Rant Train Costs

[Tom]

The politicians, and particularly the Beeching Report, were the cause of the decline in the railways. Just because nationalised railways were run badly in the 60s and 70s doesn't alter the fact that railway infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Other countries manage to run public railways effectively enough. Personally I think that even though they are separate companies, its only the cross-billing issue that's a particular problem; if there was common tariff legislation (as they have in Japan), then those problems would go away.

As for giving a railway company carte blanche to build where it likes; get real. This 2008, not 1830; 3-4 times the population and voters who get rather upset when you nick their house, rather than disenfranchised peons and landowner MPs giving each other backhanders (ooh, maybe scratch that last one).

Nationalised railways in this country have always been run poorly. It doesn't just sit in the 60s and 70s, you can go back to the 50s. I'll remind you that it wasn't the government that built the railways, it was private companies by acts of parliament. It was British Rail that spent millions on new steam locomotives post-nationalisation (a Labour government scared of upsetting the miners), only to scrap them all 10 years later. The demise of the APT is another example of stupidity and lack of forethought.

Rail in this country will never improve while you have wankers like Bob Crow in charge. You need to allow them to grow, to invest, and while you have the government constantly interfering and treating the whole thing like some big toy train set, it'll never happen. I'm sorry but if you have a popular route and need bigger trains, or more tracks, then people are going to have to move house, or do without that road bridge for 6 months while it's raised. Profitable routes should be maximised, and that profit used to subsidise those routes that are socially important, but less profitable (or even loss-making).

Someone is bound to bring up the 'freight on trains' argument for motorways, well I have a simple partial remedy to that problem - tax incentives for hauliers to run on motorways between 0000 and 0700. You'd soon see a drop in congestion.

 

[JingleBells]

I don't suppose any of you saw Ian Hislop's documentary on the Beeching report, Off the Rails?

The original findings were that something like 95% of all rail traffic travelled on 50% of the network, this prompted the large scale cuts, some of which were completely necessary, some towns had two pretty much parallel lines going to the same destinations, but operated by different companies and serving different station buildings.

One of the people on the programme said that even looking back, around 2/3rds of the cuts made by Beeching were necessary, but some lines should've stayed (some of which they're rebuilding now).

The demise of the APT is another example of stupidity and lack of forethought.

That and the fact it broke down fairly regularly.

 

[JingleBells]

Profitable routes should be maximised, and that profit used to subsidise those routes that are socially important, but less profitable (or even loss-making).

This is certainly one of the problems of the current mess of a situation, in the past Regional Railways always lost money, but was subsidised by the profit made on things like the InterCity routes. When companies:
a) Have shareholders who want returns on their investment
b) Only operating the long distance routes
this clearly is not going to happen.

Another problem is the relatively short term franchise lengths companies get, who in their right mind is going to invest several billion in rolling stock, only to lose the contract in 5-10 years time, or in some cases find their region has been merged into another and they're redundant. I've read of cases of brand new rolling stock sat unused because the underlying infrastructure (particularly in the south east) cannot provided the necessary power through the third rail system to support the new stock.

 

[Tom]

That and the fact it broke down fairly regularly.

...because it was rushed into service.

 

[old.user4556]

I don't suppose any of you saw Ian Hislop's documentary on the Beeching report, Off the Rails?

Yeah, he did the right thing. Maybe cut out a bit much, but overall did the right thing.

 

[SheepCow]

I've read of cases of brand new rolling stock sat unused because the underlying infrastructure (particularly in the south east) cannot provided the necessary power through the third rail system to support the new stock.

Really? I've heard loads of stuff complaining about the rest of the countries use of the overhead lines as they're costly and ugly compared to third rail but never anything complaining about the 3rd rail system.

SWT are predominantly 3rd rail and have got a large number of shiny new trains. They're also planning on extending the 3rd rail along other major routes (e.g. Paddington-Maidenhead line)

 

[Cadelin]

I've read of cases of brand new rolling stock sat unused because the underlying infrastructure (particularly in the south east) cannot provided the necessary power through the third rail system to support the new stock.

But wouldn't this be the fault of the privatized rail company? Buying trains that won't work on your network when there are plenty of other trains that will?

 

[Pfy]

Surely the trains are built to specification but cannot be tested properly until put into the network?

Such as frequency issues from the traction motors on specific trains interfering with the signalling when they were first introduced.

That said, the underlying infrastructure is of course old and is partly responsible for the slow advancment. For instant, I'm pretty sure egenerative breaking (where the motors are turned into generatrs when the breaks are applied, slowing down the motors and the train and putting the excess power back into the 3rd rail supply) cannot be used at the moment as the trains just end up blowing the juice all the time, due to the underlying infrastructure being delapadated(sp?).

Anyway, fares have to be high to pay for upgrades, and loads of other stuff, like my wages.