Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

And interestingly enough, it now seems to be slowly creeping back the other way:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tfls-london-o...

Normally I'd be against nationalisation, but having been a 'SouthEastern' commuter for over 20 years, I can only hope this will result in an improved service.

View on HN

TfL doesn't actually run the TfL Rail services—the big difference is their operator receives a fixed sum for operating them, compared with the other operators where they pay a fixed amount to the DfT and pocket any profit they get beyond that. Arguably, the big difference is that it means TfL Rail will only get investment if TfL decides, because there's no motivation for the operator to do so. At the same time, TfL Rail isn't in competition with the Underground, etc. so better inter-modal connectivity becomes more worth investment.

The operator also has no control over fares and branding, I'd argue that's a big difference too.

In practice, other British rail companies only seem to make improvements if the government pays for them most of the time too. There's very little actual private-sector investment in the railways; it basically just seems to be a license to print money.

Mostly, yes. One honourable exception is Chiltern's Project Evergreen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiltern_Railways#Project_Ever...

But then, Chiltern wasn't run by a bus company, but by a group of British Rail managers who knew exactly what they were doing:

http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/business/profiles/8227427.Histo...

I suppose it also helped that it was a line with potential to steal traffic from already overloaded intercity services to Oxford and Birmingham.

Chiltern are owned by Deutsche Bahn are they not? A state operator running a better railway, who'd've thought it. (And aren't the improvements all funded by the back door by central government anyway?)

There's plenty of improvements that are made by TOCs, though often not the things that get big headlines: service frequency increases are often done by the TOC, wifi on-board became commonplace on intercity services without government funding, etc.

Certainly there's plenty of cases where the improvements are only made because they're a requirement of the franchise specification (with or without funding), but I think it's unfair to say that all improvements have happened because of government intervention.

I wish the UK had a high-speed rail network like the Shinkansen in Japan.

We're in the middle of trying to establish a high speed corridor at the moment, I'm all for it personally but honestly it's been a ludicrously expensive project so far and the opposition to it is huge and mounting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2

Reply on news.ycombinator.com