Can Sir Keir Starmer revive the Labour Party? (Vol. 2)

Yup, dear old Fred, I reckon that H&S used many of his video clips showing how to risk life and limb in every day work. Balls of steel that man, I don’t think he suffered anxiety issues.

I think what the railways need are two new giant quangos, cuts to services, and a return to national strikes.

Or…maybe somebody has a bit of a think about what is actually needed? And how to deliver it.
How about that? From that, the govt could come up with a strategy, hand in hand with industry. It’s a radical idea I know.
Or next time, don’t split the frigging rolling stock from the rest of the business and load the deal so they have all the profit! How anybody thought that would work I have no idea!
I like rail travel. It is a vastly more relaxed way to travel. I didn’t really own a car when I lived/worked around Europe, it was foot and train all the time. Even when I did run the Donkey in Zurich it was only for a limited time in summer. I am always baffled why we get it so wrong in the UK.

Agreed.

Change and reform - of a radical and sweeping nature - were inevitable on the railways in the 50s/60s. Both to account for the fact they were (for the first time) a unified and nationalised system and to adapt for the fact that they were no longer the primary - let alone sole - form of effective long-distance/high-speed transport.

BR found itself in a terribly difficult position purely from a management point of view because it had to fight both internal and external battles. Even if the industry had been in rude health, nationalisation would have thrown up all sorts of challenges (take what happened within the LMS and LNER on Grouping and then amplify them ten-fold) and the rise of car ownership and road and air transport presented an existential challenge to the railways even if they had remained in private hands. It would have required superhuman levels of political and managerial leadership and vision to successfully navigate the situation that BR found itself in.

Beeching (the name used as a metonym for all the changes wrought on BR through the 1960s) was a belated realisation of that fact after the blind complacency of the Modernisation Plan.

Even in the most optimistic and service-orientated alternative course, closures would have happened, and many of them. The British railway network was over-built and full of redundant routes, even in the days of >120 competing private companies. The Big Four began some rationalisation and also began closure of unremunerative routes as heavy industry declined and the Austin Seven and rural bus and lorry services began nibbling away at market share. There were literally thousands of route miles that BR had no reason - practical or financial - reason to keep open simply because they duplicated other services and/or were scarcely used.

It used to be that Beeching was cast as the villain - the heartless bureaucrat sweeping away vital infrastructure in search of a bottom line - and more recently it's become popular to shift the blame to Marples. Marples was undoubtedly dodgy (or downright criminal) in his dealings, but even that doesn't properly set the context (and the extent to which Marples and his [wife's] company benefited from Beeching has been hugely overstated). But, as I mentioned above, the Wilson government didn't stop the closured and received just as much pro-road/car lobbying from within their party as the Macmillan government did from within theirs. And it was barely lobbying. It cannot be overstated how much of a consensus there was in the 1955-1965 period that road transport and private car ownership was the future and a highly desirable one. Railways in general had had their day and the British railways (and British Railways) were a tired Victorian relic that had no real place either the Progressive Consumerist Society of Macmillan or the White Heat of Technology of Wilson.

The Beeching programme caused very little outrage at the time, and most closures passed almost without notice, let along pushback. The irony was that just as the Wilson government was running to the end of the closure programme in the late 1960s was when we collectively realised that actually a world based around, and built for, the car wasn't as joyous and liberating and perfect as we'd thought. By which time it was too late - not only had the infrastructure been torn up, never to be replaced but we'd changed our lives, lifestyle and society so much that even a pre-Beeching rail system would not longer serve us.

In retrospect that was - imo - the fundamental flaw in how BR was set up and organised right from the start. The Attlee government nationalised all the pillars of the transport industry - rail, waterways, docks, airports, road transport - but did so simply by buying up each industry and then pretty much leaving it 'as was'. Not only unchanged in itself but (in modern management parlance) 'siloed'. There should have been two Executives under the British Transport Commission - a Passenger Transport Executive and a Freight Transport Executive. Each with overarching responsibility to organise how their respective charges moved around the country. Have Railway, Waterway, Road Transport and Air Transport Boards below those, whose role is to cater to the stated demands of the Executives. Effectively the Executives become the 'customer' and the boards become the 'supplier'. Therefore the demand becomes "get passengers from A to B" or "get goods from X to Z" and it's easier to build a more integrated and efficient system - for instance, replacing unremunerative railway branch lines with bus and van/lorry services, but retaining intercity rail lines. Or using waterways to deliver bulk goods to inland ports, then distributed by road services etc. etc.

Unfortunately such as system would also rely on a level of long-term consistency that has been entirely denied to British transport policy (and much else) since 1945. Because even in my system the BTC, the Executives and the Boards would have to know their terms of reference (is the priority maximising service, minimising cost, efficient use of assets etc. etc. etc.?) and those ToRs can't change with every change of government, which is what blighted British Rail.

False, I'm afraid.

The EU rules only mandate the separation of services and infrastructure, and then really only on an accountancy level. That's so that there can be open-access competition, with OA operators paying the infrastructure owner for the right to run trains.

It's perfectly possible for the same entity to ultimately own the tracks and the trains and the run services, so long as trains and track are kept separate and there is a charge-cost involved for running trains. This is effectively how British Rail operated in the 1980s under Sectorisation - it was all still nationalised but the rolling stock was allocated to different business sectors and costs were allocated by sector for both the upkeep of the stock and the running of the services on the centralised infrastructure. Each sector had to publish and justify its own profits/losses.

The separation of rolling stock came about because the UK chose to go for the franchise model of operation, with franchise terms much shorter than the typical life of railway rolling stock. You can't expect an operating company to pay for rolling stock with a lifespan of 30 years when they can't guarantee they'll be operating it in five years. So the ROSCOs procure and own the stock and lease it to each franchise.

Do away with the franchise model and there's no need to separate the rolling stock.

For instance, SNCF has two main divisions - SNCF-Reseau (which owns and manages the infrastructure) and SNCF-Voyageurs (which operates the trains). There's also Geodis which runs freight logistics and Keolis which runs public transport systems (including several in Britain...). SNCF-V is entirely responsible for its own rolling stock. Both SNCF-R and SNCF-V are ultimately under the same umbrella (state-owned SNCF) but are keep separate accounts and operations which fully complies with the EU requirements.

The railways are a classic example of the UK blaming the EU for sub-par policy.

#fbpe

Interesting post and yes agreed on the Beeching programme.

The fact it removed up to 30% of track, 55% of stations, but lost only 10% of passenger miles illustrates very well what was being cut (some of the proposed cuts were cancelled hence use of up to)

His wives on the other hand.....

You've spelt whinger wrong.

If Keir Starmer doesn't take a full 100% of the council seats from the former red wall he will have lost these elections.
It will show that the conservatives are still a major force to be reckoned with
It's all or nothing today.
If he doesnt get the full lot I can see questions being asked about his leadership and possibly a change of leader

Local election results are morally general election results.