closure.

But those don't conflict. The places where others drive to are the same places you would want to go by train to.

Hmm. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. There's limited funding and you have a stopping service alongside a motorway versus a rural branch line. The route alongside the motorway is going to have more potential to attract motorists, whereas the branch line is more vital to the community. That's a conflict.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

The DfT could dig out the Serpell report and implement it.

You forget they dug out the Beeching report to work out ones they need to reinstate!

I agree but unfortunately London is where the whole rail industry earns its money.
Southeastern is by far the smallest of the "dc" franchises but by revenue pre-covid was bigger than LNER.
If there are no central London offices to commute to in all likelihood there's no London office to make expensive anytime trips to from Manchester or Leeds either.
Much cheaper for companies to provide a hire car and meet at the conference centre at Reading services on the M4.

If commuting collapses it wont earn all the money yet will have huge costs and not just in leasing charges and train crew but in track access charges. Whilst they are no longer needed in the new railway Network Rail will still need to be funded. But in all this the railway is desparately needing clear direction by the govt as to what it once and an organisation that brings it all together. This is what Shapps wants so he needs to get on with issuing White Paper hes talked about all year as that is the only way DofT will be able to deal with funding pressures being exerted by the Treasury.

 

[Purple Orange]

You forget they dug out the Beeching report to work out ones they need to reinstate!


If commuting collapses it wont earn all the money yet will have huge costs and not just in leasing charges and train crew but in track access charges. Whilst they are no longer needed in the new railway Network Rail will still need to be funded. But in all this the railway is desparately needing clear direction by the govt as to what it once and an organisation that brings it all together. This is what Shapps wants so he needs to get on with issuing White Paper hes talked about all year as that is the only way DofT will be able to deal with funding pressures being exerted by the Treasury.

I agree but unfortunately London is where the whole rail industry earns its money.
Southeastern is by far the smallest of the "dc" franchises but by revenue pre-covid was bigger than LNER.
If there are no central London offices to commute to in all likelihood there's no London office to make expensive anytime trips to from Manchester or Leeds either.
Much cheaper for companies to provide a hire car and meet at the conference centre at Reading services on the M4.

If that’s the real outlook, we may as well close the railway now. It’s highly presumptive to assume that patronage of the railways will not return to 2019 levels. Clearly the government does not see it that way, otherwise they would mothball crossrail and cease work on HS2 now.

 

[Andrew1395]

You need the economy to rediscover reasons to travel - commuting to a location that’s not your home to work, travel to have face to face contact with others, to have an experience (culture, entertainment, etc).

You can maintain frequencies and cut prices. But if London and the south east are in pseudo Tier 4 until June 2021, then people won’t return. So thats next years income blown like this. By then the short term need to save money on everything but infrastructure will be the mantra. That will see jobs cut in rail occupations and budgets.

A friend who works in Canary Wharf has moved to Norwich from the Essex suburbs. Only needing now to go in to the office once or twice a week. He plans to drive rather than sit on a train. Not sure I understand why he sees that as a better option, but it is an attitude and response I have heard from others.

 

[yorksrob]

You need the economy to rediscover reasons to travel - commuting to a location that’s not your home to work, travel to have face to face contact with others, to have an experience (culture, entertainment, etc).

You can maintain frequencies and cut prices. But if London and the south east are in pseudo Tier 4 until June 2021, then people won’t return. So thats next years income blown like this. By then the short term need to save money on everything but infrastructure will be the mantra. That will see jobs cut in rail occupations and budgets.

A friend who works in Canary Wharf has moved to Norwich from the Essex suburbs. Only needing now to go in to the office once or twice a week. He plans to drive rather than sit on a train. Not sure I understand why he sees that as a better option, but it is an attitude and response I have heard from others.

Until the three places you are more likely to catch the virus - school, public transport and hospital, are dealt with and the pandemic is brought under control, the industry will need to reflect the contraction all public services will be put through.

I agree with your assessment, however I feel that the idea of public transport being "one of the three places where you're more likely to catch the virus" is a misnomer, and that's the problem.

 

[DB]

Until the three places you are more likely to catch the virus - school, public transport and hospital, are dealt with and the pandemic is brought under control, the industry will need to reflect the contraction all public services will be put through.

I'm not aware of any evidence for public transport being a significant source of spread - do you have any evidence of this?

So far as I am aware the most likely places to catch it are work, home, and in some cases hospitals and care homes. Schools may or may not be significant - but there doesn't seem to be any data on outbreaks linked to them.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Would anyone care to speculate how much the Treasury will cut from the road building budget for all the new road schemes recently proposed by Boris et al? Zero ??

Cutting 20% quickly from day to day railway operations seems hard to achieve. Stock lease fees still have to be paid. Maybe they could propose actions that would provoke union hostility leading to prolonged strikes. The government would pretend to be annoyed, whilst rubbing their hands with glee at the reduced wages bill. And I suspect we can probably expect long "delays" to any new electrification programmes, and "improved railway" schemes in Northern England. The tory leadership probably realises that lots of their Commons seats from "the industrial North" are just temporary, and many will be lost now that Corbyn has gone, so it does not matter if they upset "The North" a bit.

There are two budgets, capital and revenue.
This particular article is about the revenue budget (day to day costs).
You can't equate that to the road-building budget because that's capital spend, more like the HS2 and NR enhancements budgets (though they are under pressure too).
This 20% is focused on the TOCs' costs, and also NR's operating budget (things like signalling and track maintenance), also the level of farebox income.
You only need look at what's happened to the aviation industry to see how the real world has had to adapt to the drop in revenue.

 

[Andrew1395]

I'm not aware of any evidence for public transport being a significant source of spread - do you have any evidence of this?

So far as I am aware the most likely places to catch it are work, home, and in some cases hospitals and care homes. Schools may or may not be significant - but there doesn't seem to be any data on outbreaks linked to them.

The government advice in Tier 3 is you should not travel to work. Tier 4 is you must not - in both cases unless you have no alternative. In March London had the highest infection rates partly because of the huge movement of people coming into contact with each other.

if mass travel is not a spreader of the virus, why the aggressive mitigation’s to restrict people being in close proximity On trains and buses? And why was everyone upset when thousands squashed into trains leaving central London on the evening of Saturday 19 December!

anyway the government believes public transport is a source of Covid 19 transmission.

There is a good body of evidence to associate public transport with transmission of respiratory infections from a mixture of epidemiological studies and modelling studies. While some show no association between public transport and risk, the overall weight of evidence is towards an increased risk.

Evidence for SARS-CoV-2

6. Zhao et al (2020) explored evidence for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Zhao et al., 2020) by examining the association between load of domestic passengers from Wuhan and the number of 2019-nCoV cases confirmed in different cities. They found strong and significant association between travel by train and the number of Covid-19 cases, whereas the associations of the other two means of transportation failed to reach statistical significance.

read more at

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/904663/S0441_EMG_-_Evidence_for_transmission_of_SARS-COV-2_on_ground_public_transport.pdf

if you mean empty trains are not a source of transmission, I suspect you are right. As will the Treasury

if being at home is In itself a major source of infection why the lockdown? You would be putting people at risk. You catch the virus from people who enter your home who may have been , for example been infected at school or at a bus stop.

schools returned in September and along with other relaxations on social distancing, we very quickly saw infections, hospitalisations and deaths beginning to grow. If schools are not a concern, why are we going to test every child in year 7-13 year group weekly from January until the pandemic is over Why have schools been told to go to remote teaching and why are we planning a staggered return to school after Christmas. Secondary school children are as likely to catch and spread the virus as adult Teachers (More so when you realise how difficult it is for them to maintain 2 m social distancing once outside the school gate). The course of the disease in young people may be different to other age groups.

vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable is a sensible health priority, but will do little to get the economic active back on trains.

this all probably needs to be in another thread.

 

[WatcherZero]

Besides the government is reportedly having to think about implementing national road pricing as they face the revenue cliff edge of all the electric vehicles theyve promoted paying no fuel duty and lower tax bands due to smaller/non existent engines.

 

[yorksrob]

if mass travel is not a spreader of the virus, why the aggressive mitigation’s to restrict people being in close proximity On trains and buses? And why was everyone upset when thousands squashed into trains leaving central London on the evening of Saturday 19 December!

if you mean empty trains are not a source of transmission, I suspect you are right.

if being at home is In itself a major source of infection why the lockdown?

schools returned in September and along with other relaxations on social distancing, we very quickly saw infections, hospitalisations and deaths beginning to grow. If schools are not a concern, why are we going to test every child in year 7-13 year group weekly from January until the pandemic is over Why are schools been told to go to remote teaching and why are w3 planning a staggered return to school after Christmas.

vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable is a sensible health priority, but will do little to get the economic active back on trains.

this all probably needs to be in another thread.

What is "being in close proximity on trains and buses" in reality. I've been using trains and buses since May. On barely any have I been in "close proximity" with anyone, yet not that many have been empty. And I've not to my knowledge caught covid on them either (so far).