With friends like these, rail doesn’t need enemies. Tamsin Omond writes a screed in favour of rail that makes me – a railwayman – cringe at the sheer ignorance of it all. Even though at the very kernel of the matter is a joint agreement; the means by which privatisation was carried out was bad for the whole industry.
Does anyone in Britain enjoy taking the train? I know on the continent – where for some inexplicable reason, trains are cheap, efficient and run on time – a train journey can be a pleasure. But here inBritain – crammed into a shabby and overcrowded carriage on your way (thank God) out of your stressful City job – is there any joy to the journey?
There’s a reason for this and it’s a fairly simple one. Many of the continental timetables have more recovery time built into them. Much of our infrastructure is running at maximum capacity particularly during peak times. One small incident will cause the whole thing to grind to a halt with a Mexican wave of delays being experienced for hours afterwards. Delays that need to be attributed, creating a whole new industry within an industry. A good delay attributer is worth his weight in gold to a train operator or Network Rail.
Tamsin then asks a stupid question:
…a new report written by the former head of the Civil Aviation Authority (did I hear someone say potential conflict of interest?)…
No, none. The key is in the use of the word former. McNulty’s suggestion that the rail users pick up the costs in increased fares is, actually, the right one. The question then is, how do we reduce the running costs so that fares remain affordable? Not least because for a local trip, they are more than reasonable and if you pre-book and travel out of the peak times, even longer distances are affordable. It’s the peak time commuter run to the smoke that is really eye-watering. McNulty wants to scrap these and raise ticket prices across the board by around 30% as he feels that the commuter is effectively subsiding the cheaper fares. Well, yes businesses do use cross subsidy in their pricing structures so saver tickets are no different to special offers that other industries use to encourage use away from popular times.
The problem comes back to something that Christian Wolmar mentions (and is referenced in Omond’s article), the fragmentation of the industry in a manner that set train operator at odds with Network Rail – not “National Rail” as Omond would have us believe – and Network Rail at odds with its contractors, many of whom struggle to remain afloat waiting fro the morsels of work that may come their way. A knock on problem for them is the retention of expertise. Unless they get regular work, then it is not worth their while employing technical experts or even tendering for the work – and going through the laborious Network Rail tendering process is pretty soul destroying – not to mention painfully long winded. With time these skills will disappear unless Network Rail takes them in-house. This latter appears to be the underlying desire.
McNulty’s suggested solutions? Further fragmentation and a greater “commercial freedom” for all 20 operators. My fear is that our greenest form of transport (apart from long – very long – hikes or the bicycle) is becoming more expensive and more inaccessible.
Actually, as the Englishman pointed out during our recent disagreement, they are not necessarily the greenest way to travel. Whether you are prepared to tolerate the costs involved and the so-called carbon footprint all depends on the type of journey you are making. I cannot travel by road from Bristol and get to the centre of London in under an hour and a half during the morning rush hour. I can by train and can use that hour and a half to work, thereby clawing back the cost of the fare, making it very efficient. I don’t give a stuff about carbon footprints as they are nothing more than a construct invented by the green lobby as a stick to beat us with. However, if you want to consider such things, trains either run on diesel – horrible dirty stuff – or electricity, which is generated in part by coal fired power stations, so the green argument is best left un-argued. Trains are efficient because they use their own directly controlled infrastructure, freeing them from the congestion on the roads. Green, however, they ain’t.
Our privatised railways are a model of inefficiency.
Here, we get to the nub of the matter. While there is a disconnect between the train operator and the metals on which they run, this will continue to be a problem. While infrastructure renewals and some maintenance tasks are carried out by a range of contractors and sub-contractors who wait at the whim of the infrastructure controller, who may see their business collapse as a result of that whim, this problem will continue. Also bear in mind that many of these small businesses struggle with Network Rail’s and their main contractors’ payment terms, which can stretch well beyond the usual thirty days. As specialist expertise becomes more rare, the price rises.
There is, of course, another matter not mentioned so far in this debate and that is public outrage. The privatised industry is castigated for its health and safety culture that drives costs up and efficiency down. However, those who remember the fall-out from the Paddington crash will also recall the press hounding Railtrack employees who had nothing to do with the incident. Railtrack’s position became increasingly untenable, such that had the government of the day not shut it down, something would have had to have happened, such was the public outcry. Yes, there was a justification. However, rail remains a safe from of transport when compared with roads, for example. Yet road crashes go unremarked in the main. The reason rail crashes hit the headlines is because of the amount of fatalities in one place. Railtrack – and subsequently Network Rail – have good reason to play it safe. They do not want a repeat of what happened back in the nineteen nineties where the Daily Mirror was offering rewards for anyone giving them the heads up on any Railtrack employees indulging in Christmas parties. While we have a lynch mob in the form of the red tops, that excessive health and safety culture will remain – along with the associated costs and reduced efficiency.
Huh.
The users should pay for the cost of the service is right but then you question how to reduce the cost. There is only one answer; they make the costs less by efficiencies or automation or preferably both. Costs for train travel are not reasonable otherwise the trains would be used more often. The only reason that trains are use for commuting is that councils deliberately don’t allow car park spaces and tax car drivers so much to travel over roads already paid for that expensive subsidised trains become viable.
Trains are a method of travel. They are not for everyone but when are they going to increase train fares and tax their users to subsidies pedal bikes. No time soon I bet as the car drivers still has a few quid to spare.
“Costs for train travel are not reasonable otherwise the trains would be used more often. ”
I take it your definition of ‘reasonable’ here is reasonable in comparison to alternative modes of transport? There is another reasonable, that being in terms of the cost of providing the service.
“The only reason that trains are use for commuting is that councils deliberately don’t allow car park spaces and tax car drivers so much to travel over roads already paid for that expensive subsidised trains become viable.”
I agree with the point here, but it’s not the only reason. There are advantages to using the train, as LR says above. The train passenger travelling to London from Bristol for a morning meeting has a significant advantage over the driver.
Not too bad up our way, unless there’s sunshine, rain, snow or leaves on the line. Most trains then keep running but the critical one to get you to work is cancelled.
Lord T – yes both efficiencies and where appropriate, automation. In-cab signalling is a long way off, though, and while we still have a mixture of semaphore and MAS signalling both of which are outdated technology – not to mention some of the rolling stock, the costs of upgrading have to be weighed against the the advantages. Given that we still use 150 year old signalling on parts of the network, you can take it that those costs are sufficiently prohibitive when balanced against any benefits.
Since privatisation some costs have reduced dramatically with the killing off of some of the Spanish practices – I could tell you some horror stories there. As someone who has spent time in various parts of the industry, I see wastage all around me. Jobs that are poorly planned cancelled at the last minute because they run late or the right equipment/personnel hasn’t been provided.
Then you just have to look at the drawn out and hideously expensive approval process before new stock can be brought on line…
On parts of the network, they are at full capacity, so using them more often isn’t possible.
That may be in part a factor, but it is not by any means the whole story. Some councils are spiteful regarding car parking, but not all. The biggest factor in favour of rail travel is congestion on the roads. The private motor car has become a victim of its own success with the infrastructure unable to cope with the demand at peak times. Rail offers a viable alternative – however for the longer commute this is an expensive option.
A good summary, nothing important to add but a question for those who think more and cheaper parking is the answer to commuter problems, where are you going to put all the extra car parks and who is going to pay for them ? Obviously the user won’t be covering the cost so it will be the council tax payer presumably, in other words a subsidy.
Removing the cross subsidy on off peak rail travel makes sense as most intensively used lines are primarily commuter routes, it makes economic sense but whether it’s politically advisable is another matter. The danger is that fare rises will be used to choke off demand, as was common under BR, which will benefit no one. If rail travel were really prohibitively expensive at the moment we wouldn’t have seen the massive rise in use in the past decade or so, capacity is the real problem and there are plenty of lines that people would be willing to use in far greater numbers if the service was there and they weren’t grossly overloaded. There is a very good article in this month’s Modern Railways by Alan Williams on the Whitby line which illustrates this.
Thornavis,
They go down into the ground and use automated warehousing to store them. Car parking is expensive now and gets no subsidy. It only needs planning permission which is where the council controls it. Tax for central London is £18 I believe per visit. That alone would pay for a personal attendant to clean and look after twenty cars.
LR,
I’m sure that the wastage would be sorted out if it was removed from government control and put in the hands of a competent operator. I put my hands up and say I don’t know how to do this but I don’t know how to do many things I know can be done by experts. One thing I do know. When many people, particularly politicians, have their fingers in the pie they get to make rules, screw it up and have no responsability for the result. We need one person responsible for the whole thing and let them sub contract it out.
Only then will it take its rightful place in our transport infrastructure. Whatever that is.
Trooper,
Yes, that was my definition of reasonable. It is the one most people use.
I have used the Bristol to London line myself a few times as the costs works out reasonable.
One issue seems to me that, like everyone else, they subsidise some tickets on the backs of those that use it the most. They should have minimum fare per mile to cover expenses and it doesn’t go less than that. Not adding on night time losses to day time fares. If night time doesn’t make any money stop it.
Socialists have screwed up a lot in this country.
Quite so. My issue is not with the principle of private operators providing a public service, it’s the cack-handed manner in which it was done.
Cross subsidy is standard business practice. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having differing pricing structures to encourage people to use a service more frequently during quiet periods – airlines do it, tour operators do it, as a driving instructor many years ago, I occasionally did it, it makes perfect business sense. As for night services, there are very few apart from the occasional sleeper train. Mostly, that’s when the lines are used for freight or are closed for maintenance.
Lr,
I know cross subsidy is standard. However what also is standard is removing non profitable services and cross subsidies when it does not make business sense.
It isn’t run as a business it is run as a social engineering tool and it is wasn’t subsidised by tax, similar to the BBC, it would have collapsed a long time ago. Perhaps if it had some bright spark would have bought it and used it to provide a profitable decent transport service.
Actually, the Rail businesses are trying to operate as a normal profit making business providing a service to their clients. The problem for them is that they do so in a perverted environment created by politicians – an over regulated environment that means extensive costs when bringing into service new stock, some frankly absurd rules and regulations that cause unnecessary loss when planning and executing engineering work and an intrusive, heavy handed audit regime that sees the captive market as a licence to print money that would not be tolerated if there was genuine competition in the market.
Politicians may be trying to use it as a social engineering tool, but I’m not sure they have the necessary Machiavellian attributes to do so. The rail businesses meanwhile are making the best of what is a bad job.
Let them run it properly as a business without the government involvement – and subsidy – and matters may well improve.
Also, perhaps, if Beeching had not destroyed its lifeblood, that cross subsidy from the branch lines feeding the mainline would have given us a useful infrastructure as a viable alternative to using the car to get into the cities. Next to me there is an old railway path that goes straight to the heart of Bristol, but the railway has long gone now. Would I have used that railway to commute into the centre of town in preference to either the car or the bike? Damned right I would.
Let’s not forget that the fragmentation you mention between operating companies and the track company, is required by EU regulations.
Just saying.
Can we leave yet?
Railways – as with most other businesses – are ‘efficient’ in proportion to the way they minimise waste.
By that I mean – not having empty trains &/or empty track.
When well over half of the customers ‘want’ to arrive at destinations in the centre of cities at the same time – and go home again at the same time, that will be inevitable
(Unless you can find some way to get a million city dwellers use the train 10am-4pm every day)