Controversial opinion: The UK has a pretty decent rail system

If we couldn't complain about UK rail then most of the content on this forum wouldn't exist, and as most of us are British we love to complain. Nothing wrong with that.

However - do we not really have a pretty decent system? Sure the ticketing system is a bit messed up and there is chronic overcrowding but is the overcrowding not because it is such a good way to travel relative to cars or buses?

There are rail lines pretty much everywhere in the UK. For 90% of destinations you can say "Oh, I'll get the train" and not even have to look up if the train goes there, because you know it will at least go somewhere close and you can get the bus if required after for a short distance. This is not true in many other countries.

The train service in most locations is at a minimum of hourly, with very few exceptions. All over Europe there are services and stations that do not get even a twice daily service. Whilst individual services are delayed/cancelled with some regularity you are never too far from the next service.

Perhaps the reason we like to complain so much about the service is because it is of such a high standard that we can come to rely on it and the contrast when it doesn't work out is huge to when it does?

I've travelled many times by train in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany, and also several times in France, Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Poland, and my experience of the rail systems and the trains themselves in those countries is miles better than in the UK. Maybe I've been lucky!

In the UK I've definitely been unlucky, especially as someone who has to rely on Northern! But I've also experienced the overcrowding and delays on TPE, Arriva Trains Wales (I haven't travelled on their trains under their current guise as TfW), GWR...

I think if you look at local rail services then we in the UK are fairly well served especially if you compare us with France. All too often we are too keen to compare with Intercity or high speed on the continent.

Surely it depends on your locality. Some areas are incredibly well served, but others are pretty poor. There's no consistency so you can't rely on there being a decent service if you're travelling to a different area - you may be pleasantly surprised or there may be no service at all.

We do have, generally, a pretty decent service.

NOTE - that isnt a perfect service delivered in the perfect way via perfect rolling stock.

The takt system in Germany certainly can leave an infrequent service on some lines (and leave some High Speed Lines under utilised)

gordonthemoron said:

The takt system in Germany certainly can leave an infrequent service on some lines (and leave some High Speed Lines under utilised)

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I still think it is the best approach. It can be done with higher frequencies, of course - Germany is typically on an hourly or two-hourly base, while Switzerland does it with a half-hourly base. There are two elements to a Taktfahrplan - a consistent, clockface timetable, and co-ordinated connections. The former can be every 10 minutes as long as the latter exists, though if you're going for high frequencies you really need to choose between a base of 60/20/10/5 minutes, or 60/30/15/5, or 60/30/10/5.

Intermodal said:

However - do we not really have a pretty decent system? Sure the ticketing system is a bit messed up and there is chronic overcrowding but is the overcrowding not because it is such a good way to travel relative to cars or buses?

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No, it is overcrowded because lots of people want to travel to the same relatively small areas (e.g. city centres) where many of the jobs are, and the alternatives are either worse or impractical, not because the rail network is brilliant. Despite the rail network being overcrowded in parts, the roads are also rammed full in many areas, and even central London with its (relatively speaking) extensive public transport and cycling culture is rammed full with motor vehicles most of the time. It is high population density combined with localised centres of high, decent paid job opportunities that generates high demand for transport across road and rail, not because everybody loves sitting in a car, bus or train.

Rather like being punched in the face is better than being shot and killed doesn't make being punched in the face pleasant.

You would expect train frequencies to be high in the UK because of the high population density. The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany also have a high population density so also generally enjoy frequent services. However, the UK has one huge city and other large conurbations. Rail is the only realistic way of travelling to London, whereas there is no city in the Netherlands or Belgium big enough for car not to be an option. So out of all those countries, the UK has the most favourable population spread for high rail usage.

Personally, I think that in overall terms, the UK has a good rail system. Most of the time you can get relatively easily from point A to point B most places in the country, and usually in quite good time, especially on long distance trains, compared to other methods. The problems that people take issue with are usually ones that, while annoying, are not a big issue in the grand scheme of things. An example is delays and cancellations of services, which are, while inconvenient at the time, usually not a significant delay (i.e. more than an hour total). Another problem that people take issue with is delays to projects related to the industry. While longer ones like Crossrail are more annoying as it delays a useful cross-London route, smaller ones like rolling stock upgrades are less so as, while a new train would be nice, there is still a train running the route, so the average passenger can still get from point A to point B.

The TOC side of things maybe a little squiffy, but, the actual system is still the best ans safest in the World, and this safety is also the reaosn for delays too, there are many places in Europe where you miss a train, you have to wait hours, sometimes a day before the next one !

It's generally a great network, considering the taxation that we pay (i.e. you'd generally be paying a lot more in tax to get better public services).

Not perfect, but I think many countries would be envious of our safe/ frequent/ far-reaching railway.

A lot of people have good experiences abroad but that often relies on the "flagship" services between major cities, whilst the UK has surprisingly frequent local rail services compared to a lot of countries.

However, the better it gets, the more complaints there are about the weak bits (or complaints from people with unrealistic ideas about how perfect everything would be if only we had an unlimited supply of crayons). I'm not defending every deficiency, but some of the criticisms seem either trivial ("franchising means we have to repaint trains every seven years when a franchise ends") or contradictory ("trains are both a rip off and over-crowded").

It'll never be good enough for some people though - maybe they just hate the railway.

Broadly speaking, yes, we have a good service. As you sayz there's a lot of the country covered by trains, and stock tends not to be graffitied to the heavens as you get in Italy etc.

Ticketing is an issue which puts us behind many other countries. I can't use just ticketing as a reason to slam the whole UK system as bad.

Greg Read said:

The TOC side of things maybe a little squiffy, but, the actual system is still the best ans safest in the World, and this safety is also the reaosn for delays too, there are many places in Europe where you miss a train, you have to wait hours, sometimes a day before the next one !

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well the system should probably best be equated with those from france and germany....

the german system is in general very reliable,their strikes are also minimal..even on strike days there is a plan in place for most districts to keep a core service- so might be only hourly in cities but they will long-form to compensate.

the french system is also more reliable than ours- and france and strikes generally come in the same breath.

french air traffic controllers are something of a standing joke to international business travellers!(I'm sad to say as is the UK rail network)
the french bus service is rubbish. don't expect to get anywhere after 8pm or on a sunday.

so in summary: potentially could be very good, but much room for improvement.
I think both TOC and unions at fault here.

LivingBelowYM said:

You would expect train frequencies to be high in the UK because of the high population density. The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany also have a high population density so also generally enjoy frequent services. However, the UK has one huge city and other large conurbations. Rail is the only realistic way of travelling to London, whereas there is no city in the Netherlands or Belgium big enough for car not to be an option. So out of all those countries, the UK has the most favourable population spread for high rail usage.

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Agree with this. More sparsely populated countries (France, Spain, even Czechia away from the larger cities) tend to have much lower frequencies on inter-regional or rural routes. Under the French or Spanish system, the sparse service on the Settle & Carlisle would be the rule rather than the exception.

Reminds me of that BBC programme where those passengers thought they knew better than the TOC's and were quickly shown to be clueless about the railway. Trying to compare a 2tph Swiss railway to a 15tph (around that) UK railway service was a particular highlights.

Quite a few people from France/Spain I've spoke with are amazed with how well Britain is connected by public transport

Overall, we do have a decent rail system and I am more than happy to use it. Sure, things sometimes go wrong and sometimes you won't have a choice but to suffer if there is a strike on (I wonder how our strikes compare with those abroad?)

Most of the staff are great as well - especially Marsha at TfW who is a joy to be around.

Intermodal said:

If we couldn't complain about UK rail then most of the content on this forum wouldn't exist, and as most of us are British we love to complain. Nothing wrong with that.

However - do we not really have a pretty decent system? Sure the ticketing system is a bit messed up and there is chronic overcrowding but is the overcrowding not because it is such a good way to travel relative to cars or buses?

There are rail lines pretty much everywhere in the UK. For 90% of destinations you can say "Oh, I'll get the train" and not even have to look up if the train goes there, because you know it will at least go somewhere close and you can get the bus if required after for a short distance. This is not true in many other countries.

The train service in most locations is at a minimum of hourly, with very few exceptions. All over Europe there are services and stations that do not get even a twice daily service. Whilst individual services are delayed/cancelled with some regularity you are never too far from the next service.

Perhaps the reason we like to complain so much about the service is because it is of such a high standard that we can come to rely on it and the contrast when it doesn't work out is huge to when it does?

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I’d say the biggest bugbear is overcrowding.

bramling said:

I’d say the biggest bugbear is overcrowding.

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And fares. I think the service (coverage and timetabling) is by and large OK and the rolling stock by and large acceptable.

The trouble is that resolving the "fares" issue will make the "overcrowding" issue much worse.

Bletchleyite said:

And fares. I think the service (coverage and timetabling) is by and large OK and the rolling stock by and large acceptable.

The trouble is that resolving the "fares" issue will make the "overcrowding" issue much worse.

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I’d happily push up fares by quite an amount if it reduced overcrowding. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea though.

I've had around 29 years of generally good rail travel, even though the last one was trying.

The continuing emphasis on changing the balance between subsidy and fare revenue is a problem and beginning to degrade the service.

Beware the crumbling edge of value for money.

bramling said:

I’d happily push up fares by quite an amount if it reduced overcrowding. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea though.

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Possibly not.

I recall a passenger on what is now TfW having a rant about the increases to her fares, and even when I explained that it partly due to the biggest upgrade to our Railway System to the Victorian age she didn't want to know and just kept up the 'it's wrong, it's wrong' line.

Not quite a 'snowflake', but obviously she could not accept that the money to pay for these upgrades have to come from somewhere if we want an efficient network which can handle the traffic of the future.

There are good parts and bad parts to our railways - and many of the bad parts can be blamed on politicians & civil servants.
I commuted into Manchester for two separate periods of the 1960s & 1970s, for a total of about 7 years. Yes, trains were occasionally late - usually more when returning home in the late afternoon rather than going into Manchester in the morning. But I cannot remember a single cancellation, and certainly no omission of intermediate stops if trains were late. Yes, the old BR was imperfect, but, within reason, connections would be held for a few minutes if your train was late.

Toy-sized trains were uncommon until 2 coach dmus, often displaced from closed lines, were inflicted on services for which they were totally unsuitable -- and probably helped to drive passengers away from rail travel. For example, a well-loaded Manchester to Llandudno commuter service with 6 or 7 coaches had shrunk to a half-full 2 coach dmu (Class 100/101/108) within a couple of years of conversion to dmu operation.

Long distance commuting did exist then, but nowhere near as common as now. Much of the change can probably be attributed to the rise in house prices in many big cities; many people cannot to afford to live there, but cannot get jobs elsewhere, so almost the only alternative is to move away from cities, and commute daily back into the city -- often by rail. But, to quote an old saying "you can't fit a quart into a pint pot", the railways have been trying to do the equivalent - to fit too many trains into an infrastructure not designed to take so many trains. Things might just work adequately in a perfect world, but in our imperfect world, it just takes one or two minor problems / delays for the system to collapse into chaos. In my opinion, politicians must take the blame for most of the problems.

Thatcher's selling of council housing - without affordable replacements - was a big cause of escalating house prices. Failure of politicians to invest adequately in rail infrastructure is another cause. And John Major's creation of a fragmented passenger network has been a disaster in my opinion. Yes, there are more frequent trains in some areas ; yes, if you are lucky, you might find a bargain fare at somewhere near the times you want to travel. Yes, you may find a seat on a train (e.g. TP, XC) if you are lucky, but equally your fare might be hideously expensive, and your local TOC may have fiddled their defintion of peak hours to extract more money from your pocket.

I find this quite hard to answer - I commute on the trains, which is a uniformly unpleasant experience, so it's hard to be objective. With that in mind:

The service is good in that it's extremely unlikely to kill me, and will usually get me to my destination without being more than ten minutes late. So, a tick on the big stuff.

On the other hand, some of the smaller things rankle. The timetable during the morning peak is fictitious. The cost of my journey routinely goes up more than the capped average and doesn't feel like good value - I gather that SWR is one of the few unsubsidised TOCs; it would be interesting to know whether the cost of travel is equal to the cost of providing the service (plus the TOC profit) or whether the DfT is trousering some of it. Communication to passengers is sometimes unnecessarily bad. Queue management at Waterloo is poor, and at Bank is literally non-existent, in the parts of the stations that I use. Some of the infrastructure seems unreliable although, that said, Wimbledon seems to be falling to pieces less often than it used to. Many of the speakers inside trains don't work, and/or many of the guards don't know how to use a PA system - sounds like a minor thing but I think quite important, as the primary means of communicating with passengers. I could go on, but to be honest I'm boring myself now so god knows how the rest of you feel.

So: it does the job in the fundamentals. Could be much worse. But it also seems as though certain aggravations could be sorted out with some will and some effort, and I don't think that the industry has earned any sort of complacency.

I broadly agree, but with some previsos: it's much better in the southeast of England, and around Glasgow, than anywhere else. Ok, these places have higher population densities, so this night be expected: but really the service in some parts of the also fairly densely populated former metropolitan counties in Pacer-driven Northernland, let alone other parts of northern England, is pretty substandard. But overall, for frequency of service, especially, the UK does well. And generally much better than it did 20 or 30 years ago.

The other main proviso is that the quality of urban rail services is pretty poor in the UK. That is.more due to the rarity of metro-type services in most of the latter cities (or in some cases like Bristol or Edinburgh, very limited local rail services at all).

With those qualifications (and without getting sidelined by a discussion about ticketing.....), The UK's railways are still probably better than those of much of Western Europe. There are numerous things that could be improved - connections, integration with other modes public transport, information of various kinds - but really it's pretty good. And in most regards probably the best it has ever been.

al78 said:

No, it is overcrowded because lots of people want to travel to the same relatively small areas (e.g. city centres) where many of the jobs are, and the alternatives are either worse or impractical, not because the rail network is brilliant. Despite the rail network being overcrowded in parts, the roads are also rammed full in many areas, and even central London with its (relatively speaking) extensive public transport and cycling culture is rammed full with motor vehicles most of the time. It is high population density combined with localised centres of high, decent paid job opportunities that generates high demand for transport across road and rail, not because everybody loves sitting in a car, bus or train.

Rather like being punched in the face is better than being shot and killed doesn't make being punched in the face pleasant.

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That's hardly unique to the UK though - my only long-term experience of commuting was Paris for a year, and it was exactly as you describe. Lots of people want to travel to big cities and out again at the same time and so the trains will be overcrowded at these times... and that, will be the same the world over.

The European Commission carry out surveys to gauge public opinions on various services across the EU and produces reports on their findings:

Here is the summary report for "Europeans’ satisfaction with passenger rail services"

http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/ResultDoc/download/DocumentKy/83720

The UK in most instances fares better than the French and Germans. This one caught my eye - France and Germany worst satisfaction for punctuality & reliability!





(Full details here: http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice...tsurveydetail/instruments/flash/surveyky/2172)

Modron said:

Not quite a 'snowflake', but obviously she could not accept that the money to pay for these upgrades have to come from somewhere if we want an efficient network which can handle the traffic of the future

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The problem is that the last ten years of above-inflation fare rises haven't been to pay for upgrades, they've been to pass the burden from the taxpayer to the fare-payer.

People have heard the "jam tomorrow" so often they now don't believe it.

I fully concur with the opening thought of this thread. UK has a very good rail system and the times I've travelled up and down the country, never been let down. Been everywhere on time, every time. Have had that cancelled services over the years but hey, in such a complex network, things do happen and I'm not complaining.

On a lighter note, I'd suggest you travel by train in India to appreciate what UK offers. I've used metros and trains in France, Israel and Singapore and they've all been good enough. But the UK though, guess there's an emotional attachment. Love it!

civ-eng-jim said:

The European Commission carry out surveys to gauge public opinions on various services across the EU and produces reports on their findings:

Here is the summary report for "Europeans’ satisfaction with passenger rail services"

http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/ResultDoc/download/DocumentKy/83720

The UK in most instances fares better than the French and Germans. This one caught my eye - France and Germany worst satisfaction for punctuality & reliability!

View attachment 58901



(Full details here: http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice...tsurveydetail/instruments/flash/surveyky/2172)

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The only issue with this is that it only asks people about the system in their own country. For all we know, Latvians, Austrians , Spanis and Irish might just be the sort of people who are always satisfied about things and dont complain! Comparisons are always difficult