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    Class 701 'Aventra' trains for South Western Railway

    A couple of points to this position: 1. The leasing payments are not covered entirely by government subsidies. Pre-Covid some three quarters of the passenger TOC’s total costs were covered by fare income. In the meantime this proportion has fallen to about half which means that essentially...
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    Class 701 'Aventra' trains for South Western Railway

    For the avoidance of doubt, I should like to point out that the capital (some £895 million) has been provided by the leasing company Rock Rail and its partners SL Capital and GLIL Infrastructure and not by the state. The loss of income affects the leasing company, not the Treasury.
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    What could be done to improve the Elizabeth Line’s performance?

    If a 27 minute gap is so stressful, then why not take the next train to Paddington and take a Heathrow Express from there? There's one every fifteen minutes so, at worst, one would get to Heathrow ten minutes earlier. If it's a question of missing a flight or paying for another ticket then I...
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    "I'm a Signalman, not a Signaller!"

    In principle you are correct, but there are a range of common uses and one can go down this rabbit hole a long way. I would just point out that the German word 'man' can be used as an indefinite pronoun which can refer to one person or also to people in general (in the sense of 'mankind') where...
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    "I'm a Signalman, not a Signaller!"

    A minor correction, in German a teacher is a Lehrer or Lehrerin, the being being taught is the Schuler or Schulerin. There is also the difference between the formal 'Sie' (= you) and the informal 'sie'... Also in German the word 'Mann' is used in the same way as 'one' would be used in English...
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    Train Leasing Profits Treble, £400,000,000 dividends

    OK, so the chief mechanical engineer's department did all this product support work for free? That they were only paid for their design work for new products? No, not necessarily true. If you've signed up to a contract like this I'm not surprised that you are disappointed. BR was very adept...
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    Train Leasing Profits Treble, £400,000,000 dividends

    Even if the government bought the trains - then the money still comes from the government, so what is your problem? Is it just that you don't like private finance...? Anyway only that proportion of the lease payments which comes from the government's subsidy to the TOC is in question. If, for...
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    Train Leasing Profits Treble, £400,000,000 dividends

    You have still not understood. If the government supplies you with the cash to buy the assets it can do so in one of two ways: it can give you the money as a grant (which does not need to be repaid) or it can advance you the money in the form of a loan in which case you will be making a...
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    Train Leasing Profits Treble, £400,000,000 dividends

    Which only goes to show that you haven't understood the previous arguments. Once again, the point about the private sector finance supplying the cash to purchase new trains is that this large lump sum is not subject to vagaries of government policy. Both quantities and timing of government...
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    Train Leasing Profits Treble, £400,000,000 dividends

    A little bit of factual background to the ROSCO debate… The original BR passenger rolling stock fleet was divided among the original three nascent ROSCOs which at the time were state-owned. There were competing ideas about the distribution of the stock; for example one ROSCO could have had all...
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    Would HS2 have saved money by bringing in a company like SNCF to build the line to their pre-existing designs?

    I would suggest that cost overruns are pre-programmed if a free-standing, government-funded company is set up to build infrastructure such as HS2 and if this company has no financial interest in the resulting operation. As a result there is no pressure whatsoever to investigate alternatives in...
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    GTR Performance measures relaxed for 2024

    There is more to 'performance' than running trains. Much better informed commentators than I have often pointed out in these forums that 'performance' in this context does not refer only to train reliability and timekeeping but much much more to things that interest the DfT. These cover things...
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    Did Beeching get it right in Scotland?

    I sometimes wonder whether you are being deliberately mischievous. Fiennes was writing in 1967 about his time as Chief Operating Officer at the BRB in 1961, six years earlier, and only six years after the publication of the Modernisation Plan. This Plan called for, inter alia, the construction...
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    Could the railways be renationalised under Labour and what should happen in the meantime?

    Hmm... I would suggest that some of the differences in theory and practice between private and nationalised companies need to be better understood. A private company has a simple purpose: it is there to make money for its owners or shareholders. In some rare cases they are intended to deliver...
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    Did Beeching get it right in Scotland?

    Criticism of the Modernisation Plan and its implementation is not new. At the time the main criticisms were being made by people internal to the railways. For example Gerry Fiennes wrote in 1967 of his time as Chief Operating Officer at the BRB in 1960: He goes on to ask whether we needed...
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    Did Beeching get it right in Scotland?

    To the last point, I think it is worthwhile to understand why at that time investment money was short. It was inevitable. Beeching was called in because the Modernisation Plan had failed to stem the losses which had been increasing continually since the early 1950s. There was no apparent end in...
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    GWR IET’s Lots of 5 Car Sets PAD > South Wales

    This is not quite accurate. I attended a presentation made to the Railway Division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers giving details of the Intercity Express Programme which was held on 27th June 2011. At this meeting one of the DfT’s civil servants responsible for the IEP, Stuart...
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    Have you been to your town's twin town(s) / sister city / -ies? Which has better public transport?

    However we are not comparing like with like - apart from the twinning. Düsseldorf is the capital of Nord-Rhein Westfalen and has a population of over 650,000. Reading is now simply a unitary authority with a population in the borough of 170,000 and in the surrounding area of some 300,000...

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