Libby Purves bemoans the fact that no trains are running over the festive period:
There’s one place you’re unlikely to be reading this, and that is in a train seat. There aren’t any or at least, only a few oddities such as the Gatwick Express coach replacement, or the Great Central Railway’s Boxing Day gala lunch trip from Loughborough to, er, Loughborough, on a steam train. Which I’m sure will be delightful, but doesn’t actually count as transport.
There won’t have been any trains yesterday, either. Unique among the main Western European nations, Britain closes its railways down for 58 hours. Nine others run trains on Christmas Day, eight of them managing a virtually normal service. Friends of the Earth is furious, saying: “It is time the rail industry helped people get out of their cars by running trains on Boxing Day at the very least.”
Um… Yes… When, exactly would Libby and Friends of the Earth like the infrastructure controller to engage in their major engineering works? During the working week or when most people are tucked up somewhere with no particular need to travel?
It is, in short, a thundering inconvenience.
Well, yes, doubtless it is to some, but rather less than it would be trying to do major works during the week. This major shut down is when they can take out and replace bridges, for example or replace junctions, track and overhead electrification with minimum inconvenience, because contractors have continued access to the line without disturbance. There is always a balance to be drawn between running trains and repairing and replacing the infrastructure that can only be done when trains are not running. You can’t have both.
And almost more importantly, it dramatises the difference in attitude between Britain and its neighbours. The difference is that, in Britain, public authorities and utilities find it difficult to grasp that they exist to provide a service. To us.
And part of that service involves maintenance and renewals, doesn’t it?
It does beg the question when, exactly, do other countries do their maintenance?
There are a couple of factors at play here; firstly, apart from the Americans, other countries tend not to be quite so precious about Christmas, so the country tends not to go into the same level of stasis in the first place. That Britain does, gives Network Rail an opportunity that it would be foolish to ignore.
Other counties do not use their railways at quite the same level of saturation as we do, so their opportunities for smaller shut downs are greater to start with.
Even if our railways were a purely privately owned, service-driven industry, likely as not, the infrastructure owner would make the balance between revenues from fares and access for maintenance and come down on balance with maintenance. I would.
Itmay be the case that these maintainence works are essential, but it doesn’t stop them being inconvinient for some 😉
Well, yes, whenever they do it, someone will be inconvenienced. Such is the nature of major renewals and maintenance. Mostly, they do it overnight and at weekends. Bigger jobs require a longer shut down. The rules of the route mean that Network Rail have to negotiate with the TOCs to get access to the railway – something that SNCF don’t have to bother with, for example.
If they don’t do it, I would suggest that rather more people will be inconvenienced (and Libby Purves will find a few column inches to complain about it, too) – and, indeed, placed in unnecessary danger through poorly maintained infrastructure. It’s a balancing act. A few people inconvenienced during the holiday period is a reasonable compromise, I feel.