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. )

[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.

[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.

[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.

[anonymous-user]

grumbledoak said:

If you cannot make something run at a profit, then it isn't worth doing. Railways were an attempt to make money, and they failed. Those involved have switched their profit motive to subsidy farming, and now just spout any plausible sounding reason they can think of to keep that gravy train rolling.

Really we have an oversized Hornby set purely for the Glory of the State. A National Treasure, we are told. We should bang pots for it on Thursdays.

Or we could make the changes it needs. Scrap the subsidies and let the industry evolve. It would contract to the profitable bits overnight. I imagine changes to livery would be quite low on the priority list.

I disagree with the premise that if something doesn't turn a profit then it isn't worth doing. If that was the case we would have very little national infrastructure or services. We certainly wouldn't have roads, the NHS, food standards, safety standards, Police, schools, passport services, and so on. We would basically have nothing if we had to ensure each service turned a profit in some way.

You often have to run things at a loss to offer it as a public service. But I'm sure you know all this, and I'm not sure why you made such a comment as you are usually much better than that.

If you scrapped the subsides then the rail network would simply collapse, in most areas, passenger numbers are now back up to 95% of pre-pandemic levels, meaning 3.9 million people use the trains as a form of transport every day, and nearly 2.5 million of those journeys are people commuting to work.

The end of subsidies would mean only a handful of profitable lines would remain on the busiest commuter routes.

If the rail service stopped tomorrow, the impact on the economy would be almost incalculable, especially for any large towns and cities where rail transport is essential for commuters, shoppers. and tourists.

The Beeching cuts were a clear example of how you can be too hasty with dismantling the railways. Sure, there will be a significant number of his axed lines that would still get axed today, but many routes would now be significantly busier, mostly due to factors like our increased population, younger people shunning driving, car ownership costs more expensive, parking and driving in town and city centres becoming more difficult and expensive, environmental concerns with driving, and so on.

[anonymous-user]

Don't get me wrong, I think our railways are riddled with issues, especially over these last few months.

But this is a case of be careful what you wish for.

Do you really want a national transport service to be allowed to collapse?
What about the millions of people who rely on trains as their main or only means of transport?
What would happen to the millions of commuters/workers who need to get in and out of town and centres?
What would happen to all the businesses served by those workers who commute on the train?
What would happen to the roads if those millions of commuters were forced back into cars and attempted to commute by car? It would be utter gridlock.
What about all the freight that is moved by rail? Thousands more lorries on the roads adding to the traffic?

I think letting the railways fail and close would absolutely create far more problems than we realise. Those problems would also cause issues for people who never use trains.

[anonymous-user]

velocemitch said:

Leithen said:

Does anyone have passenger numbers over the last 100-200 years?

I may be wrong, but I think I remember reading passenger numbers on the railways peaked, just before the pandemic. And I’m talking about 1919 either.

That is absolutely true.

2019 was the busiest year for passenger travel in the UK, ever, before the pandemic hit. Apparently the figures are now back to about 95% of 2019, despite the expansion of working from home. Estimates suggest we will likely be back to the 2019 figure in full by the end of this year. Numbers will likely continue to rise in the way we have seen over the last 20 years or so.

This was my point earlier, that the need for passenger travel on the railways has literally never been greater, and continues to rise. Not saying it is anyone in this thread, but it baffles me when some people say there is no need for the railways these days.

Some graphs below:

Edited by anonymous-user on Friday 17th February 08:48

[anonymous-user]

grumbledoak said:

Difficult to answer a list, but...

So what if it collapses? I don't care at all about the Glory of the State. If we are only keeping this on life support to spare the State's blushes, switch it off.
The millions of commuters can pay for their transport. That bit probably is worth keeping.
So we won't have business collapsing due to the absence of commuters, or all the commuters on the roads.
I don't see why the freight cannot also pay it's way.

I think you a priori want to keep the big Hornby set and are fishing about for justifications for why we all have to pay for it. There really is only one - will people voluntarily pay for it and use it?

I'm not sure what all this 'glory of the state' stuff is? I don't know a single person who thinks the railways are anything but a mild embarrassment to the country, and I certainly don't know anyone who wants to keep the railways purely out of some feeling of national pride.

As for myself, I will use the railways when they operate as they should, as it is faster and more convenient than using my car for when I am in the office/meetings. You will note in my opening post that said I have avoided using the railways as best I can for 8 months now, and it hasn't caused me any concerns. If they disappeared tomorrow I would manage just fine, so you needn't bother going down the route of thinking this is some personal crusade or concern of mine. I am interested in the business model and how it might change. I started this thread as a discussion of the proposed changes for anyone who might be interested.

You don't seem to understand that unless it is a strictly closed/separate system, such as the Underground, The Glasgow Metro, or perhaps the Isle of White 'Island Line' then it isn't easy to run just selected parts of a railway that make a profit. You can't just tell freight to 'pay its own way' on a large network where passenger services have been abandoned, as the freight alone would be nowhere near enough to pay for the running, signalling, and upkeep of the network. The freight would also have to close and we would have a whopping 100-120 million tonnes of freight back on the roads, on lorries, per year. Each freight train removes an average of 76 lorries off the roads.

If you let the national passenger network flop then thats fine as long as you can acknowledge the freight side closes with it and there would be an impact on industry and an extra 5 million lorry movements on the road per year as a minimum.

You also have to acknowledge that our roads and car parks wouldn't cope with the millions of extra cars that would suddenly flood the system due to commuters needing to get to work. You can't just keep very specific lines that are busy with commuters, that isn't how it works. People need a network, to get to multiple destinations.

I think our railways are piss poor to a large extent, but absolutely necessary, for a multitude of reasons, even to those who never use them. The growth in passenger numbers over the last 20 years is extremely significant, and continues to grow. As the government and various towns/cities continue to try to kick people out of their cars for environmental reasons, trains will become ever more useful.

If you think all of this is just nonsense, that is fine, but at least provide some statistics of your own regarding freight tonnes, freight movements, passenger numbers, commuter statistics, and so on, to back up your concept of 'let it fail and it'll be fine'.

[anonymous-user]

Leicester Loyal said:

Derby has been chosen as the HQ for Great British Railways.

Does this mean more taxpayers money will be spent building a new building?