Should the railways be nationalised?

[Gogoplata]

I'll look forward to the railways striking like the tube workers during the holidays...

Are things really that bad on the railways? I don't use trains very often, but from my experience I thought the cost was reasonable & the service was fine. For £41 I thought it was more cost effective to get the train from Newcastle to Leeds for the weekend instead of taking the car and paying for petrol & parking.

[Du1point8]

Gogoplata said:

I'll look forward to the railways striking like the tube workers during the holidays...

Are things really that bad on the railways? I don't use trains very often, but from my experience I thought the cost was reasonable & the service was fine. For £41 I thought it was more cost effective to get the train from Newcastle to Leeds for the weekend instead of taking the car and paying for petrol & parking.

costs me roughly £85-90 return Hull/Kings Cross.

Similar trip in Finland costs me €60 return (Helsinki/Tampere)

One way, overnight sleeper from Tampere to Rovaniemi (10 hours overnight with car and having a sleeper cabin) €49

It does seem expensive to me and not a reasonable price.

Edited by Du1point8 on Sunday 20th September 15:33

[Welshbeef]

Gogoplata said:

I'll look forward to the railways striking like the tube workers during the holidays...

Are things really that bad on the railways? I don't use trains very often, but from my experience I thought the cost was reasonable & the service was fine. For £41 I thought it was more cost effective to get the train from Newcastle to Leeds for the weekend instead of taking the car and paying for petrol & parking.

Reading to Paddington 45ish miles
In Rush hour £50.90 return

Off peak it's I think £28 each.
Kind of makes a family outing to the natural history museum (free) very expensive plus parking the car at the station/taxi down.

[mikebradford]

I feel in principle all infrastructure should be nationalised.
Regardless of any EU directive on allowing outside bids/owndership for things etc.

The fact historically they have been run badly is a separate issue.
The principle should always be that its owned by the country , for the benefit of its users.
The hard part is getting the then public sector workers to do it to a standard without unions wanting strikes every 2 mins, and not having so many layers of management that the costs are so high that people consider privatising it to try and provide a cheaper better service.
I accept that the currently private services still have many of these issues. But some of that may be a legacy of the previous nationalised system.

Ultimately the same old storey, so highly unlikely. And so frustrating from an outside perspective.

If the service was done to a standard and considered value for money then i dont feel anyone would even care about this topic.
On occasion we consider using the rail service to go to neighbouring towns, but as a family of 4 even with a friends and family railcard its cheaper to drive and pay for parking.
Looked at taking the rail for my wife and i to go to Edinburgh from Bradford area. Again the cost was such id rather pay £30 of diesel, and £50 in parking and use the savings towards a meal out.
That sums it up for me.

[loose cannon]

It's ok, there opening up the stand on the roof service soon to cope with all the extra passengers !

[Looket]

No.

I wasn't around in the BR days, but I know for a fact that anything the government touches turns to utter, total and complete st. It's an irrefutable fact - nay, a law of nature. If you're mad enough to think anything would improve by nationalisation you may as well deny the theory of evolution and call the earth flat.

[dcb]

Looket said:

I know for a fact that anything the government touches turns to utter, total and complete st. It's an irrefutable fact - nay, a law of nature.

+1

Mind you, I'd be a lot happier if there was only once price
for any one journey.

Getting offered a dozen different prices for one journey
is most confusing.

I seem to remember that the Italians used to - maybe still do -
provide distance based pricing.

So if you want to travel from A to B and it's X kilometers,
then you must pay Y euros, where Y = X * cost per km.

Lot simpler, easier and fairer.

[Rick101]

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article...

Awful isn't it. Record customer satisfaction and and big bag of cash back to the treasury.

Let see what happens now it's back in private hands.

[Welshbeef]

brickwall said:

Actually I need to revise my current position.

If you allow state companies to bid in a franchise arrangement, you start on an inevitable creeping path back to British Rail.

Why?
If you allow a state company to bid, they'd likely win. They could undercut private companies because they wouldn't need to make a profit, and (more crucially) they'd probably have a lower WACC.

Once you've got a bunch of state-owned franchises, there are decent reasons to merge them. And then you rapidly start to look like BR, and it doesn't take long for it all to go to st.

I seriously doubt many in snr roles public sector who know yet understand what WACC IRR and life cycle replacement is

[MajorProblem]

I work on the railway as an new works interlocking tester, basically testing and verifying st loads of logic circuits / programming data, over the years I've seen massive improvements in the quality and safety of the infrastructure since Network Rail took over the day to day maintenance, the railway was absolutely fked by the end of BR in the mid 90s, quite frankly I've no idea how it held together without more disasters than they had. Rest assured if I can find a picture of a set of points in BR compared to now you will be amazed and probably a bit worried of how trains where passing over them at up to 140mph.

Basically the railway was at its zenith at the end of World War Two, BR was born from the big four and then the railway was run into the ground until BRs demise in c1994

There is no way on earth I'd want another BR. I'm unsure if this is the same approach they had to rolling stock so I can only speak from a signalling point of view.

[Welshbeef]

MajorProblem said:

I work on the railway as an new works interlocking tester, basically testing and verifying st loads of logic circuits / programming data, over the years I've seen massive improvements in the quality and safety of the infrastructure since Network Rail took over the day to day maintenance, the railway was absolutely fked by the end of BR in the mid 90s, quite frankly I've no idea how it held together without more disasters than they had. Rest assured if I can find a picture of a set of points in BR compared to now you will be amazed and probably a bit worried of how trains where passing over them at up to 140mph.

Basically the railway was at its zenith at the end of World War Two, BR was born from the big four and then the railway was run into the ground until BRs demise in c1994

There is no way on earth I'd want another BR. I'm unsure if this is the same approach they had to rolling stock so I can only speak from a signalling point of view.

Had totally overlooked the accidents - the end result of zero investment and running way beyond end of life of product .... Sadly it meant the loss of life and in these incidents many many lives.

[MajorProblem]

Also accidents post BR have come as a result of the maintaining companies such as Jarvis, Balfour, First etc just being the same BR staff with a different set of overalls on.

Things are coming right now, NR have seriously upped the game and also changed attitudes massively.

I used to call it BR disease when people would hark back to the old days, they used to go mental, didn't help that I wasn't in the RMT Union either but that's a different matter.

[Watchman]

Should be wholly privatised without any subsidy at all. Then, if it gets too expensive to travel into London on the train, maybe there will be a redistribution of companies to other parts of the UK.

Better to spend the public money on roads and broadband services to rural areas.

[MajorProblem]

Yes I agree Tonker, I am talking about maintaining and improving what we have, Network Rail's IP (infrastructure projects) arm is a different animal and you do end up a lot of the time having people who dont even have a rail background in positions they have blagged their way into, once they are working for someone who has done the same you just end up with a circle jerk of bullst and things go wrong, but then they try to hide things / blame things on others etc it turns into a right mess.

However there are some very good teams in IP, in all the works I've done over the last few years mainly on the East Coast, Midland and Southern only a couple have slightly gone off plan (biggest one was the Kings Cross fck up last Xmas) However it's the complex major works that get the headlines be it a success or a failure, work is going on every day of every year in order to improve the infrastructure and it's not easy when you have limited access - however this is due to the TOCS and FOCS excersising their franchise rights and giving the absolute minimum to the maintainer so perhaps that is NRs fault.

[Derek Smith]

Thatcher, and a considerable number of tory mps were against privatisation of the railways as their conclusion was that it would still have to be heavily subsidised, fares would increase, and the dividends paid would be nothing more than money from taxes. Shows how wring those damn tories can be, eh?

In essence, privatisation means that the government, of whatever colour, is obliged to continue to put money into the system. In the old days, the investment varied from government to government and there could be no long term planning. If a particular government wanted to boost how much they 'gave' to the electorate just before an election, they could raid such funds.

Currently I never travel by train. The cost is too much. I go by coach if it is long distance or drive.

Whilst I am against state ownership, the privatisation of the buses down my way was a complete farce. There used to be only the one company with its depot. The buses were frequent, I often used them, and you could get anywhere on them. Now they are in private hands, just the vast majority of buses are one company, painted the same colour, they are just as frequent on certain routes, but others are all but abandoned. Despite having a free pass, I hardly ever used them. The depot has gone, sold off in a blatant example of profit taking, and the prices have gone up.

The power generating industry: now there's a success story for privatisation, as long as you are a share-holder.

There is nothing wrong with public ownership of certain services. The problem lies with the government interfering. MPs have no idea, yet that doesn't stop them 'improving' them.

Short termism is something we can hope for from them.

Once a situation gets political it becomes a disaster area.

[KarlMac]

MajorProblem said:

Also accidents post BR have come as a result of the maintaining companies such as Jarvis, Balfour, First etc just being the same BR staff with a different set of overalls on.

I used to call it BR disease when people would hark back to the old days, they used to go mental, didn't help that I wasn't in the RMT Union either but that's a different matter.

Ditto for my time at Wabtec.

Return to BR would be very very bad.

[mph1977]

Tango13 said:

Bit in bold

standard gauge track but a smaller overall structural gauge

[grumbledoak]

Rick101 said:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article...

Awful isn't it. Record customer satisfaction and and big bag of cash back to the treasury.

Let see what happens now it's back in private hands.

This makes no sense. A private company could not make it profitable yet the state owned version finds £235M? What can they possibly be doing other than raiding it in the short term?

It also makes no sense for the State to try to "make money", but that is possibly a bit deep for this discussion.


Edit - I can't count.

Edited by grumbledoak on Sunday 20th September 19:49

[Pebbles167]

I work on the railway, for a private a private machine maintenance company. Despite Network rail often making a complete hash of things, at least they try. Money does get spent and improvements are made, the railway is maintained and faults fixed. Regular meetings ensure methods and practices to get better, even if very slowly.

I know people who worked at BR and their view was that although easy, it was absolutely st. A day or night at work consisted of trying to do as little as possible whilst getting away with it. Nothing was done, and staff were paid to sit around drinking amd playing cards all night. On the rare occasion work was done, it was slack and unsafe. As for repairs, these were only carried out when the damage could either no longer be hidden/ignored any longer, or some sort of inspector was present. That being said he was usually pissed himself amd didn't really care. Should someone truly responsible complain about the massive lack of effort and then threaten disciplinary action, everyone would instantly get the union involved and the whole thing would be swept under the rug.

Things were better under privatisation with railtrack, although it quickly became apparent they were only going through the motions of proper care and maintenance, as in actuality they didn't have a clue about what needed to be done. Ultimately they turned out to be a prime example of how privatisation can be just awful.

The job i do came about from a severe incident in London that also served as the nail in railtracks coffin. As i said, Network rail are not fantastic but they do an adequate job, it's the best we've had it in years. Sure fares are more expensive, but its a worthwhile price to pay for a properly maintained infrastructure.

I fear nationalisation would lead to a lack of funding and things would either go back to a much more dangerous time and be cheaper, or would be a massive drain on government funds and the cost of everything would rise exponentially.

[Welshbeef]

How much would it cost to renationalise the railways?

Would small railways be brought in too - say Ffestiniog railway in North Wales or only what's been franchised out? If so why ?