There's a lot to digest here, and it feels too early to come up with "solutions" - there are a number of industries where I wouldn't want to take a bet on how demand patterns will solidify - e.g. childcare (we've gone from thousands of people working as childminders/ nannies or providing "wrap around" cover at schools to permit parents to drop the kids off at 08:00 and collect them at 18:00 - but with so many people working from home/ furlough/ unemployed, there's a lot less need to pay someone else to look after your kids - even if that means you working on your laptop in one room whilst your child is sat watching Peppa Pig on another laptop!)
People will blame the industry set up but nobody was predicting Covid, we'd managed to see rail growth despite the global recession that had much bigger and longer term repercussions than the much shorter/localised ones that BR lost a lot of passenger numbers in - I can see why people assumed that the railway was bulletproof
Without getting too political, there has been an active choice of successive governments to move the cost of running the railway from the taxpayer to the farepayer.
There has certainly been an attempt to limit subsidy to no more than half of costs, but serious questions ought to be asked about why the railway industry couldn't reduce subsidies despite the huge growth in passenger numbers over the past generation - I'm not trying to turn this into a privatisation/nationalisation argument, just pointing out that the reduction in subsidies wouldn't have been so much of a problem if we'd been able to keep costs in check
However, I think that the fact that the Government were always going to bail things out meant that there was never an incentive to keep things fit for purpose
Try taking away the local rail service and I suspect you'll find its every bit as contentious as trying to close the local school or hospital.
I'm sure there'd be petitions on Facebook and a few pictures of angry councillors in local newspapers
But the point is that passenger numbers are a third of what they were (despite so many Forum members seeming to point out just how busy their trains have been!) - people would be upset to lose a rail service in the way that they would be upset to lose that pub that they drink in once or twice a year
Even before Covid, the railway was an irrelevance to most people, only 10% used it often
What is the right balance though? As I said above, running the full service with less passenger demand just isn't sustainable. TfL had to do this and (yes they have other issues) rapidly ran out of money. Some TOCs have cut too much but others have been more marginal. Also different TOCs have different types of users; a heavily commuter based railway (that used to cover many of its costs) will probably have more suppressed demand going forward than an operator that has seen higher leisure travellers.
It's a bit of a broken record but demand-wise there's still a lot of "let's wait and see" as travelling patterns still haven't stabilised.
It's going to be hard for the railway to adjust to demand, given that:
1. We don't know what future Covid restrictions will be (do we assume a continual reduction in restrictions or that the UK will have a few more bumps in the road)
2. The railway takes a long time to set new timetables and adjust
3. It's fine for bus companies to change a service from every ten minutes to every twelve minutes to every fifteen minutes then back to every twelve minutes depending on demand, but train services can't be tweaked so easily - you might want to thin out a service but it's not as simple as changing a fifteen minute service into a twenty minute service because that might conflict with other services at junctions etc, so you might remove a quarter of services whilst keeping the other 75% but then that leaves half hour gaps - not ideal!
On the brightside, it sounds like overcrowding won't be as much of a problem.
I wonder what next year's list of Most Crowded Services will be - will the highest get above 75% of seating (rather than 150%!)
I did say I don't think the railways have a good repuation. But then again you do also have to consider that someone that had a good journey isn't going to tweet about it.
I don't know that the railways ever had a "good" reputation amongst the British public, certainly in my lifetime - it's generally something that people use because they have to - for every wide-eyed tourist on the Settle & Carlisle there are thousands of miserable commuters who only used the train because they had to
Agreed. We’ve read on here how people will still keep coming to the railway no matter what, so things like uncomfortable seats or crowded off-peak trains weren’t anything for the industry to be bothered about addressing.
That's true - we've had things like the boom in house prices forcing people to commute distances like Didcot to London because they were priced out of "Zone 4" - so little need to fight for passengers when you're so busy (in fact, you sometimes needed to price the off)
Ironically, the privatised railway was doing that rather well in the late 1990s and 2000s. It’s only since the DFT started micromanaging that things went downhill.
Agreed - we'll look back on that period as a "golden era" (before the DfT got their fingers into things)
1) Scrap the IETs. I had the misfortune to use two of them last weekend for the first time and am disappointed that the poor reception these trains have received is fully justified.
Some of the complaints are justified, some are highly subjective from "seat people", some complaints have turned out to be complete wibble (e.g. I remember the arguments on here that the slope needed to permit the underfloor engines would be so steep that trolleys couldn't pass along the train and passengers wouldn't be able to get beyond the first couple of seats)
