As I said maybe Girvan-Stranraer or a similarly obscure line (Barton-upon-Humber must surely be England's biggest basket case line now?) but not the S&C
The S&C may still be the biggest basket case (given the infrastructure costs)
I accept that it’s too high profile to close (which is why the Government’s Operator Of Last Resort has instead been cutting lots of low profile services that don’t attract tourists or serve big cities like Leeds (Doncaster to Scunthorpe/ Hull, Huddersfield to Wakefield/ Castleford, Sheffield to Doncaster, Sheffield to Brigg/ Cleethorpes etc… those cuts seem to have slipped under the radar without much scrutiny)
But even if the S&C loses more money than all of these routes combined, it’s now sacred and cannot be considered for closure
But that's exactly how franchises worked, with specific subsidy routed to the TOCs operating the service.
Currently (post-covid) the entire cost is met by the government, who also take the revenue.
The infrastructure costs are a lot more opaque, and bulk direct grants are involved between DfT and NR, reviewed every 5 years by ORR.
I don't think any part of the railway pays its way at the moment.
Agreed on all points there
I think the very notion that the railway is 'lurching out of control' is an emotive, sensationalist and lurid way of expressing an idea that belongs firmly in the headlines of the Daily Mail or Daily Express. Also as a way of deflecting blame from where it truly belongs.
Where’s does blame truly belong?
On the subject of the Barton line, Barrow Haven which has approx 36 users per week has recently had a £1.3m station upgrade completed..
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-63598199.amp
That’s… wow… even at its pre-Covid “high” of about three departing passengers a day, that’s a one-off cost equivalent to over a thousand pounds per return journey… even if you assume that it’ll last for fifty years (with no other expenditure required on the station in the next five decades) that’s over a tenner per return journey just to do this upgrade
Surely there’s got to be a cut-off n point at which you say “It’s not economical to keep this station open”?
You might rely on your car but if (after a “collision”) it’ll cost a lot more to repair it than to buy a replacement then surely you accept it’s no longer viable… yet we keep train stations open even as costs keep ramping up…
With regard to the barton line, I've only ever used it to get to Barton itself - is there any scope for better bus connections and through ticketing to Hull I wonder !
That’s truly damming!
Even
@yorksrob isn’t making excuses for the poorly used line , it really seems beyond hope
(Connections are available at Barton with the half hourly 350 bus from Scunthorpe to Hull and this shows on RTT so I’m guessing through fares from Grimsby etc are possible?)
You could argue the problem with the Barton line arises from the short-sightedness in the 1970s of building the Humber Bridge as a road-only bridge: The work really should've been combined with extending the railway into Hull. If that had been done, then the Barton line would today in all likelihood been a fairly busy and much needed line connecting Hull and Grimsby. But as it is, the line stupidly stops a few miles short of where almost everyone is going to want to go, which very predictably means very few people use it.
The cost of fixing that today would be astronomical, so that's obviously not going to get done any time soon. Through ticketing and decent, dedicated/guaranteed bus connections might be the next best thing, although I'm not sure that would give much benefit over direct Hull-Grimsby buses?
Interesting to speculate at what services/ frequency we might have seen if a rail link had been included as part of the bridge - given that even at the railway ‘s pre- Covid “high” there was only one train per hour from Scunthorpe to Grimsby/ Cleethorpes… If it was Doncaster to Hull trains running that way then would that be at the expense of existing services via Selby/ Goole?
Hmmm, I wonder if certain other things happened that affected the railway since then besides the end of franchising...
You also continue to claim that franchising is better because the companies are accountable - but they're accountable to the government, so this doesn't really change where control lies.
Absolutely, passenger numbers dropped off a cliff when the first wave of covid happened, and clearly the TOC contracts weren’t written with any contingency for how to deal with government-enforced lockdown
But I remain convinced that the franchises we had in 2019 were “less bad” than the current situation (where, instead of checking out lottery numbers or football results each evening, we are refreshing websites to see which trains the Government-controlled franchises will attempt to run)
I’ve no problem with the government being ultimately in control (I’m not demanding a fully subsidy free railway, someone needs to write the cheques to sustain a reasonable level of services - which doesn’t necessarily mean propping up every basket case route), but a “seven” year franchise duration meant that there was accountability, there were guarantees, there was a medium-to-long-term strategy.
What have we got now though? Too much Government control, no vision for the future, no security (and nobody able to stand up to the whims of the Government, since the firms contracted to run trains are effectively “silenced” by the contracts that they’ve had to sign)