My proposals for full renationalisation of the National Rail network rather than a half-way house

[Railman]

Not been a good year for the Tories, Re nationalising the Railways, Energy companies going bust, lack of cheap foriegn labour causing them to say HGV drivers pay should go up. Starting to think they are more Labour than Labour!!
Time to push on with the new gBR, and dont waste time on a halfway house that will have to be full nationalsiation of TOCs later on. What will the new model look like? well to save a lot of time and public money on consulants etc just get out the file on 1993 Rail privatisation and rip out the first page "where we are now" and keep it, and throw away the rest.

 

[43066]

well to save a lot of time and public money on consulants etc just get out the file on 1993 Rail privatisation and rip out the first page "where we are now" and keep it, and throw away the rest.

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

 

[Davester50]

Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

BR towards the end was doing well with the funds it was given. Imagine BR having the funds that the privatised railway had lavished upon it.
Swiss+

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

People continually fail to understand that BR didn't have the funds to do anything less than managed decline and what it actually did was find a way to keep the network intact such that it was still there for the passengers to come back to and for all of us to continue to enjoy today. It certainly never had to pay back £25m to dept of transport but it more than saved them that amount every year.

 

[30907]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

I did and I do (the sectorised version), despite the government's under-investment . Perhaps I'm a nobody?

But that's OT.

 

[thenorthern]

BR towards the end was doing well with the funds it was given. Imagine BR having the funds that the privatised railway had lavished upon it.
Swiss+

It was doing OK but nothing special. The problem with British Rail and British Airways was they struggled to raise capital for more investment and there wasn't much of an incentive to get more passengers.

With private companies it's much easier to raise capital for projects than for state owned companies. Also with private companies there is an incentive to get more passengers as it keeps the shareholders happy.

 

[quantinghome]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

I remember it. In terms of punctuality and customer service I honestly see very little difference between the early 90s and now. Of course, the railway today is better in most respects than it was in latter days of BR. But then the railway in the early 90s was also better than it was in the late 1940s. But that's just plain old progress, nothing to do with who owns the railway.

You accuse others of 'pure ideology' then proceed to make highly ideological claims yourself. Managed decline was the inevitable outcome of post-war government policy as they kept insisting that BR make a profit, which would only have been possible with a significantly smaller network once freight shifted to road transport. Yet despite the lack of investment BR somehow managed to roll out major line upgrades, electrification schemes and journey time improvements. The Intercity 125 programme was truly transformative. All this on a shoe-string, and often achieved much quicker than equivalent projects during the privatisation period.

Apologies to the mods for continuing an O/T conversation. Perhaps we can split this discussion off into a new thread?

 

[Djgr]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

Well count me out of your "nobody". Always proud to say "Bring Back British Rail".

 

[LowLevel]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

I don't know about that. I actually think it's a shame it never had a chance to prove itself long term once it was reorganised into businesses. It often seems to be the case that just as things seem to be coming together someone decides it's best to mix things up again.

Intercity was very good, albeit with a backbone elderly train issue on Cross Country and West Coast bearing down on it to resolve, Regional Railways had turned the local railway around pretty well from the dark days of the 70s and early 80s and Network South East was just starting to see the results of total route modernisation.

Same happened with Central Trains - in the last 18 months it finally had some really high quality electric trains coming on stream in the form of the 350s and a great backbone to it's DMU fleet in the form of some nearly new 170s. Meddling took place and left two of the three resulting businesses with crippling rolling stock shortages.

Someone *always* has to find reason to tinker to justify their own existence and very rarely is it actually a hugely positive impact that they create.

 

[nw1]

Well count me out of your "nobody". Always proud to say "Bring Back British Rail".

Yes, there was nothing wrong with 1982-95 era BR, IMO, and I am no particular fan of the style of fragmented privatisation implemented by the Tory government of the 90s. (I pick 1982 was that was my first year using the railways, so can't really comment on 1948-81 first-hand). There was a lot of modernisation in that period and such things as reliability and overcrowding were less of a problem than in the privatised era, though I don't blame the downward trend on those measures on privatisation as such, rather the railway was a victim of its own success in attracting passengers.

On the other hand, a 'British Rail', or a TOC, run by this sorry excuse of a government, is something that doesn't inspire me with confidence. For example SWR's planned cuts are, from what I can make out, at the behest of the government. I think I'd prefer a private company to run my trains than the likes of Johnson and Shapps. Let's wait for a new, less right-wing government, and *then* nationalise the railways!

 

[bramling]

I don't know about that. I actually think it's a shame it never had a chance to prove itself long term once it was reorganised into businesses. It often seems to be the case that just as things seem to be coming together someone decides it's best to mix things up again.

Intercity was very good, albeit with a backbone elderly train issue on Cross Country and West Coast bearing down on it to resolve, Regional Railways had turned the local railway around pretty well from the dark days of the 70s and early 80s and Network South East was just starting to see the results of total route modernisation.

Same happened with Central Trains - in the last 18 months it finally had some really high quality electric trains coming on stream in the form of the 350s and a great backbone to it's DMU fleet in the form of some nearly new 170s. Meddling took place and left two of the three resulting businesses with crippling rolling stock shortages.

Someone *always* has to find reason to tinker to justify their own existence and very rarely is it actually a hugely positive impact that they create.

I’d agree that 1990s British Rail never had the opportunity to prove itself. A lot of good things happened around this time - quite a few electrification schemes in particular which laid the foundations for some spectacular growth over the following decades. Naturally some of this was done down to a specification, and in many cases has required costly follow-up works, but it did happen.

 

[nw1]

I’d agree that 1990s British Rail never had the opportunity to prove itself. A lot of good things happened around this time - quite a few electrification schemes in particular which laid the foundations for some spectacular growth over the following decades. Naturally some of this was done down to a specification, and in many cases has required costly follow-up works, but it did happen.

+1 to that. As I have said in the past, the 1987-90 period in particular was a period of significant improvement, so more the late-80s going into the 90s. This period saw improved service frequencies, electrifications, more regular timetables and sped-up services for various reasons. On the other hand 1991-3 seemed to mark something of a decline, on some routes (e.g. out of Waterloo), though that was likely due to the recession rather than BR themselves.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

+1 to that. As I have said in the past, the 1987-90 period in particular was a period of significant improvement, so more the late-80s going into the 90s. This period saw improved service frequencies, electrifications, more regular timetables and sped-up services for various reasons. On the other hand 1991-3 seemed to mark something of a decline, on some routes (e.g. out of Waterloo), though that was likely due to the recession rather than BR themselves.

Only in selected areas (eg ECML, Chiltern), where BR was able to focus its efforts.
The majority of the network, especially Regional Railways, was deteriorating with minimal investment, and the government would never have given the necessary upgrade funds to BR.
Whatever you think of privatisation, it unlocked investment line by line across the whole country, and opened up the BR edifice to much closer monitoring and management, with 20-odd separate operations.
WCRM and Thameslink 2000 were approved on a privatised basis; they would have struggled to get those funds under BR.
BR never had the scope or security of 5-year funding plans that began in 1995, and which Network Rail has today (current CP6 is £38 billion).

 

[yorksrob]

Only in selected areas (eg ECML, Chiltern), where BR was able to focus its efforts.
The majority of the network, especially Regional Railways, was deteriorating with minimal investment, and the government would never have given the necessary upgrade funds to BR.
Whatever you think of privatisation, it unlocked investment line by line across the whole country, and opened up the BR edifice to much closer monitoring and management, with 20-odd separate operations.
WCRM and Thameslink 2000 were approved on a privatised basis; they would have struggled to get those funds under BR.
BR never had the scope or security of 5-year funding plans that began in 1995, and which Network Rail has today (current CP6 is £38 billion).

And how many years late was Thameslink 2000 ?

How long did we have to put up with no growth franchises on the regional railways ?

The reality is that no bit of the railway can have investment 100% of the time. It's a bit disingenuous to highlight the investment blackspots under BR and ignore those under privatisation.

 

[Irascible]

Are the important bits not even more under govt control *now* than under BR? NR - and hence the network itself - is nationally owned and the DfT decides what runs where directly, staff swap uniforms with franchise changes so they might as well be DfT employees ( who's underwiting staff pensions, btw? ).. Sure, make the OLR permanent everywhere & fold things back into sectors & you've done it but the real damage was blowing up all the infrastructure & science departments into hundreds of fragments, it's going to take more than mere public ownership to rebuild there.

 

[507020]

Are the important bits not even more under govt control *now* than under BR? NR - and hence the network itself - is nationally owned and the DfT decides what runs where directly, staff swap uniforms with franchise changes so they might as well be DfT employees ( who's underwiting staff pensions, btw? ).. Sure, make the OLR permanent everywhere & fold things back into sectors & you've done it but the real damage was blowing up all the infrastructure & science departments into hundreds of fragments, it's going to take more than mere public ownership to rebuild there.

Exactly. There was a LOT more to BR than just a few passenger services. There was everything that had been inherited from the Big 4 as well as everything created since. The BR research department, the design and manufacture of all rolling stock and signalling equipment, the railway hotels, Sealink ferries, the Seaspeed Hovercraft “Princess Anne” and “Princess Margaret”, Red Star parcels, Motorail and Travellers-Fare catering to name but a few of the other aspects of our nationalised railway. Not everything was sold on privatisation, but particularly with the hotels, it only took someone with expertise in running modern hotels a few thousand pounds worth of paint, new carpet and bedsheets to make them profitable, so why couldn’t BR have hired such a person as Alex Polizzi and used them to generate income for the taxpayer? The loss of the scientific areas is the most damaging, as no development has now taken place in the intervening 30 years meaning that an entirely new British design of bogie compatible with British Railways, which several foreign designed ones have proved not to be, much to the bewilderment of their foreign designers. The same applies to signalling systems, a freight locomotive to replace Class 66s, bi-modes required to replace no less than 832 Class 150/156/158 carriages over the next decade and the list goes on. If the expertise in this country was sold off then the only thing we can do is import and foreign manufacturers are aware of this. Fortunately, thanks to the infrastructure operator being in public hands, electrification is one area in which the skills do exist in this country, but the government refuses to do any! The whole thing was completely broken until very recently. The South Eastern OLR renders it about 0.5% less broken, but it is a significant improvement.

 

[Aictos]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

You're conveniently forgetting that BR had to operate on a much lower budget then TOCs of post BR for example, ECML electrification done to a shoe string budget, HSTs seen as a stop gap, they also had tough choices to make either Class 91s for WCML or Networkers for Network SouthEast but they did their best with the limited resources available eg modernisation and electrification of the WCML etc...

If BR had just a fraction of the funding and investment made available to the likes of Southern, Virgin Trains, ScotRail, Thameslink etc which all saw new trains during their tenure then BR would have managed to do the same.

If the TOCs of post BR had to deal with the same limited budgets that BR did then I doubt you be seeing reality though your rose tinted glasses.

 

[irish_rail]

I don't know about that. I actually think it's a shame it never had a chance to prove itself long term once it was reorganised into businesses. It often seems to be the case that just as things seem to be coming together someone decides it's best to mix things up again.

Intercity was very good, albeit with a backbone elderly train issue on Cross Country and West Coast bearing down on it to resolve, Regional Railways had turned the local railway around pretty well from the dark days of the 70s and early 80s and Network South East was just starting to see the results of total route modernisation.

Same happened with Central Trains - in the last 18 months it finally had some really high quality electric trains coming on stream in the form of the 350s and a great backbone to it's DMU fleet in the form of some nearly new 170s. Meddling took place and left two of the three resulting businesses with crippling rolling stock shortages.

Someone *always* has to find reason to tinker to justify their own existence and very rarely is it actually a hugely positive impact that they create.

I agree that Intercity is sorely missed. A national operator providing consistent high quality services the length and breadth of the country. So situations like passengers on the Western having to suffer the GWR 800 interior , whilst those up north get the far more pleasant LNER or TPE sets. There would be one standard throughout and it would be far better in my view.
Something to be truly proud of. As others have said, this GBR halfway house but still keeping lots of TOCs isn't going to achieve anything.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I agree that Intercity is sorely missed. A national operator providing consistent high quality services the length and breadth of the country. So situations like passengers on the Western having to suffer the GWR 800 interior , whilst those up north get the far more pleasant LNER or TPE sets.

That shows the power of marketing - give or take the LNER buffet, they are the same other than in colour.

 

[tbtc]

Yes, there was nothing wrong with 1982-95 era BR, IMO

Nothing wrong?

There was some good, certainly, but let's not pretend that it was all rosey.

The regular strikes

The accidents (over a thousand injured or killed at Clapham and Cannon Street combined)

The fare rises that certainly weren't limited to just RPI once a year

The withdrawal of evening/Sunday services on certain routes

The stations that were reduced to just a handful of services a week (in the days before any franchise commitments promised to maintain a minimum service, it was easy to reduce a station to a token number of calls)

The closures of stations/ lines (as well as the proposals to close more down, even the S&C) - admittedly starting in 1982 excludes closure of the Woodhead route, but closures continued to happen up until privatisation

The replacement of "full length" loco hauled services by two coach Sprinters

The subsequent chopping of dozens of two coach Sprinters into single coach units to stretch resources further

The constant penny pinching

And if you still think that BR did nothing wrong, may I bring up the introduction of Pacers?

Even some of the good things had problems (e.g. the ECML electrification)

The usual retort now, I believe, is to say that it wasn't BR's fault, all of the bad things were because of the nasty Governments at the time not funding BR well enough (which ignores the fact that the BR management at time chose to lavish huge sums of money on certain areas/ routes whilst starving others - if they had the money for all these swanky new trains on Network South East then they can't also plead poverty for the fact that they had to replace services with single 153s due to lack of funds)

I'm not saying it was all bad - of course not - there were big improvements in certain areas - but we seem to have forgotten most of the miserable aspects of it (or excused them all as being the Government's fault) whilst lavishing praise on BR for all of the good things that happened during this period

On the other hand, a 'British Rail', or a TOC, run by this sorry excuse of a government, is something that doesn't inspire me with confidence. For example SWR's planned cuts are, from what I can make out, at the behest of the government. I think I'd prefer a private company to run my trains than the likes of Johnson and Shapps. Let's wait for a new, less right-wing government, and *then* nationalise the railways!

This is the problem with the "nationalisation" fixation - if you want nationalised trains then you have to accept all of the whims of the various parties in power (locally, nationally)

Look at how people excuse BR in the 1980s/1990s because "it wasn't BR's fault, they had to implement the cuts forced through by Thatcher/ Major" - look at how public services were trashed in Cameron's Austerity years yet rail thrived

I agree that Intercity is sorely missed. A national operator providing consistent high quality services the length and breadth of the country. So situations like passengers on the Western having to suffer the GWR 800 interior , whilst those up north get the far more pleasant LNER or TPE sets. There would be one standard throughout and it would be far better in my view

Consistent? One standard?

This was the InterCity (in BR days) that could have meant a two coach 158 (on some Cross Country services, e.g. Edinburgh to Manchester Airport, the Glasgow - Portsmouth service that went into Liverpool to reverse) or 73s on the Gatwick Express or 47s on much of Cross Country - InterCity could mean DMUs or Mk2s or Mk3s or Mk4s - vastly different levels of comfort/ food etc?

There wasn't even much "consistency" about what made it onto the InterCity map - remember that BR's idea of "InterCity" meant that the Gatwick Express counted but a train from Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - York - Durham - Newcastle apparently didn't serve sufficient cities to qualify, so was just "Regional Railways" instead - it was never a consistent product (I remember the "InterCity" maps that used to feature in diaries and road atlases at the time that suggested that the only way of getting between Manchester and Leeds was to change trains at Tamworth or go all the way up to Edinburgh!

But revisionism means that people "remember" everything being the highest quality, even though you'd have struggled to find a restaurant car on the 158s or some of the Mk2s I used to travel on

 

[quantinghome]

This is the problem with the "nationalisation" fixation - if you want nationalised trains then you have to accept all of the whims of the various parties in power (locally, nationally)

Unless you have a genuinely commercially profitable passenger railway, which we don't (and hardly anywhere in the world does) you will ALWAYS have political interference. Taxpayers' money will always be necessary, and politicians will look to spend in a certain way according to how they perceive the demand of their constituents and/or funders.

Privatisation didn't create a new source of funding for railways; it came from the same place it always does: fare payers and tax payers.

Look at how people excuse BR in the 1980s/1990s because "it wasn't BR's fault, they had to implement the cuts forced through by Thatcher/ Major" - look at how public services were trashed in Cameron's Austerity years yet rail thrived

Cameron didn't cut rail spending, because infrastructure funding is agreed in 5-year control periods and he inherited one starting in 2009. That's the only advantage of a franchise system - it locks the government into a contractual requirement to provide funding, rather than chopping and changing every year.

 

[nw1]

Only in selected areas (eg ECML, Chiltern), where BR was able to focus its efforts.
The majority of the network, especially Regional Railways, was deteriorating with minimal investment, and the government would never have given the necessary upgrade funds to BR.

Mind you, was it? I will admit I was not a really close follower of RR in this era (living in NSE-land) but my perception of RR in 1987-90 or so was that the main trends were stock renewal (sprinterisation) and introduction of more regular, clockface timetables. But this was just gained from casual glances of timetables rather than being an actual user.

 

[tbtc]

Unless you have a genuinely commercially profitable passenger railway, which we don't (and hardly anywhere in the world does) you will ALWAYS have political interference. Taxpayers' money will always be necessary, and politicians will look to spend in a certain way according to how they perceive the demand of their constituents and/or funders.

Privatisation didn't create a new source of funding for railways; it came from the same place it always does: fare payers and tax payers

I agree - but privatisation meant that we had the stability of longer term planning - a seven/ten year franchise guaranteed a certain level of service at stations, certain standards too - Network Rail was set up to deliver certain things during five year periods - whereas the BR model had none of those guarantees - stations could see their evening/Sunday services scrapped at the next timetable change - the relatively modern stock you'd got used to on your local route could be moved hundreds of miles away due to BR's "Robbing Peter To Pay Paul" approach

The model of privatisation that we had wasn't perfect, but it delivered some medium term certainties that the BR model didn't - state controlled (so not entirely at the mercy of the private sector) but without the level of state interference that a wholly nationalised system would have.

And I think that the Government were "scared" to impose cuts on the large companies who ran franchises and the foreign governments who owned some of them, certainly reluctant to pick a fight with the likes of Branson - when they could have bullied a supine BR that was wholly dependent on the Government - we had a pretty decent "half way house" in hindsight

If we want nationalisation then we have to accept nationalisation during the leadership of someone like Sunak/ Patel, not just the largesse of Prime Ministers who are sympathetic to the railway (I really don't like the way that pro-nationalisation people always praise BR for the "good" and blame the Government for the "bad" that was happening at the same time)

Cameron didn't cut rail spending, because infrastructure funding is agreed in 5-year control periods and he inherited one starting in 2009. That's the only advantage of a franchise system - it locks the government into a contractual requirement to provide funding, rather than chopping and changing every year.

Exactly - local government and various other departments saw huge cuts but railways were protected because the privatised model meant that they were out of Government hands when it came to annual budgets - imagine how a "BR" would have fared in 2010-2015, and how many lines would have been closed? 1980s BR closed Woodhead and tried to close the S&C and Marylebone station - in comparison privatised railways' list of closures and potential closures is small fry like IBM Halt and British Steel Redcar - I don't think I feel comfortable being wholly nationalised and subject to the whims of politics

 

[nw1]

Nothing wrong?

There was some good, certainly, but let's not pretend that it was all rosey.

Maybe I should add a caveat of "in my experience". But I was a regular, 5-day-a-week rail user (school commute) from 1982-89 and fairly regular user from 1990-95. There were problems admittedly but I do remember my school commutes being pretty hassle-free, with less delays and overcrowding than the privatised era - and I used morning peak Waterloo services, so in one direction at least I was on the busier trains of the day.

And the prevailing trends in NSE-land did seem to be positive: electrification of several lines (Hastings, East Grinstead, Weymouth, Solent); Thameslink; stock renewal; and particularly in the 87-90 period, improved service frequencies.

I will admit it wasn't all good though, I do remember the 1985 and 1991 timetables in particular showing marked cuts. In the former case though many such cuts had been reversed by the late 80s. And I am aware of early-80s cuts though these seemed to largely occur just before I started using the railways (late 1982).

Elsewhere on the network you had such things as the ECML electrification.

But while I prefer a nationalised BR on the whole (but not ShappsRail, I want to make that clear), I don't fully lay the blame of the issues of 21st-century rail on privatisation. As I said above they are perhaps an inevitable consequence of more people using the railways which a post-Beeching network does not have the capacity to cope with.

And how many years late was Thameslink 2000 ?

In comparison, incidentally, what was the original target opening year for Thameslink 1988?

If we want nationalisation then we have to accept nationalisation during the leadership of someone like Sunak/ Patel, not just the largesse of Prime Ministers who are sympathetic to the railway (I really don't like the way that pro-nationalisation people always praise BR for the "good" and blame the Government for the "bad" that was happening at the same time)

Is this an 'end of Johnson' forecast incidentally? (sorry for OT post). Mind you I hope it's not a forecast of Patel becoming prime minister - someone who makes Thatcher look like a left-wing kind-hearted socialist. Only good thing there I suspect is that Patel would lose an election, badly.

 

[gg1]

That’s purely ideological. Nobody who remembers using BR as a passenger actually wants it to come back. It presided over decades of managed decline and under investment which has taken much of the last two decades to reverse.

I'm another 'nobody' who disagrees.

I was a fairly regular rail traveller in the final years of BR from 1993 to 1998, and became one again from 2013 until 2020. IMO the passenger experience in the 90s was a better one than in the 2010s.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

You would hardly expect me to not comment on the fact Inter City , Freight and (almost) NSE were subsidy free up 1989 ...........

Plenty of detailed , factual evidence in say "Modern Railways" and hefty books like Gourvish on "BR economics" and service quality etc.

A sobering fact is that "BR" cost about a £100K a day in the late 80's to keep going. Often proven to be the most efficient / VFM railway in Europe.

Yes - there was constant change and churn , but a 153 on certain lines was better than no service.

 

[quantinghome]

An issue often ignored is that the BR service structure, particularly regional services, became preserved in aspic upon privatisation. A lot of flexibility was lost. For example the Liverpool-Norwich service was established I think in the early 90s by BR, largely for operational reasons, but this has then stuck for the best part of 30 years not for any reason of meeting a demand but because the franchise system imposes a straightjacket on services. Since privatisation there have been comparatively few brand new connections. There are plenty of examples of patchy services under BR which have been significantly improved (e.g. Manchester-Glasgow, Leeds-Edinburgh), but only a handful of new connections - ECML open operators, Norwich-Cambridge and Leeds-Nottingham are the only ones that come to mind. As a result there are still regions of the country which have no direct services between them.

 

[deltic]

Ownership of the railways is fairly irrelevant - given that few parts of the network are profitable what is key is certainty of funding, agreeing what you actually want from your railways and transparency. The latter is almost completely lacking in the rail sector. The CAA publishes detailed route by route traffic flows for the highly competitive and privately operated airline industry and yet similar data in the heavily subsidised rail sector is regarded as commercially sensitive.

 

[XAM2175]

Red Star parcels

Which turned out to be hideously unprofitable once sectorisation stopped the hiding of costs in other departments' overheads.

Motorail

Also unprofitable.

The loss of the scientific areas is the most damaging, as no development has now taken place in the intervening 30 years meaning that an entirely new British design of bogie compatible with British Railways, which several foreign designed ones have proved not to be, much to the bewilderment of their foreign designers.

Why, pray tell, do we need "an entirely new British design of bogie compatible with British Railways"? How have foreign-designed bogies proven to be "incompatible"?

If this is a badly-veiled criticism of inside-frame bogies, you should know that Network Rail's access-charging structure incentivises their use.

The same applies to signalling systems

We've been through this before. Your understanding of ETCS is hugely flawed and you still can't articulate a single decent reason for a wanting a uniquely British signalling system that isn't based on personal ideology.

a freight locomotive to replace Class 66s

Several such locomotives exist; it's just that nobody yet wants to spend the money on shrinking them to fit British loading gauge. I can't imagine that a hypothetical modern-day BREL would be particularly interested in doing so either.

bi-modes required to replace no less than 832 Class 150/156/158 carriages over the next decade and the list goes on

Stadler already have such a unit and both Bombardier and CAF say they're willing to come up with one when asked, so I'm not sure what you're driving at here either.

If the expertise in this country was sold off then the only thing we can do is import and foreign manufacturers are aware of this.

I agree that it was disappointing to lose that knowledge and institutional memory, but let's not forget that it was the British market's inability to actually build reliable locomotives that let EMD get their first toe in the door here. And can you blame the new owners of ex-BREL and the like for shutting up shop here at a time when domestic customers simply weren't buying any new trains, and when it was once again proven that export customers have no interest in uniquely British kit?

 

[Irascible]

You would hardly expect me to not comment on the fact Inter City , Freight and (almost) NSE were subsidy free up 1989 ...........

Plenty of detailed , factual evidence in say "Modern Railways" and hefty books like Gourvish on "BR economics" and service quality etc.

A sobering fact is that "BR" cost about a £100K a day in the late 80's to keep going. Often proven to be the most efficient / VFM railway in Europe.

Genuinely not a leading question, just curiosity - if you projected late 80s BR management onto today's situation with it's different costs for safety & civils etc, do you think the subsidy would be any less than it is?

An issue often ignored is that the BR service structure, particularly regional services, became preserved in aspic upon privatisation. A lot of flexibility was lost.

This is something else I'd like opinions from proper insiders about - did the privatisation & especially fragmentation of the system result in it becoming too conservative all the way through? say what you will but BR - once it got over it's shock treatment - *had* to be innovative.

As I've said in a lot of Beeching threads ( let us please not devolve into one again ) I tend to blame BR management of the time for axeing when they should have pruned, and they made a number of questionable decisions afterwards which are still costing us now. None of the governments owning BR are remotely blameless but neither are they entirely to blame - many of them did treat the railways as something they wish would go away, though. Looking through *that* glass the beginning of the revival in the 80s seems pretty remarkable.

I agree that it was disappointing to lose that knowledge and institutional memory

That's what I was really getting at - the institutional knowledge of how to run the network with the combination of how to make it run better - we ended up with Railtrack & NR to some extent had to start over again. What's NR's R&D like? BREL and our other manufacturers are something of a seperate issue.