Great British Railways - The proposed changes

[anonymous-user]

I was listening to Huw Merriman, the Minister for Rail, on Radio 4 today explaining that the government were indeed proceeding at pace with the big shake-up plan for 'Great British Railways' (GBR).

When the GBR announcement was made by Boris Johnson, I immediately filed it in the bin with the rest of his nonsense, and was surprised when I heard it was actually progressing. There was much speculation that it had been canned as soon as it had been said.

GBR has numerous objectives apparently, including getting more freight onto rail rather than road, and a different way of organising rail maintenance and station operation, but some of the objectives that will directly affect passengers are as follows:

Rebranding of all the rolling stock and stations to 'GBR' rather than Avanti, Southern, Northern etc.
Creating one single central service for timetables and buying tickets under the GBR brand.
Simplifying the whole system for customers.
Abolition of nonsensical ticketing aspects such as 'split tickets' being cheaper, and return journeys costing almost nothing.
Improved and more flexible season tickets.
To encourage as many passengers to use the railways as possible, attracting them using pricing, service, and a simplified system.
Fully digital tickets and the complete phasing out of paper tickets.
Introduce contactless and ticketless 'tap in tap out' systems at all stations, as well as improved information boards.


As someone who uses trains regularly*, I don't object to any of those proposals. I think it is ridiculous that Train Operating Companies have ever been allowed to brand the trains in their own livery. In my opinion, the franchise deals should always have meant that every passenger train, staff member, and station was fully branded as 'British Rail' and that tickets and timetables were handed by one central service.

To anyone but a regular train user, our rail network looks like a confusing mess of different brands, different operators, different timetables, different apps, and different tickets. The fact we still have paper tickets mixed in with digital is just daft, especially in 2023.

It remains to be seen if the government will make any headway with all this, and frankly I don't trust them to run a bath, but if they actually manage to get anywhere close to their overall aims of simplifying and improving train travel, and encouraging more passengers, then I will be pleased.



( * I try to use trains regularly, however the railway staff have made that almost impossible over the last 8 months. )

[WyrleyD]

It'll only work properly if they sack all the train drivers and re-employ those that actually want to work and can be relied upon to provide a reliable service.

[Dr Jekyll]

[quote=Lord Marylebone]I
To anyone but a regular train user, our rail network looks like a confusing mess of different brands, different operators, different timetables, different apps, and different tickets. The fact we still have paper tickets mixed in with digital is just daft, especially in 2023.

I/quote]

A bit like air travel in that respect, I don't really see where the confusion comes in. Why is having different branding for different operators more confusing than having them share the same brand? Having a simpler fare structure sounds good, but in practice the very cheapest fares would probably disappear.

[Leithen]

Sounds great for the worst operators, pretty rubbish for the good ones.

[CharlieH89]

WyrleyD said:

It'll only work properly if they sack all the train drivers and re-employ those that actually want to work and can be relied upon to provide a reliable service.

I’m not sure what you are trying to say here?
Re-employ them in what capacity? At a lower wage?

[boyse7en]

Dr Jekyll said:

Lord Marylebone said:

I
To anyone but a regular train user, our rail network looks like a confusing mess of different brands, different operators, different timetables, different apps, and different tickets. The fact we still have paper tickets mixed in with digital is just daft, especially in 2023.

I/quote]

A bit like air travel in that respect, I don't really see where the confusion comes in. Why is having different branding for different operators more confusing than having them share the same brand? Having a simpler fare structure sounds good, but in practice the very cheapest fares would probably disappear.

The thing is that there isn't much of an alternative to flying, whereas if you have to try and work out which operator's train you are supposed to book (as a non regular train user) then if it gets to complicated/expensive then just take the ar instead

[demic]

WyrleyD said:

It'll only work properly if they sack all the TOCs and re-employ those that actually want to run trains and can be relied upon to provide a reliable service.

Edited for accuracy.

[anonymous-user]

Dr Jekyll said:

Lord Marylebone said:

I
To anyone but a regular train user, our rail network looks like a confusing mess of different brands, different operators, different timetables, different apps, and different tickets. The fact we still have paper tickets mixed in with digital is just daft, especially in 2023.

A bit like air travel in that respect, I don't really see where the confusion comes in. Why is having different branding for different operators more confusing than having them share the same brand? Having a simpler fare structure sounds good, but in practice the very cheapest fares would probably disappear.

To turn that around, why do train operators need to brand the trains in their name? What difference does it make to them? All it does is waste millions of pounds when they have to rebrand from one operator to the next (Virgin to Avanti etc).

Planes are very different IMO. They are all very separate businesses, from multiple countries, with distinctive brands, offering very different products from budget to luxury. They are often owned by holiday operators. They can offer flights, routes, and timetables, totally on their own terms and prices, they can choose to operate or not operate, and from which airports. They are brands in their own rights.

Trains are a national public transport service, and should be branded as one unified service IMO, the same as the stations are all branded with the same National Rail logo.

I appreciate this is a small point, but it's one of the things I actually liked about the proposals. But as I said, I don't trust the government to run a bath, let alone make improvements to our rail system.

[Simpo Two]

Lord Marylebone said:

To turn that around, why do train operators need to brand the trains in their name? What difference does it make to them? All it does is waste millions of pounds when they have to rebrand from one operator to the next (Virgin to Avanti etc).

Because changing logos and rebranding is more fun than trying to run a railway, and you get to visit sexy advertising agencies.

[IroningMan]

Simpo Two said:

Lord Marylebone said:

To turn that around, why do train operators need to brand the trains in their name? What difference does it make to them? All it does is waste millions of pounds when they have to rebrand from one operator to the next (Virgin to Avanti etc).

Because changing logos and rebranding is more fun than trying to run a railway, and you get to visit sexy advertising agencies.

They don't want to run railways - that's far too much like hard work - they want to make money by buying and selling a licence to run railways.

[monkfish1]

Most of that stuff will never happen. Grant shapps was in charge of progressing it and nothing happened at all. But thats not a surprise. Grant Shapps is a moron.

Basically its British Rail, but re branded becuase otherwise they would have to admit disbanding british rail was a dumb idea and got us to where we are.

But i predict, it will remain a confusing mess. Sorting it out requires decisions and competence. There isnt any in government nor at the D(a)FT.

[anonymous-user]

Simpo Two said:

Lord Marylebone said:

To turn that around, why do train operators need to brand the trains in their name? What difference does it make to them? All it does is waste millions of pounds when they have to rebrand from one operator to the next (Virgin to Avanti etc).

Because changing logos and rebranding is more fun than trying to run a railway, and you get to visit sexy advertising agencies.

Very good point. I hadn’t consisted that.

As silly as this is, it probably isn’t far from the truth.

[xstian]

Why can't we run or organise anything in this country? Other countries seem to manage it. All we seem to be able to do in this country is spend loads of money on rebranding and prentending the previous disaster is doesn't count anymore because its got a new name.

Just look at government departments as an example.

[Chrisgr31]

Simpo Two said:

Lord Marylebone said:

To turn that around, why do train operators need to brand the trains in their name? What difference does it make to them? All it does is waste millions of pounds when they have to rebrand from one operator to the next (Virgin to Avanti etc).

Because changing logos and rebranding is more fun than trying to run a railway, and you get to visit sexy advertising agencies.

One advantage of different brands is it makes it easier to catch your train at stations served by more than one brand if you know what brand you are due to be on.

[Chrisgr31]

Lord Marylebone said:

Abolition of nonsensical ticketing aspects such as 'split tickets' being cheaper, and return journeys costing almost nothing.
Improved and more flexible season tickets.
To encourage as many passengers to use the railways as possible, attracting them using pricing, service, and a simplified system.
Fully digital tickets and the complete phasing out of paper tickets.
Introduce contactless and ticketless 'tap in tap out' systems at all stations, as well as improved information boards.

I'll be very surprised if this all happens. Are they still saying the changes in tickets are t be revenue neutral? If so it follows that every fare that goes down another one has to go up.

I dont want digital tickets unless its on a card. I will select paper tickets over tickets on my phone as the times I have used mobile phone tickets they havent worked as rotate as I hold the phone to the reader and the ticket no longer fits on the screen. So I need to be let through the barrier by who ever is there. Also of course I cant guarantee he phone will have enough charge!

Its also worth remembering that on a return ticket you can break your journey on route. On singles you cant. Its not something I want to do every journey but it can be very useful.

[Simpo Two]

Well gentlemen, it seems we are a bit screwed. Private companies can't run the UK trainset, and neither can Government.

I think at times like this it is worth going back through history to find when the trains were last competently run, and try to copy it.

[2xChevrons]

Simpo Two said:

Well gentlemen, it seems we are a bit screwed. Private companies can't run the UK trainset, and neither can Government.

I think at times like this it is worth going back through history to find when the trains were last competently run, and try to copy it.

That gets to the core issue of everything with the railways (and a lot of other questions of infrastructure/public service) - what's the metric for 'competently run?'

In the 1950s British Railways was an astoundingly comprehensive transport service. You could ring up a freight agent in Bristol, tell them you had to transport an elephant to Aberdeen and in 48 hours they'd have provided a specially-built van with a heavy-duty floor and Jumbo would be in the Granite City. All at set (and uneconomical...) rates. There was a web of branch lines putting a station within walking distance of most villages, any decent-sized town had at least two stations, there was door-to-door service of parcels and goods with a fleet of road vehicles, a network of sleeper trains connecting all the major parts of the country and a system of railway-owned hotels and ferries. There were engines and coaches on standby duty so failures or delays could be replaced, short-notice special services run, or traffic patterns altered on the fly. It built its own locos, its own carriages, its own wagons.

It provided a truly comprehensive service and was a marvel of logistical, technical and manpower management. In that sense it was amazingly competently run. But it lost the equivalent of £billions every year and was shedding users and share in almost every sector.

In the 19th century the private companies made huge profits, but did so mostly by having an unchallenged collective monopoly and untapped markets to grow that monopoly into. Once the railway system was complete in the 1890s and the companies were forced to compete with each other on service, not expansion, the rate of profit collapsed and even some of the biggest, most prestigious firms began looking very shaky financially.

The Big Four of the 1920s were very good at marketing (hence why that's often considered a golden age) but generally failed to react to the changes and threats in the transport market, failed to drive a new political/legislative settlement to allow then to compete with road and air transport and basically did 'business as usual' while their profits dwindled. One of the B4 was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1939 and one of the others wasn't far behind.

The point in all this is that you'd probably have to go back to the days of the Hetton Colliery Tramway to find a railway that was flawlessly run in every sense, and looking to the past is not really helpful in the present.

GBR is essentially the model that TfL uses - private contracted provision of services under a 'single buyer' with unified branding and a single customer-facing organisation.

[anonymous-user]

Chrisgr31 said:

Lord Marylebone said:

Abolition of nonsensical ticketing aspects such as 'split tickets' being cheaper, and return journeys costing almost nothing.
Improved and more flexible season tickets.
To encourage as many passengers to use the railways as possible, attracting them using pricing, service, and a simplified system.
Fully digital tickets and the complete phasing out of paper tickets.
Introduce contactless and ticketless 'tap in tap out' systems at all stations, as well as improved information boards.

I'll be very surprised if this all happens. Are they still saying the changes in tickets are t be revenue neutral? If so it follows that every fare that goes down another one has to go up.

I dont want digital tickets unless its on a card. I will select paper tickets over tickets on my phone as the times I have used mobile phone tickets they havent worked as rotate as I hold the phone to the reader and the ticket no longer fits on the screen. So I need to be let through the barrier by who ever is there. Also of course I cant guarantee he phone will have enough charge!

Its also worth remembering that on a return ticket you can break your journey on route. On singles you cant. Its not something I want to do every journey but it can be very useful.

I have no idea how it will work, but they seem to be taking aim at the 'issue' of a single ticket costing say £24, and a return costing £24. I imagine they want to make each ticket cost £12 instead.

In the defence of digital tickets, I use the train most weeks for work, and have used digital tickets for years without issue. Select and buy them easily on an app, and they've always worked fine. They don't rotate or do anything strange on my phone when displayed in the Apple Wallet on on The Trainline app. They just pop up, remain fixed no matter how you hold the phone, and scan as expected.

Point taken about breaking your journey.

[Yertis]

Simpo Two said:

Well gentlemen, it seems we are a bit screwed. Private companies can't run the UK trainset, and neither can Government.

I think at times like this it is worth going back through history to find when the trains were last competently run, and try to copy it.

Despite 2xChevrons (unfailingly) erudite summary, I do think the 'Big Four' model might still be the best. Accepting that two of them were up the creek in 1939, two of them (the GWR and Southern IIRC) were not. The Southern in particular, while having been hammered in WW2, remained at nationalisation a very slick organisation, far ahead of the others in many respects including electrification. So, my thinking (which I'm very happy to be corrected in) is:

1 Railways are a complete system. You can't separate trains and track – it's one organism.

2 Likewise the people. They all need to be on the same team, pulling on the same rope, so no-one can say "your/our train is late because somebody else's points froze". One neck to strangle.

3 There is a relatable, human dimension to the geographic distinctions in the "Big Four" that make sense where the current distinction do not. Within the Southern area (for example, because today I'm sitting betwixt the S&D and Castleman's Corkscrew, for you railway buffs) everything had a single brand, so the customer experienced consistent touch-points throughout their journey unless they took a train to say Manchester, when the touchpoint would look different because (obviously) you're in Manchester. The branding and signage is at the moment is a complete muddle. Individual systems might be OK (I think the current GWR brand is nice) but overall it's a pickle. (Although not as bad as hospitals/the NHS, which is terrible nonsense.)

4 I believe railways should be treated as critical strategic infrastructure, the transport method of first and last resort. I can support the nationalisation argument providedthat the railways are run with quasi-military levels of discipline and commitment, like they are in Japan.

I wonder whether the Big Four would have been so quick to flog off the trackbed, had they not been nationalised and rationalised, or whether they'd have been forced to sell even more, more quickly.

[2xChevrons]

Yertis said:

Despite 2xChevrons (unfailingly) erudite summary, I do think the 'Big Four' model might still be the best. Accepting that two of them were up the creek in 1939, two of them (the GWR and Southern IIRC) were not. The Southern in particular, while having been hammered in WW2, remained at nationalisation a very slick organisation, far ahead of the others in many respects including electrification. So, my thinking (which I'm very happy to be corrected in) is:

I wonder whether the Big Four would have been so quick to flog off the trackbed, had they not been nationalised and rationalised, or whether they'd have been forced to sell even more, more quickly.

The problem with the 'Big Four' model (assuming that means private regional monopolies fully responsible for their services and infrastructure and operating on a commercial basis) is that it requires the basic business to be profitable. In Japan it works because, due to the density of the population and the demand for services, it is viable to run a railway (one of the most capital-intensive of all businesses) on a for-profit basis. The 'Big Six' of Japan receive virtually no subsidy and 60% of Japan's passenger services are run without any at all. Basically it's as if the entire network was the London/SE England commuter belt and nothing else.

So for that model to work you have to either accept that the service will be pruned down to a profitable level, or that some level of subsidy will be introduced to support services that are not commercially viable but are economically and/or socially desirable. And once that happens you swiftly end up with a case for government oversight of some degree and there goes your true 'Big Four' model.

Some sort of nationalisation was inevitable in the 1940s. The railways had been flogged almost to destruction during the war and the level of compensation the government was legally required to pay the Big Four would have exceeded their corporate value, so in essence the Big Four sold themselves to their biggest creditor. As mentioned, the LNER was already a financial basket and the LMS was heading swiftly in the same direction.

But it is interesting to see the Big Four's post-war plans, the projects that some of them drew up for spending government development grants in the 1930s and what they were trying to achieve legislatively in the 1920s. For instance, the Southern (as you say, the most financially secure and technologically progressive of the Big Four) had as its end-goal to electrify all its lines east of the London/Bournemouth main line and diesel-ise everything else with a combination of mixed-traffic locomotives and DEMUs. Lines that could not justify that capital investment would be shut. Goods depots would be rationalised, with one large depot roughly every 20 track miles, serving its hinterland by van and lorry.

The Big Four fought long, hard but unsuccessfully to shrug off some of their legislative burden in the 1930s. They wanted to repeal the common carrier legislation that mandated that they accept all traffic regardless of quantity and carry it at centrally-fixed rates which did not reflect the commercial cost. They wanted to relax the legal procedure for removing passenger services from lines or shutting them entirely. One can imagine that if the Big Four had somehow achieved these goals while remaining independent you'd see a much quicker and more savage version of the Beeching Axe in terms of rail services, but probably with a more integrated bus/lorry service as a replacement.

But even that wouldn't have been enough to see off the rise of the private car and the road haulage industry. And it also depends on there being management of sufficient quality in place, and since the management in BR in the 1950s and 1960s was largely the same as that which would have been in charge of the Big Four, that's very doubtful. BR could do some ludicrous things in its desire to 'modernise' - in the late 1950s they decided it wasn't viable for every station to have a couple of vans and a flatbed truck to do local deliveries. These would be pooled at the major freight depots and driven to the station as traffic demanded. Since the majority of goods traffic to such stations was from the major depots outwards, you had the comical situation of a goods train leaving the main depot and heading to the provincial station, shadowed along the parallel roads by an empty van, to which the goods would be transferred at the station for the 'last mile' delivery.

And that wasn't just BR's fault - it was legislative because (due to outdated Victorian-era rules) the railways couldn't provide pure road services - they could use road vehicles to pick up and drop off goods at their start/end points, but the consignment had to travel by rail in the middle. That speaks to my opinion that, in hindsight, the organisation of the nationalised transport industries in the 1940s was fundamentally misjudged. Instead of nationalising the railways, the road services, the canals, the docks and the airports as they stood, and managing them as separate but related entities, they should have been nationalised as 'passenger' and 'freight' businesses from the top down. And that would have then required a legislative programme to update the rules the industry was working under to suit.