If services/ stations/ lines are so lightly used that passengers numbers aren't even enough to justify a minibus service then I'd argue that heavy rail is an incredibly blunt/expensive way of providing that service
Does that mean that I will no longer have my late night train all to myself any more?
That's no reason to stop privatising something - councils privatise their bin lorries - offices privatise their cleaners - pubs hire in Bouncers from private security firms - Yorkshire Water are a private company who look after my sewers - if you can get a provider to perform a service cheaper than it currently costs the state then it's worth investigating
If our gas and electricity and telephone networks are in private hands then why can't a railway line be contracted out?
Maybe, but our local council have ended the commercial contract with the private company and are taking the waste and recycling services back in house. And no, it’s not a Labour controlled council either.
The status of cleaners has changed a bit since COVID19. I don’t know what the longer term will bring though.
Bristol Water has never been anything other than a private company, but it’s regulated. So it does not have the final say in the prices it charges. Also it has a captive market. As a customer, you have have the choice to use the water from the private company, or not to have mains water. No one knows if a state owned company could provide the service at or below the cost that the private company charges.
Mains gas, electricity and telephone provision is not essential. And most people do have a choice on which companies provide the billing services for mains gas and electricity. Although the actual distribution company that provides and maintains the infrastructure to pipe the gas and for the electricity cabling, distribution networks and substations are completely different private companies, which again a customer normally has no choice. It’s another captive market even if there is no direct payment between the house holder and the distribution company. It’s rather difficult to make a loss if you have a more or less fixed customer base...
So just like the railways, IMHO, it’s a fudge.
I think a big part of the challenge is finding a way to reform the railway industry to bring in more competitive pressures to drive down costs, you only need to look at the horrific cost of projects like East-West Rail and HS2 to see that costs seem to be completely out of control.
There needs to be competition in operation and maintenance of the network, Network Rail needs breaking up. There needs to be at least 2, possibly even 3 separate organisations running infrastructure on mainline routes to allow benchmarking and the introduction of competitive processes for the long-term operation and maintenance of mainline routes.
We had that nonsense before under Railtrack. It hired many different contractors and sub contractors to carry out all the work. Both maintenance, renewals and investment works.
We had a staff travelling hundreds of miles north to do one job, while another group doing very similar work would travel hundreds of miles south... Or similar east/west.
And heaven help you if your company found they did not have a suitable spare component/equipment that was required to fix a major failure. As the competition would not help you out (unlike now where internally we help out between different areas).
And the contact companies and their staff would know exactly what was required in the contract, so would refuse point blank to do anything beyond those requirements. So if more than one contractor was involved, there would be a lot of waiting around if anything did not work exactly to plan. And unfortunately things going wrong was more common than things going to plan. So lots of staff standing around doing nothing.
The contractors would only get paid if Railtrack got all the correct documentation. So more effort went into the paperwork than actually doing the work...
Network Rail looked at this expensive and inefficient system and decided to take maintenance in-house. It’s definitely reduced costs.
Splitting up Network Rail is not the solution. And you don’t really want to use competitive pressures to drive down costs for safety critical work or time sensitive engineering work. Unless you want rest a nasty failure or worse. Or to re-do the work all over again at a later date...
And if you do go back to using contractors again, whichever company is responsible for the running and safety of the infrastructure will have to hire a new army of management and engineering staff to arrange the contacts and provide oversight and try to carry out quality control. This is very difficult when the work place extends for hundreds and hundreds of miles...
Is there any competition? Can a better performing region take-over the running of lines within another region? Do the regions compete against each other for the rights to run routes, or have the flexibility to re-write processes, specifications, engineering standards to introduce new innovations, practices, drive down costs?
Standards are the same across the whole of the Network Rail controlled infrastructure. For good reason. For both safety and so that best practice is used everywhere.
No there is no competition between different routes.
Network Rail does not run passenger or freight trains. That’s what the train operating companies (TOCs) and freight operating companies (FOCs) do. The freight companies do compete with each other. But the majority of TOCs don’t, because that is the deliberate way that the franchises were set up.
The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is the regulator for all of the above.
