150222
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Surely they can re-nationalise the railway now though? The government appear to be paying more now than they were under BR.
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Bring back british rail!
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I get the impression that the general public quite like the Voyagers and Pendolini though. Every time I've talked to people that are not interested in the railways they have said they prefer the new trains.
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Just look at how much it would cost though to pay off the TOCs and buy all the stock from the ROSCOs. Network Rail would also still most likely be separate due to the EU directive although it could be merged into a new BR as long as accounts for infrastructure remained separate.
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That's the most important point, which is why I said exactly that earlier in the thread; BR WOULD NOT HAVE GOT THE MONEY! It took privatisation to allow the politics of power to feed money into rail. That is why it was privatised! BR was so starved of money it was about to die!
And those 87s and Mk3s; yes, a 1st class Mk3 seat is about as comfortable as train travel gets. But the trains were slow, and more importantly on today's crowded lines, slow to accellerate. Pendolinos are cramped by comparison, and claustrophobic with those tiny letter box windows, but bthey ride well at speed, and accellerate like no 87 ever did! And they are far more reliable!
150222
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Did you say you used to sign pendo's? If you did what were they like to drive?
I'm not sure abou that, governments as I say are now more pro-public transport and I think more would have been invested in rail. Back in the early 1990s though the Tories continued with road building.
Schnellzug
Established Member
Well, true if you want a direct service, however EMT to St Pancras via Sheffield isn't a bad alternative, a via Chesterfield ticket does exist for this purpose.
Indeed, and that's the kind of thing on which alternative direct services might well be feasible (if not on time, then on other factors like space, seating, & so on), if the operators weren't so constrained by what the Govt. insists that they can and can't do.
Perhaps some alternative services from Liverpool might be an idea, too.
Snapper
Established Member
You're trying to compare apples with oranges. Even if BR existed in the present day it would cost far more than it did in the 1990s dues to a whole host of external factors (like new H&S regulations for example). Plus, a lot of the costs of the railways in the present day are due to expansion - they're not running costs.
As for renationalisation - forget it. It's a dead issue. It simply won't happen. No political party that has a cat in hells chance of ever forming a Government is in favour of renationalisation.
Minilad
Established Member
No never have signed them
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So why not have the interior layout of the mk3 in a 390. Best of both worlds. But no. Todays thing is just to pack em in
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It would cost billions to renationalise and would be an organisational nightmare (how do you recombine the many many separate interfaces back into one or how do you harmonise the now very different pay/conditions that the rail workers all have?). Way back in 2004 Gordon Brown stated that it would have cost £22bn to renationalise the railway, today you would probably be looking at £30bn+.
That is true but when did this change occur? When would BR have started to get the massive influx of cash that the privatised railway has had nearly since it started? Would it have got the cash from 1997 or would it not have been until the mid 00s? Would we still be riding the wave of investment that's been going on since the late 90s or would that investment only just be beginning to take effect?
There was more chance of polar bears taking up a diet of penguin than BR getting realistic funding in the 1990s. Ever since nationalisation the Treasury starved rail of the investment needed to run a railway. Hence decline, shrinkage, cost-cutting, demoralisation, worn out infrastructure etc etc. It got worse as time went on (post the 'Modernistaion Plan - itself disasterously implemented by BR). By the 1990s rail was in such a state it was barely working at all. It would have been political suicide for any government to suddenly turn around and pump massive funds into BR, so never in a million years would it happen.
Throw up a smokesceen called privatisation, however, and anything can (and did) happen. Plus, the influx of business know-how that the TOCs brought with them changed the culture - and that was as vital as getting the funding.
HSTEd
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There is an alternative option to "paying" off the TOCs..... primarily as the majority of them are owned by a handful of companies such as Stagecoach and National Express, which are publicly traded companies on the stock market.
Purchase 51% of the shares (compulsorily or otherwise) and pack the board with executives who agree to trade the shares for complete ownership of the rail divisions (with additional funding/shares depending on the proportion of the corporation concerned with rail operations). Only the TOCs owned by state owned operators would have to be dealt with conventionally.
As for ROSCOs you could either serve CPOs on the rolling stock, undertake the same mechanism as above (although you might have trouble with HSBC Rail for obvious reasons) or simply take the gradualist approach of ensuring that no more stock purchased by a ROSCO is ever hired by the railway and that all new stock is owned directly by said railway.
Schnellzug
Established Member
very true. I think, rather than trying to resurrect this dead horse, people perhaps should be trying to think of constructive ways to tackle the problems that they consider there to be, rather than just nostalgically yearning for something that never existed precisely as they remember it. How many, let's be honest, of the shortcomings of the railways as they are now are actually because they're operated by privately owned companies, and how much is because the Government insists on stipulating everything?
Labour cancelled most of the road projects almost immediately in 1997 but then set up several "Multi Modal Studies" that took some time to report back. It's only since around 2005 that climate change has been high on the agenda though. Don't forget the state of the network after Hatfield though and the cost of sorting this out.
That was APT, wasn't it? It proved a tilting train operating within the WCML loading gauge didn't need to be claustrophobic and have tiny windows. A world-beating design killed off very early in its development. A prime example of the railway being at the mercy of short-termist politicians for funding.
Old Timer
Established Member
Unfortunately this appears to be another re-run of the ridiculously incorrect and disingenuous commentary that you made last Christmas on this subject.
Your intense dislike of BR and its staff is well known to those of us who are former BR staff, as is your disingenuous and innacurate statement of "facts" that can easily be disproven. By way of example the Class 87s were not failing constantly in the last BR days. Neither was the Infrastructure failing, indeed the WCML had NO temporary speed restrictions along its complete length when the Infrastructure was taken over by Railtrack.
The infrastructure along the WCML started to fall apart together with performance during and after the Route Modernisation projects was being undertaken and completed, so much so that Virgin was compensated.
Your claim that customer service increased exponentially with Virgin taking over is another good representation of your lack of credibility. The staff employed by Virgin were and still are in many cases BR staff. It is possible to find a fair proportion of on-board staff who started in BR days. In terms on management there again are a fair few senior people who are ex-BR
It is within your manner to twist and distort, for example your claimed 50 years expereince. If we accept you leaving school at 14 and then having 50 years of BR that would make you 64 in 1997. This would now make you 79.
Your continued crowing about BA makes me believe you were actually an employee of that outfit. I would imagine you would prefer me not to say how awful that airline was both under nationalisation and subsequently. Indeed I no longer fly BA and have not doe for may years because of the appaliing attitude of the cabin crew. This however you should know as BA is famous for it, along with the French. Indeed only since Willie Walsh has taken over has anyone tried to drag customer service and terms and conditions into the 21st Century.
So I would be quite happy to go one for one with you BR v BA but I doubt you would want to.
Whilst I would concede that, in one or two points at most, you made have a degree of validity, your tone and the dismissal of various responses on here clearly indicates that you have absolutely no interest in an informed debate but that you simply wish to regurgitate the tired old tripe that we continually see form you with regards to BR. Presumably as a payback to some imagined (or maybe actual with your attitude) slight you feel occurred back in BR days.
I take VERY great pride in being ex-BR, and spent all my time there working in the interestws of passengers along with the very vast majority of my colleagues - whom I have no doubt find your posts as unpleasant and lackjinmg in substance as I do. You strike me as one of the few obnoxious passengers who we could have done without.
I recall giving up debating with you in frustration last Christmas as you only believe your own propganda that we were all useless, lazy and incompetent. I do not propose to repeat that experience.
I wonder if you ever had training or assessment in CRM, I would love to have seen the feedback from your CC about you had that been the case. That by the way is a rhetorical question as any debate with you will simply waste bandwidth and achieve nothing positive as far as I am concerned.
I wouldn't say rail wasn't working at all. If it was that bad then no-one would have used it. Also at a time where governments were pro-car funding for rail wasn't as likely as it is now where climate change and peak oil are issues.
So when would BR have revived the big lump of government cash that the railway did in real life?
I mean really we're arguing about nothing I'm simply trying to make the point that whilst government spending would have increased on the railways over the last 15 years if BR had remained it certainly wouldn't have been anything like as quick (or even as large perhaps) as it was in real life.
I think that would depend on when it was realized that rail was going to be the only sustainable form of transport long term. Labour quickly realized that you couldn't keep building roads though.
Schnellzug
Established Member
But things were declining irrevocably; on the freight side (which no one seems to have considered) most of all. I'm pretty sure that if BR had remained in being, the only rail freight left today would've been perhaps MGR coal (steadily diminishing) and perhaps intermodal, although seeing how Freightliner got the scrag end of BR's loco fleet when it was spun off, i wonder if that would have lasted? And on the passenger side, this was the era of putting up fares to reduce demand; truly the gesture of a desperate management.
Tired rant, OT. You've ranted it before on here.
You forget I was a WCML regular in the last 5 years of BR right up until a few years ago. So I KNOW how many times we sat in silence in our Mk3s in late BR days, as fitters struggled to free the brakes or do whatever else was required to get us (or the train in front that was holding us up) moving. The number of times we'd make unscheduled stops at places like Watford or Leighton Buzzard to pick up a whole train load of stranded passengers off a failed earlier train, our 1st class declassified to cram them all in.
I don't recall any of that happening once the Pendelinos came in. And of course the massive re-build of WCML which would never have happened under BR eliminated many other causes of delay.
And the staff may have been the same in some cases, but THEY HAD BEEN TRAINED IN CUSTOMER CARE by Virgin! So they didn't behave the same!
I never worked for BA. Or any rail company. I'm simply a user of their services and therefore well placed to compare them. Unlike you I have no axe to grind here. I am a disinterested (but far from uninterested) observer and user of the railway. I can theefore give the independant unbiased view that you, as an ex-BR employee, never can.
You forget I was a WCML regular in the last 5 years of BR right up until a few years ago. So I KNOW how many times we sat in silence in our Mk3s in late BR days, as fitters struggled to free the brakes or do whatever else was required to get us (or the train in front that was holding us up) moving. The number of times we'd make unscheduled stops at places like Watford or Leighton Buzzard to pick up a whole train load of stranded passengers off a failed earlier train, our 1st class declassified to cram them all in.
I don't recall any of that happening once the Pendelinos came in. And of course the massive re-build of WCML which would never have happened under BR eliminated many other causes of delay.
And the staff may have been the same in some cases, but THEY HAD BEEN TRAINED IN CUSTOMER CARE by Virgin! So they didn't behave the same!
I never worked for BA. Or any rail company. I'm simply a user of their services and therefore well placed to compare them. Unlike you I have no axe to grind here. I am a disinterested (but far from uninterested) observer and user of the railway. I can theefore give the independant unbiased view that you, as an ex-BR employee, never can.
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A policy that some TOCs still use today to discourage travel at peak times.
Old Timer
Established Member
Yes same old tired response from yourself I see. The world according to Captain Speaking and heaven help you if your view or indeed experience differs.
You obviously never travelled during the WCRM period then unlike myself who worked and travelled on the WCML both in BR as well as post-BR days up to more recently than you.
Morgsie
Member
Labour had the chance to Renationalise the Railways in 2004 or 2005 but did not, there was a Conference motion on the subject.
The EU Commission is taking legal action against approximately 17 States for failure to implement the First Rail Package. There are recent developments at the EU level recently.
The way in which BR was Privatised has been criticised by many.
On the issue of Renationalisation or keep the current model of privatisation, It is hard one
I have a political background
The EU Commission is taking legal action against approximately 17 States for failure to implement the First Rail Package. There are recent developments at the EU level recently.
The way in which BR was Privatised has been criticised by many.
On the issue of Renationalisation or keep the current model of privatisation, It is hard one
I have a political background
There was indeed and the motion at the 2004 conference did pass but Gordon Brown overruled it.
Rants don't impress, OT. Cogent argument does it for me.
You obviously didn't read my post. I still use Virgin WCML services to London to this day, but from about 5 years pre-privatisation until about 3 years ago when I retired I was a twice-weekly user for business. That gives me a large base of experience as a passenger from which to observe what I experienced.
I presume that by WCRM the RM stands for 'Route Modernisation' or some such? Yes of course during that work there periods when services suffered (work at Rugby overunning was a prime example), but that's inevitable with a major upgrade of a working railway. It was worth it for the much improved service we now have!
It was 2004 and passed with 63% of the vote but Gordon Brown overruled it as he stated it would cost £22bn to implement and Alistair Darling stated that it would cause the loss of £70m per week in private investment in the railways.
Source
Neither did I. I said it was 'hardly working', by which I meant it was seriously creaking at the seams and in danger of suffering serious failures.
Three times as many people use it now than did pre-privatisation! Rail must be doing something right!
I think politicians are more concerned with votes (most voters have cars, not many voters use trains) than climate issues.
Totally wrong dude.. A units speedo is subject to calibration periodically, if there is an incident, if a unit is not making line speed, if a report of different speed readings from end to end.. So those 30yr old speedos are not likely to be wrong..
Well the point was that I wouldn't say it was in a "hardly working" state at all, it was certainly working much better than when the network descended into chaos after Hatfield under the watch of Railtrack. Now that was a "hardly working" state.
This does not prove that the increase in the number of passengers was due to privatization. You can't say for certain that there would not have been a similar increase had it not been for privatization.
It may well have been the case back in the 1990s but climate change is much higher on the agenda these days even with the Tories.
Markdvdman
Member
Three times more could be using it due to the massive overcapacity on the road, and the extreme price of fuel - you cannot say privatisation alone is the reason - MANY factors can be attributed to it!
The Valleys lines in Wales are atrocious under privatisation - do NOT believe the reliability figures Arriva spout - it is hogwash!
However, the cost of going back to state owned is way too high, and highly unlikely. Modern business methodology could have made BR work but it is hard to tell now.
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