Train coaches overcrowded

Their reliability record seems OK from what I can gather (they’ve let me down fewer times than XC) and the experience of getting onto a Mk5 have always been more pleasant than a 185 for me!

I also love the sound which probably helps!

I have a cab pass to change that

As has been hinted at, blame the DfT! Rail franchising has been phased out in favour of new fixed-fee ‘National Rail Contracts’. Previously train operators paid a premium back to the government and kept their ticket revenue, making commercial decisions about services & rolling stock (albeit still with heavy government interference). Now, the government pays them a fixed amount to run a stipulated service instead. As part of this the DfT have demanded cost savings and compelled operators to squeeze their fleets down to the bare minimum, which saves on leasing costs. The fore mentioned and much maligned CrossCountry had had to get rid of their five or so High Speed Trains (the old “Intercity 125s”), which whilst elderly were the largest and most comfortable trains in their fleet and added desperately needed capacity. They finished a week or two ago, with nothing to act as an immediate replacement. Great Western Railway are in a similar position.

There has been for years an ongoing shortage of diesel trains, not least because for a very long time the government insisted that it would electrify everything and therefore there was no point building new ones. Then they changed their mind, and shouted about how bi-mode trains (i.e. electric trains with diesel engines) meant that further electrification was unnecessary! Go figure!

Like most things in the UK rail is suffering from lack of investment.

It is of course no different to roads. Potholes are a mere symptom of the lack of maintenance of roads, including the surface and drainage. Filling in potholes doesn’t solve the problems

And if you read this article https://returnoftheliberal.wordpress.com/2023/10/0... you can see how privatisation lead to an increase in passenger numbers.

…good job that privatisation lead to a drop in investment by the government….

Oh wait…

https://fullfact.org/economy/how-much-does-governm...

I’ll be the first to admit that BR had its problems, but was actually a very efficient organisation in how things were achieved, for example their electrification of the East Coast Main Line was done with a level of efficiency that the current Midland Mainline Electrification isn’t achieving.

The nature of the way that BR was privatised led to a massive fragmentation of the industry - it’s now a sea of private companies, all of whom are not doing it for love!

Because according to the government no one is travelling so they aren’t allowed to.

Because according to the government no one is travelling so they aren’t allowed to.

Saturday's are just insane at the minute. Particularly in and out of Leeds.

When I was a kid you went out in your local town and maybe once in a blue moon you'd have a big night in a nearby city.

It feels now that if you're 20 you don't bother with your local town but just head straight to Leeds (if you're Yorkshire based). We deposit literally 100's on every single train most of Saturday and then take a good chunk of them home again. 5 or 6 trains an hour just from Sheffield absolutely packed.

We can all recall or find tales of woeful customer service under BR, and can variously proscribe that to anything from bolshy unionised bloody-mindedness to widespread tanking of morale during the era of 'managed decline'.

But 'old BR' as an organisation, and a lot of its employees, still worked on the ethos inherited from the private companies that went right back to the earliest days of the railways - the ethos that the railway had to get its charges (passengers or cargo) to their destination, regardless of how late or by whatever means. That made perfect sense back when the railways were the only viable means of long-distance transport. If you'd bought a ticket from Manchester to London and your train broke down, the company was obliged - if only by sheer practicality - to arrange an alternative service, since it's not as if you could take the bus or car instead.

Cyril Bleasdale, the manager who took BR's Intercity services into the era of Sectorisation (when BR was split into semi-autonomous divisions based on traffic type, each with the stated goal of being self-funding from their own revenue) made a very pertinent point in this regard. Before Sectorisation BR essentially worked on the same traffic model as the private railways. This being 'service-focused' - the aim being to provide a service to all-comers. The 'get them there, by any means, even if it's slow and late' ethos was part of that - when they bought their tickets passengers were making contract with the railway to be taken to their destination. The system had resiliency and flexibility built into it - traffic diagrams and working timetables were drawn up month by month to account for ebbs and flows in traffic, and could be adjusted in shorter timescales, right down to the hour or even minute, to cope with disruption or sudden surges in demand.

This required a lot of spare rolling stock to spend a lot of time just sitting around to cover for breakdowns, disruptions or extra demand. But it meant that when a football match in a seaside town coincided with a heatwave and a big crash on the motorway, the hourly train service could be run in two portions using scrounged-up stock. When the last train out of town in the evening was overcrowded, an extra carriage or two could be dug out from the back of the shed and coupled on. If a cross-country express conked out half-way through its journey, the station pilot loco or the nearest depot's spare DMU set could be called into action. The entire network, and all its locomotives, units, coaches, wagons and staff were under the same management and part of the same system. This resulted in stories like passengers who missed their last train out of London being allowed to travel in the shortly-departing newspaper train, or the time in the 1980s when a DMU failed to start to run the morning service on a Yorkshire branch line, which ended up being worked instead by a 15mph diesel shunter towing a luggage van fitted with some benches unbolted from the station platform.

According to Bleasdale, Sectorisation - largely unintentionally - caused a complete change in organisational mindset. With the railway divided into business sectors (each with their own allocated rolling stock, depots, maintenance and staff) it was no longer the case that one locomotive or one coach was as good as another. If an Intercity service failed, you couldn't just borrow a handy DMU, because it was part of Regional Railways. And Regional Railways couldn't just use a Scotrail carriage to boost capacity at short notice. And Scotrail couldn't just add a Rail Express Systems brake van to a service to accomodate loads of bikes carried during a weekend cycle marathon. And RES couldn't just use a Railfreight Metals locomotive if one their's failed. And so on. Or rather, Sectors could use each other's assets but they had to be paid for to make the budgets balance, unlike when everything was BR and painted dusty blue. And with all rolling stock now allocated to a Sector, and each Sector responsible for a business case and balancing its books, the cost of having 'spare' stock lying around 'just in case' (and of failed or unreliable stock) was much more stark.

There was also a key switch in ethos from 'service' to 'product'. This was very deliberately driven by Bleasdale at Intercity, but also ended up evolving less explicitly elsewhere due to the realities and economics of Sectorisation. Bleasdale had the notion that, when passengers had the option of driving, flying or taking National Express instead of an Intercity train, then they were specifically purchasing Intercity as a consumer product - not like the old days when rail travel was the only practical choice for most long-distance journeys. Therefore if they purchased a ticket from Manchester to London, with the promise of 125mph air-conditioned luxury with a buffet service and on-train telephones, and their IC125 set expired at Crewe then they had not received the product they had purchased. The old service-driven BR would have scrounged up a 25-year old DMU which would have wheezed and rattled its way into Euston, two hours late, no first class service, weird draughts and odd exhaust smells and considered that it had upheld the ethos of the railway by getting the passengers to their destination - no refunds or fare reductions because the service (getting from Manchester to London) had been delivered.

Bleasdale changed the mindset at Intercity - now that IC was directly responsible for its own maintenance, an renewed emphasis was put on improving reliability so on-the-road failures were reduced, and if IC trains did fail or did have to be cancelled then passengers were given a full refund rather than a degraded service.

The old definition of a 'proper railway', as opposed to a light railway, a tramway or a metro system, was that it carried passengers and freight to timetables on the same network and was a common carrier, able to react to any customer demand if given sufficient time. Being able to insert new services into the timetable 'on the fly' was the proud mark and metric of the worth of a British railway. The Metropolitan Railway always insisted that it be ranked among the other mainline railways because it didn't run passenger trains in fixed 'sets', put dining cars on some of its services and ran freight trains alongside its passenger ones. That was held from the 1830s to the 1980s, only seen off by Sectorisation.

Privatisation emphasised that new order. Operators bid for service patterns as agreed with the DfT, and the operators in turn have to pay for the use of their rolling stock and the paths on the network on which to run them. So now not only is the 'special' service a thing of the past, but even adding an extra carriage to an over-burdened service is an administrative, financial and physical impossibility. Trains aren't made up of locos and carriages any more, there aren't many, if any, spare units and both the service pattern and the rolling stock diagrams will have been planned and paid for far in advance, and with hefty fees chargeable for any changes. The recent shift to the railways being run on a service-provider model will, if anything, make that worse because the DfT will be contracting the operators for specific timetables with specific capacity and, in some cases, specific types of rolling stock.

So in this sense (and this sense alone), the monolithic, bureaucratic, inefficient BR was actually a much more agile and resilient service provider than the fragmented, straightjacketed, every-cost-accounted 2020s privatised system.