Darren R
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Which, of course, is the reason why every Opposition criticises rail fares and overcrowding, but no Government ever does anything about it.
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Nationalisation - how does it benefit the passenger?
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Which, of course, is the reason why every Opposition criticises rail fares and overcrowding, but no Government ever does anything about it.
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Robertj21a
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You're not allowing for the few hundreds, then few thousands of staff who would get recruited to swell the ranks of those who are quite happy working less and less for their wages - just like the 'good old days'. And where is there any incentive to innovate or simply work more efficiently ? As for fares going down.......
Gareth Marston
Established Member
It's all more complex than The Free Market Freaks versus Trotsky's Numptys, in fact if these two factions shoved off we could have some sense.
steamybrian
Established Member
I worked for BR but left the railway industry in 1996 after 2 years of privatisation and saw it breaking up.
I will agree that nationalisation and suggest the following would happen as under BR.
1. Connections would be better maintained. (At present many train companies do not seem to hold connections with another companies trains)
2. Tickets would be valid on any train on that route ( At present many tickets sold by one company are not valid by another companies train even though they are operating over the same route between the same places.
3. Staff would be more interchangeable between jobs. For instance working in HQ or divisional offices I worked overtime in a booking office to cover staff shortages. At small stations signalmen to issue tickets, etc.
I give full support to nationalisation
I will agree that nationalisation and suggest the following would happen as under BR.
1. Connections would be better maintained. (At present many train companies do not seem to hold connections with another companies trains)
2. Tickets would be valid on any train on that route ( At present many tickets sold by one company are not valid by another companies train even though they are operating over the same route between the same places.
3. Staff would be more interchangeable between jobs. For instance working in HQ or divisional offices I worked overtime in a booking office to cover staff shortages. At small stations signalmen to issue tickets, etc.
I give full support to nationalisation
Darren R
Established Member
By the time of its demise, wasn't BR the most effcient railway system in Europe? Not quite the massed ranks of bureaucrats sat on their arses waiting to collect their pensions that you seem to imagine.
Indeed.
The not-very-widely-published policy of BR in the final 10 years pre fragmentation in 1994 was to put up fares somewhat ahead of inflation, particularly in the South East, to make the most of the 'captive market' and thus meet the Treasury financial targets. In the 10 years to 1994 average fares in London / South East went up 118%, of which 30%+ was real, ie more than inflation. And it was very much BR policy to continue that, but privatisation got in the way and along came overt fares regulation with Government directives.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
The fares that are excessive are long-distance Anytime fares, evidenced by those trains not exactly being full. Other fares are probably about right unless a load of subsidised extra capacity could be found.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
It certainly was, and many of us wonder what it could have been if it had received the sort of subsidy today's operation does. Yes, today's railway is vastly superior in most ways, but it's also vastly more expensive.
You must be drunk if you think that any money saved from it not going to TOCs would be invested back in the railway.
What a fatuous argument. Even if rail were nationalised we wouldn't be going back to BR. DfT would probably interfere even more.
cjmillsnun
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About the only benefit that going back to nationalisation would bring would be to restore the wheel/rail interface, which would end the delay arbitration process that goes on now.
Sadly all the other hangups from privatisation will remain, meaning the railway will not be that much cheaper to run, projects will still require endless consultants, DafT will still be sticking their oar in at every opportunity, most of the customer service staff will be contractors. Oh and DOO. Lots more DOO.
The genie is out of the bottle. Even Nationalisation wouldn't put it back. It's too late.
Sadly all the other hangups from privatisation will remain, meaning the railway will not be that much cheaper to run, projects will still require endless consultants, DafT will still be sticking their oar in at every opportunity, most of the customer service staff will be contractors. Oh and DOO. Lots more DOO.
The genie is out of the bottle. Even Nationalisation wouldn't put it back. It's too late.
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thenorthern
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There is a part of the United Kingdom with state owned railways already called Northern Ireland. 
Compared to the railways in Great Britain are the ones in Northern Ireland better? I would say no as they are slower and less frequent and I am sure a private sector company would improve services there to try and gain more passengers. At the same time until 10 years ago I doubt any private sector operator would want to operate services in Northern Ireland. All this really sums up the debate in some ways private sector operators are better in some ways they are worse.
Compared to the railways in Great Britain are the ones in Northern Ireland better? I would say no as they are slower and less frequent and I am sure a private sector company would improve services there to try and gain more passengers. At the same time until 10 years ago I doubt any private sector operator would want to operate services in Northern Ireland. All this really sums up the debate in some ways private sector operators are better in some ways they are worse.
cjmillsnun
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There is a part of the United Kingdom with state owned railways already called Northern Ireland.
Compared to the railways in Great Britain are the ones in Northern Ireland better? I would say no as they are slower and less frequent and I am sure a private sector company would improve services there to try and gain more passengers. At the same time until 10 years ago I doubt any private sector operator would want to operate services in Northern Ireland. All this really sums up the debate in some ways private sector operators are better in some ways they are worse.
Having said that, BR was better than Northern Ireland Railways. So not really a valid comparison.
Gareth Marston
Established Member
its a question not an argument!
Bearing in mind most of the privatisation brigade base their arguments on how supposedly terrible and inefficient BR was (even though many of us who used it at the time knew that not to be the case), I don't think they have much business accusing others of making fatuous arguments.
70014IronDuke
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I do not disagree with you, YorksRob - I believe there are good arguments for a privatised system, and for an integrated, possibly state-owned system.
It was easy to see supposed inefficiencies in BR, or ways to make savings - hey, let's cut out the expensive break-down crews, eh?. Of course, when you get a train off the road, you need to hire crews and cranes at exhorbitant rates. etc etc - issues which are well discussed on here.
But why I posted is because this whole, as others have pointed out, is complex. Saying 'let's get rid of fat cats' is as cheap and populist as saying 'privatise the lot and get rid of the dead hand of the state'.
Why is there no emoticon for "pondering" ?
I do not disagree with you, YorksRob - I believe there are good arguments for a privatised system, and for an integrated, possibly state-owned system.
It was easy to see supposed inefficiencies in BR, or ways to make savings - hey, let's cut out the expensive break-down crews, eh?. Of course, when you get a train off the road, you need to hire crews and cranes at exhorbitant rates. etc etc - issues which are well discussed on here.
But why I posted is because this whole, as others have pointed out, is complex. Saying 'let's get rid of fat cats' is as cheap and populist as saying 'privatise the lot and get rid of the dead hand of the state'.
Why is there no emoticon for "pondering" ?
Indeed, but it's also easy to see how having a myriad of separate franchises as opposed to the four passenger business sectors will have increased duplication in areas such as marketing etc.
I see the rhetorical suggestion that anything deviating from a post Reagan/Thatcher ideal of a free market economy must automatically lead to us becoming North Korea, cropping up more and more in the press pertaining to wider economic issues rather than just the railway, and I just can't stop myself from responding that this isn't the case and hasn't been for much of our recent history.
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That's a good point. Neither the BR nationalised model nor the privatised franchise model are perfect. I'm not sure there is a perfect model! The question is, which model (and not just restricted to the two above) is best, and what is the definition of 'best'?
As with driver pay, the remuneration of senior staff in the TOC's is far higher than the area managers etc in BR days would have been.
Whether the same level of pay, and the same number of staff would be required under a different model of operation and ownership, is difficult to say.
Technological advances mean that even a comparison with BR operation is now extremely problematic.
Yes, it was. That didn't stop the architects of privatisation from describing it as deeply inefficient, though.
Indeed. What might have been frequently pops up as a topic here!
Quite. BR| was criticised an awful lot when I was young. Some of it was justified. Most of it wasn't. I think that overall BR did a pretty job given the circumstances of the times. Some periods were more successful, some chairmen were more effective than others, but the organisation was nowhere near as bad as some liked to claim.
A lot has been made in this thread about connections. The reason connections aren't held is because of the British mentality of not changing trains. People would rather a worse service that makes a direct journey than a better service that requires a change. (Hence the amusing Sutton Loop debacle on Thameslink).
You could have connections held when the hourly local service is self contained, rather than forming an additional intercity service somewhere else.
A reasonably good example is Stansted Airport - Birmingham. This train performs the service of 3 or 4 different trains. Stansted - Cambridge, Cambridge - Peterborough, Peterborough - Leicester and Leicester - Birmingham. This is most evident when taking this train. It pretty much tips out and re-fills at each main interchange point I've described (and Ely, but that's just because the Cambridge - Ely corridor is incredibly busy and needs a better service).
Somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands, you'd have these each as separate services, which means that if you have to hold the Peterborough - Cambridge train for 5/10/20 mins to connect with a late running service from Scotland, that only impacts passengers for Whittlesea, March, Manea, Ely, Waterbeach and Cambridge (assuming this would become a regular stopper). You're not going to impact a huge number of services elsewhere, because you'd possibly lose slots further down the service. The potential for recovery is easier.
It's also more expensive to do this, because your fleet allocation has to exist for each different chunk of service, but that's something that existed under both BR and Privatisation. If this mindset changes, you can start thinking about connecting services, but it won't change until we stop insisting on direct trains from Barmouth - Yarmouth.
You could have connections held when the hourly local service is self contained, rather than forming an additional intercity service somewhere else.
A reasonably good example is Stansted Airport - Birmingham. This train performs the service of 3 or 4 different trains. Stansted - Cambridge, Cambridge - Peterborough, Peterborough - Leicester and Leicester - Birmingham. This is most evident when taking this train. It pretty much tips out and re-fills at each main interchange point I've described (and Ely, but that's just because the Cambridge - Ely corridor is incredibly busy and needs a better service).
Somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands, you'd have these each as separate services, which means that if you have to hold the Peterborough - Cambridge train for 5/10/20 mins to connect with a late running service from Scotland, that only impacts passengers for Whittlesea, March, Manea, Ely, Waterbeach and Cambridge (assuming this would become a regular stopper). You're not going to impact a huge number of services elsewhere, because you'd possibly lose slots further down the service. The potential for recovery is easier.
It's also more expensive to do this, because your fleet allocation has to exist for each different chunk of service, but that's something that existed under both BR and Privatisation. If this mindset changes, you can start thinking about connecting services, but it won't change until we stop insisting on direct trains from Barmouth - Yarmouth.
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shinkansen1966
Member
At the moment, we lack a national brand. Remember the days of INTERCITY ?
Privatisation has given us multiple identikit rail brands, all pretending to be different. They all have similar web sites and all capable offering most UK rail tickets. But there are sufficient pointless variations, so that it's sometimes worth buying your tickets via a specific web site.
Involving private companies to run trains is fine. But we need more consistency. For example:
standard carriage yellow lines denoting first class
one web site, offering all tickets at the best price (like Bahn.de for Germany)
national brands
consistency in ticket restrictions based on route and not operator
standard national typeface for printed and online timetables
nationwide universal marketing of train travel
adopting the London bus franchise method for involving transport companies
a national smart card and a national railcard (like BahnCard)
going back to to BR's 'any reasonable route' ticketing
Privatisation has given us multiple identikit rail brands, all pretending to be different. They all have similar web sites and all capable offering most UK rail tickets. But there are sufficient pointless variations, so that it's sometimes worth buying your tickets via a specific web site.
Involving private companies to run trains is fine. But we need more consistency. For example:
standard carriage yellow lines denoting first class
one web site, offering all tickets at the best price (like Bahn.de for Germany)
national brands
consistency in ticket restrictions based on route and not operator
standard national typeface for printed and online timetables
nationwide universal marketing of train travel
adopting the London bus franchise method for involving transport companies
a national smart card and a national railcard (like BahnCard)
going back to to BR's 'any reasonable route' ticketing
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You are correct that it's really three different services. This is for financial reasons, as BR found that it meant a better use of scarce resources to thread tow or three services into a longer through route. A fine example of that is the Marches route. There' not a great through market but he financial saving sare pretty good and as a side benefit what through travellers there are don't have to change trains.
The downside is lower reliability, but this is nothing to do with nationalisation v privatisation as such.
Again that's true, but it isn't an issue of nationalisation, it's more an issue of how the railway system is financed and also the different geography of the countries concerned.
There are no direct trains from Barmouth to Yarmouth, and it's not correct to say that anyone insists on such a thing. It's simply the result of both BR and the TOC's trying to get as much out of their resources as they can. It's not a mindset as far as I;m concerned, it;s a pragmatic reaction to circumstances under a nationalised industry and a privatised one.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Have you done extensive regional travel in Germany? There are RegionalExpresse (and not just the ones that were IRs) with three hour journey times of exactly the same nature as the UK ones. The thing that makes connections work is that they often have long layovers in the middle of the route, not just at the end.
Long layovers in the middle of a journey have never been popular with either passengers or operators here. The waits at certain stations on the Heart of Wales line has attracted criticism since the new timetable came in.
As usual, though, it's a resource led situation, and again, I don't think that the system being nationalised or privatised has much to do with it.
As usual, though, it's a resource led situation, and again, I don't think that the system being nationalised or privatised has much to do with it.
So, yes, I agree. I didn't make it clear enough in my original post that I was making the post entirely to point out that connections have nothing to do with Nationalisation or Privatisation.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Indeed. They're a policy thing, and they have more to do with the style of operation. DB Regio services tend to operate around a 2 hourly frequency base, which means a missed connection has high impact, so they are often held. UK services generally run to higher frequencies, so they often aren't.
I thought you were, but I wasn't sure!
But REs tend to stick to one Region and don't tend to just cross the entire country.
That's left to the ICs and ICEs. Germany has a very different population distribution so it can't be directly compared (we'd be catapulting ourselves off topic here).
I was mostly talking about Regio-Bahn trains, rather than Regio-Express trains, as services like Cambridge - Peterborough aren't really serving anywhere in between the two that would be served by an RE. REs tend to serve major population areas between towns, where Rs tend to serve the intermediate stops too (it's why I subtly didn't talk about Norwich - Liverpool, that is much more RE like).
I agree, let's stay focused on the original question, please!
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
They stick largely to one Bundesland with some overlap (e.g. into the city states of Hamburg and Bremen). But those Bundeslaender are huge compared with our Counties or even regions.
It appears that you started the comparison so I am merely confirming why I think they are similar in many ways.
The difference between DB REs and RBs is a confused one. Traditionally a RE was a subsidised express, while a RB was a subsidised all stations stopper, however more recently it seems to be becoming more the case that REs are part of a Taktfahrplan but RBs not (so in the UK, a North Wales Coast stopper would be a RE, but the Conwy Valley a RB).
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