UK Rail services to come under unified state control | Hacker News Reader

UK Rail services to come under unified state control

bbc.com

277 pointspwatsonwailes376 comments

Hurrah! Even as a free market conservative I've long been in favour of this: bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets.

There's effectively only one operator anyway, for a given journey, it should be the state, awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer.

You don't travel with X from A to B because you think X is great value for money and provides a really top notch service; you do it because you need to get from A to B and X happens to be the operator.

However.. I'm pessimistic... I'm sure operators will push back on 'under one brand', and argue they need this that and the other in order to differentiate themselves and effectively compete...

I'm sorry to say, but these plans still see routes being operated by private companies awarded multiyear contracts...

Pricing and scheduling are to be centralised though AIUI

Perhaps, but:

> The government says the new system should look more like Transport for London, with multiple operators under one brand, offering greater accountability when things go wrong.

If it introduces more accountability, it's basically doing it's job. Multiyear contracts do not mean no accountability. I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with little to no recourse.

I didn't see any promises about additional recourse. It seems to be more about bureaucratic consolidation than accountability.

This is not the nationalisation and price freezes promised by Corbyn.

I don't see specific details either if that's what you mean, other than the suggestion in the statement I quoted above.

Perhaps i'm being naive, govt is not exactly my forte, though it feels reasonable to suggest accountability is implicit to consolidation here... currently they seem to get contracted to essentially go and manage themselves and their lines; whereas multiple operators under one government management structure of some kind at least has potential for accountability without relying on the operators goodwill (which seems to be as absent as the free market forces).

> "I'm not a regular passenger but my understanding is that reliability of current service is generally poor with little to no recourse."

In my experience, the UK rail system has been running fantastically since Covid began! I don't think I can remember even a single delayed train since March 2020 and certainly no overcrowded ones. So it seems like the real problem with the trains was always the passengers ;)

Isn't that a bit like saying it's not the ISP's fault that they aren't delivering even 50% of the throughput they promised? if only there weren't so many subscribers - this is literally what happens on cheap mobile internet with high contention ratios, when it's sunny outside, the throughput and stability shoots through the roof.

It might be "one line", but the number of trains, carriages, staff and general stress on the infrastructure is based on the number of people using it - if not managed well, or resources are stretched to thin to squeeze profits, it's not the passengers fault. COVID simply created a sudden and unusual surplus of resources for them.

The OP finished with a winky. They were being tongue-in-cheek.

So does Transport for London, in some behind the scenes way I don't need to know or care about.

Nationalisation is not a panacea.

In France for instance, SNCF runs the non-TGV railway with inefficency and carelessness on a "it's our railway and we decide how you can use it" basis, and the regional governments are chomping at the bit to be able to award the contracts for subsided services to someone other than the state monopoly.

I'd be happier than the status quo even if it just meant presented to customers as a single brand — I always found it ludicrous trying to get to, say, Gatwick from London Bridge & thinking "There's a Thames Link train leaving at 5 past, I'll go for that but if I don't reach the platform on-time, I won't be allowed use my ticket on the next train, because that's South Eastern, so I'll have to wait for the train after that". Unnecessarily confusing.

"Flexible season tickets" is also a really welcome one, especially if people go to WFH/office hybrid set-up.

> awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company where there's little/much more indirect incentive to do anything in the interest of the consumer.

Well... the incentives really aren't different for the government.

Actually they are because unlike shareholders who cares more about dividends then efficiency and service levels the government have stakeholders who care about efficiency and service levels.

Hahahahaha

Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.

Efficiency leads to profits and thus dividends. The government cares more about politics than efficiency. Look the the problems southern have had because the government insisted on getting rid of guards - they effectively nationalised southern (GTR) years ago because they refused to let the private sector run it how they wanted.

Compare with chiltern who converted the Chiltern line from a service about to shut down under the government in the 80s to a leading toc massively increasing service and options

Chiltern Railways were great, and were one of the few TOCs that genuinely competed for passengers against other railways, as Chiltern, Virgin (now Avanti) and London Midland (now West Midlands / London Northwestern) all operated competing services between London and Birmingham.

Back in the day, Chiltern had express peak-time services to Birmingham which were only marginally slower than Virgin's high speed trains. But Chiltern was much cheaper and would serve you a cooked breakfast and proper espresso coffee at your seat - in standard class!

The white paper extols their open data promise which will allow (for example) "Personalised travel offers, like free coffee when a service is delayed"

I don't get this kind of argument. Efficiency doesn't mean a good service. It means to minimise the costs in meeting your contractual requirements. It's not unusual for a company to be set up specifically to bid for a government contract since they're so lucrative and so hard for the government to respond to: a very profitable approach is to compete for a contract and then offer the shittiest service for which you are not subject to penalties. In some cases the senior management of reputable public transport service providers with decades of service provision have basically just upped and left the country before the contract is even through.

The free market certainly provides benefits, but there needs to be some meaningful recourse to removing your custom while the provider depends on it. Otherwise, it's simply not a free market at all, no matter the circumstances that surrounded the bidding process.

The government already had to care about that. They were losing votes to promises of nationalisation under Corbyn in 2017.

This looks like an attempt to present a kind of Potemkin nationalisation to mollify the anger of people with £1k+ season tickets and cement their hold on voters drawn away from Starmer in the last election (who meekly dumped rail nationalisation as a policy).

But they could do nothing about it because of the arms length principle, putting things under government control shortens the chain of responsibility.

This measure might be too little to really matter but the fact is that when you don't have an market(and for passenger rail you kind of don't) outsourcing operations to for-profit organisations provide nothing but a venue to funnel cash out of the system to private shareholders.

When there is an functioning market that is not tied to an government backed/guaranteed service it does make sense to subcontract work to private enterprise, but unless the government contracts represent a relatively minor portion of the subcontractors revenue and the subcontractor don't have more then say 20% market share, there is no functioning market, so all you end up with is an mercantilist structure of public risk and private profits if you still insist on pushing the task to private enterprise.

I also question whether outsourcing is cheaper too. Once you add in all the overhead in managing the contracts and contractors, plus the profit for the companies, I struggle to see how this is a better deal for government (and by extension the taxpayer).

Removing the incentive to make profit does not create incentives to improve efficiency and service. The government has no such incentives.

>does not create incentives to improve efficiency and service.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess you've never used the for-profit rail services of the UK then.

(I know this is quite snarky, but to elaborate, there is no incentive for the TOCs, because a operating a stretch of railway line doesn't have any competition. You don't need to be efficient or give good service because customers do not have an alternative choice of train they can use.)

Yes, they do, campaigning on a program of better services and then not delivering anything is very much against career politicians' interests.

The timeframe for changes is so long that this has zero chances of affecting any politician's career

Yes, but they're still judged for their actions, so they'll lose voters if they do nothing or take actions that will be widely criticised by the press.

This was part of the reason why a lot of previously nationalised stuff was privatised in the first place. MP's would get people complaining to them about the quality of their phone lines from BT for example.

It all moves in cycles, I could well imagine the same situation happening again in 20 years.

Having an incentive to make profit doesn’t create incentives to improve efficiency and service. A private companies incentives are the profits, and anything else is just in order to serve those.

It would certainly simplify the structure. At the moment it's all contracts and metrics and fines and lawyers when things go wrong. Perhaps the end to the ultimate metric for whether operators get fined or not being whether trains are on time which leads to bizarre situations like trains switching platforms at the last minute and leaving empty due to all the passengers being on the wrong platform.

And getting flat out cancelled when it's cheaper to take that hit than try to get passengers to where they're going in spite of the delays.

When the government will take away your franchise in a few years - as just happened here - that is the only sane thing to do.

Shareholders aren't stupid enough to invest in something long term unless their investment will have a return. Companies invest when there is a long term profit from the investment that makes it worth it. With governments all over the world having a history of nationalizing railroads, there is no rail investment that can be made with a time-frame beyond 7 years - and rail is up front expensive enough you need a lot more than a 7 year time frame on most investments.

Most of the railroads in the US were funded by 150 year bonds. (your history class talked about the government giving railroads 10 miles of land on each side of the track - but that was only a few routes in the west that got that, most rail in the east the railroads had to buy the land at market price). I assume most of the rest of the world was similar.

Companies don't deserve free bailouts. If they go bankrupt the government can reasonable expect something for paying their debts.

It becomes a campaign issue (or does if it is an issue), which is what I mean is 'strictly better'. Not great, probably, but not worse in any other way that I can think of, and that is a positive (to whatever extent).

Indeed the government has incentives to spend time, money and energy on campaigning. Unfortunately running things is a different matter.

Ultimately both governments and private entities can run things efficiently. And both governments and private entities can run things badly. The UK government has an excellent recent record of running rail franchises when it has had to step in and bail out franchises (it ran it profitably, and with excellent customer feedback on service), so it's a good bet that it'll do better than the existing providers for the time being.

It is the same people who worked for the franchises working under government control - it is the senior management who go but the actual doers are the same.

Incentives on one is to maximize profits, which in a monopoly means just extracting more money and spending less.

Incentives on the other is electability (or ideology, perhaps rare), which at least has the possibility of meaning doing a good job.

Look how much hay Mussolini made from running the trains on time (which wasn't even the case, they just padded the schedule).

> which wasn't even the case, they just padded the schedule

Well, if I'm a company using rail for freight or a worker depending on the rail to get to work, it already is a massive improvement if I can at least rely on the train being where it should be at the announced time. Improving the schedule for faster travel or shorter intervals is another thing, but predictability alone makes my life easier.

Both are important, but for different things. If the trip time is too long nobody will take the train. If the train isn't predictable nobody will take the train. You get a bit of leeway in different situations though. The longer the trip the less either matters because what else can you do? If you are only going a few meters it needs to be here now (whenever now is - on time in 1 minute is too late!), and it only needs to be faster than walking that distance. In between you get some ability to do things.

In the Swiss case on time is critical because they want people to depend on their next train being there when they get there. They assume most people will get off one train and get on another (or a bus) so they all meet in the same place at the same time. Early does nothing for anyone unless the bus/train they are meeting is early and leaves early. This is one good way to run a system. The other is run so many trains/buses that whenever you arrive there is another waiting for you that will leave as soon as you can get on. This second way to run a system is much faster and better for everyone - but the costs are significantly higher though and so nobody can afford to run a large system that way. (large cities often can run this way and should where they can). Note that system is the key word here. If you only have one train the considerations are different.

Too right. It's always frustrating if your train is 2-3 minutes late and just as you step off the train you see your connecting train leaving its platform and know you now have a 20 minute wait for the next one. The could definitely do with a bit more padding for those situations.

Thankfully I don't have to take the train very often - especially these days lol

LOL Switzerland (i.e. extremely punctual society) actually does this with their rail system. There is a time buffer in the rail schedule for each of the stops. If a train is running late, and is /expected/ to be late, according to the estimated time of arrival, the train adjusts its speed, going faster, to arrive at the originally planned scheduled time. Failures on the rail system are of course rare.

If they're way late, they'll skip stops too, so they don't ruin the schedule for the whole network for the day.

A few people in one town having to wait an extra 20 minutes ensures hundreds of thousands have a predictably on-time system.

Late at night, if one of the regional trains is late to a local hub, the local trains wait for it to arrive so you're not stuck getting home.

In general though, I'm so used to the trains being on time, I start tutting if it's even a minute late

Yeah, my last visit to Switzerland they announced one of the trains would be three minutes late and apologized for the inconvenience.

Meanwhile, I've arrived in NYC fourteen hours late on Amtrak.

That's just good planning.

I think all rail systems have some small buffers build in.

On the polish site which tracks punctuality of trains, you can often see train delayed for some time, which decreases delay by every stop, eventually ending with smaller delay or on time.

http://infopasazer.intercity.pl

What really happened is the trains continued to run the same way they always had, but the Ministry of Propaganda said they were running on time and people believed them. It sounds cynical, but that's only because it worked.

Perhaps also because it's still working.

And what happens when party A fucks up and you vote in party B who also fuck it up your are officially out of options.

The tender approach for time limited monopoly was just terrible though and had no good incentives at all, and so I'm not really sure a government monopoly will be much worse.

In decent voting systems, you vote in party C.

If there was only one issue to vote on. However party C will have some other negative that I hate that party A is best on and party B is okay.

The only system that doesn't have voting negatives to me is one with a population of less than 10 where I'm sole dictator. Any population more than that and someone will get mad at me and kill me. Republics with some form of voting are the best option I know of for large populations of people who aren't "mind numbed robots" with no ideas of their own, and there is room to tweak the voting system. However they are still terrible for getting good results.

I don't think there's any voting system that genuinely gives you three choices to lead government at every election. Even in proportional systems, you might be able to select someone who more closely represents your interests and can advocate them in parliament, but the government is probably going to be led by one of the same two parties over time. If party A and party B are both ideologically inclined to fuck up rail, getting party C elected as a junior partner probably won't change that.

And if you're just hoping to replace party A entirely with party C, FPTP is one of the better systems as long as you're not in a country where election laws are set up to ensure that the Democrats and the Republicans are going to win almost every election. But that's a question of candidacy laws and incumbent rights; changing the voting system in the US won't suddenly cause other parties to get elected.

Anyway, the fact that party A fucked it up and party B is fucking it up doesn't mean party A lacks incentives to improve it tomorrow. Perhaps they fucked it up because their leader was incompetent, and now that there's been a change in leadership they will be motivated to improve.

> but the government is probably going to be led by one of the same two parties over time.

Finland has generally had 3 major parties ducking it out usually around 15-25% for each. 1995 was last time single party got over 30% of seats. Depends a bit on time which exact ones they were.

English wikipedia doesn't have the historic list, but Finnish does https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduskunta#Kansanedustajat_puol... Divide by 2 to get the % (there are 200 members)

Population size is a big problem. The more you scale up a democratic system, the more it becomes difficult to bootstrap and maintain a coherent political movement that can have a realistic chance to win an election, in what is probably a logarithmic scale. So the bigger the country, the more entrenched the options will be, which eventually boils down to two sides when you approach certain thresholds (one for the current government, and one against it).

France has had a million parties. Romania, too. Italy, same. If there's a will, there's a way. Most of the time there's no will.

The end of the rail franchise system is not new news.

The franchise agreements were effectively terminated in March 2020 when the government bailed out operators due to Covid.

By July, the ONS announced that rail operators were now considered part of the public sector for statistics purposes, signalling that they had effectively been nationalised:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/news/theonsclassifiestrainoperat...

In September 2020 the government announced that franchises would be not return:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/21/uk-covid-19...

What’s new with this announcement is that the functions of several organisations (Network Rail, ATOC/National Rail, etc) will be merged together into a single new entity.

I’m not. I have a choice on the WCML of multiple different providers. Manchester to London walk up far for almost any time can be £300 return for the fast train arriving in london before lunch and getting home before 9pm, or £50 for a slower train with a change.

Same with crewe-Manchester, Birmingham-london, Edinburgh-london etc.

Quite happy with the competition and no government interference.

You're saying there's clearly plenty of competition when a flight from London to New York can be had for the price of a fairly normal rail ticket from London to Manchester?

Those £50 tickets are about market segmentation - separating the customers who have time flexibility or are willing to suffer from those who don't or aren't.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Rail is as expensive as a plane ticket that goes much further because the railways have far more limited capacity than the skies do. It's not related to competition or lack of it - those rails just cannot safely take more vehicles.

Lol, no, rail has 10x to 50x more capacity than skies do, a single train can carry thousands of passengers and China has invested in modern raileay because their airspace is clogged. Now they have more high-speed rail than the rest of the world conbined while plans for HS2 are older than I am and are still nowhere

Seriously? You do realize that we're talking about the capacity of the air vs land, not individual trains vs individual planes? Yes, a single train has more capacity than a single plane, but the limit to how many planes can be in the sky is more or less a function of how sophisticated your ATC system is. UK rail hit the physical limits a long time ago, and expanding it is extremely hard because the land is all taken. That's why HS2 is so expensive and slow, yet (was) still being pursued, because it's the only way to add meaningful capacity. Same with Crossrail.

That £300 return subsidizes train services in rural parts of cornwall. That's a political decision. Other options are to have more taxpayer subsidy, higher prices in Cornwall, close services in cornwall, or reduce operating costs (which are heavily staff and rolling stock based -- something that HS2 will slash)

P.S. I just looked up an equivalent London-New York economy flight (flexible flight leaving this evening and returning tomorrow), and it's £2,481.02

It also subsidized Richard Branson's lifestyle. This is also a political decision.

I looked at London-NY - if I put it off one week I can easily cross 1/3 of the world for less than the price of a day trip to Manchester tomorrow.

Where does the subsidy for Branson's lifestyle come in? Branson hasn't been involved in the UK rail network for a couple of years.

If I look at Manchester-London in a weeks time with a non-flexible ticket it costs £45 return (actually for £45 it's pretty flexible - you are just limited to one firms trains, a bit like that BA fare, and can't travel in the morning rush hour)

https://i.imgur.com/CNCzmKu.png

That's less than 9p per mile. What do you think a fair price would be?

A fair price would be a £45 return ticket London to Manchester if I bought it at 9am tomorrow at the station.

This would bring the UK rail prices more in line with most other European countries.

£300 is gouging.

That's available and fine, as long as you leave Euston after 0845.

You can take the 08:46, arriving in Manchester at 12:13 - an average speed of about 60mph.

The £300 is an option that few choose, because that journey gives them major benefits. The money raised from that is plowed back into the railway and used to subsidise services to Harrogate, Holyhead and Hungerford

Average speed of 60 mph? Is this 18th centurely where rail competes with horse carriages?

You do realise that a country needs 21st century rail service to be competitive interbationally?

You can pay a £20 premium each way to up that to about 100mph average. Competition and choice is great.

Quality services and products are great, choice for the sake of choice has no value.

Otherwise we would bring back bloodletting, leeches and snakeoil salesmen to get more choice in cancer treatment.

http://www.leeches.uk.com/

£300 for a train ticket and you are happy? Have you been on a train in China, France or even Czech Republic?

This parody for 'competition' has given us most expensive fares in Europe and soviet-block quality of rail service.

It's a new disease, 'neoliberalism of the brain' that maintains 'free market' even at the cost of organ failure

https://www.seat61.com/uk-europe-train-fares-comparison.html

> the next time someone says (or you read) "Britain has the highest rail fares in Europe", you'll know this is only 15% of the story. The other 85% is that we have similar or even cheaper fares, too. The big picture is that Britain has the most commercially aggressive fares in Europe, with the highest fares designed to get maximum revenue from business travel, and some of the lowest fares designed to get more revenue by filling more seats.

I'm sorry but this article is bullshit. Go and actually check the train prices (because I did) now. Book Sheffield to London 1 month in advance, comes out to £70 odd return (nearly 4x more than article states) with a first class upgrade for an extra £70....Paris to Leon 1 month in advance? £20 odd return with another £20 first class. Idk if something has changed but you can't quote this article anymore. Train prices in the UK are criminal.

Seconded, this article is quite misleading. The UK fares always seemed quite unpredictable to me when I used them, with variances similar to those you see when booking flight tickets. Maybe the fares have an extra component based on demand? If I look for second-class tickets from Edinburgh to Montrose (which I went on semi-regularly) @ scotrail.co.uk on 1st June I see prices that fluctuate from £9.30 to £24.60. Maybe the guy only looked at the lower-bound on the London-Sheffield route?

Yes, train fares are based on demand, same as plane and coach fares. Same as they are in Europe (The Paris-Dijon journey in a months time is between €31 and €71 depending on what time you choose)

For walk up fares, Edinburgh to Montrose is 100 miles each way, an "off peak" return (so any time after 0930) is £34 if you limit yourself to LNER trains or 17p/mile, or £41 return for a choice of LNER or Scotrail trains. If you want to travel before 0930 on whatever train turns up next, it's £48.60 or 24p/mile.

What price do you think you should be paying? In 2019 Scotrail carried 1.8 billion passenger miles got £482.8m subsidy - a 27p per mile subsidy. The company made a £11m loss too.

How much should the tax payer subsidise your Edinburgh-Montrose journey? 35p/mile/ 45p/mile?

The article actually explains this, with different options

> For travel today, bought at the station, immediate departure, outside the peaks...

And

> If travelling today in the business peak hours...

It acknowledges that finance bros travelling from Manchester to London for a 9AM meeting and traveling back on the 1630 will pay more. That doesn't affect most people

The summary makes it quite clear.

The big picture is that Britain has the most commercially aggressive fares in Europe, with the highest fares designed to get maximum revenue from business travel, and some of the lowest fares designed to get more revenue by filling more seats.

Basically a tax on last minute business travelers to subsidise leisure travelers and commuters.

Yeah I’d known about peak/off-peak, but it always seemed odd that there was such a wide range and that there were so many differently priced tickets within that range and I never knew the formula. An even longer journey I take here (Brno-Prague) seems to always be either 205kč or 245kč (£7-8.50).

I know British rail travel is more expensive, it’s the (to me) unpredictable ticket pricing that I would like to decrypt

Privitisation has made fares far cheaper if you know what you're doing, it's great for people with a hacking mindset who aren't worried about looking at brfares.com, and maybe investigating things like routing guides.

Advanced fares exist to encourage people to travel by train who wouldn't normally. They are released on trains that are generally more lightly to get more revenue from perishable stock. Same as supermarkets selling lunch food near expiry date cheaply in the evening - they don't want to do it earlier in the day (and canibalise their lunch trade), but doing it at 4pm means they get extra money without revenue abstraction.

I'm not a fan of advanced fares though, I don't tend to plan, and I hate the stress of missing the train, so I look for hacks to get better flexible fares.

A Manchester-London "standard fare" has increase from £50 in 1995 (£100 today) to £160, however competition and sties like trainsplit mean you can buy a walk up return fare for £45 -- less than a quarter of the old cost after inflation, and only about 20 minutes longer than the old time.

There's more "hacks" to be had too. I used to travel from Wilmslow to London on a semi-regular basis (every few months, getting the 0811 fast train, and returning about 6pm. It cost about £120 return, because I bought a super off peak ticket from Edinburgh, which was valid on any train arriving into Euston that was on the route. Break of journey is well worthwhile - I travelled from Crewe to London a fair bit on a Chirk-Tunbridge Wells return, which allowed break of journey in both directions and was valid on so called "peak" trains from Crewe to London. Splitting tickets can work, especially on very overcrowded trains like the cross country services. Don't buy a pricey ticket from Exeter to Leeds, instead buy a combination of tickets for your journey and save a fortune.

All this means if you are willing to put in time or effort you can travel far more cheaply. The goal of the "rail delivery group" over the last few years has been to remove these "hacks", so everyone has to pay the full price.

Other options to reduce fares would be

1) Getting rid of the unions (rail staff have a strong contract meaning driver salaries have increased about 5.5% a year since privitisation -- same as the "standard" fare on the Manchester-London ticket)

2) Reducing staff (DOO where the driver has to press the "door open" button instead of the guard. This led to massive industrial action on both Northern and Southern)

3) Increasing train speeds (A London-Manchester return takes about 5 hours for staff, costing 5x3 salaries for the driver, guard, and buffet. Replace with HS2 and it drops to 2.5 hour round trip, halving staffing costs - and train leasing costs - and the HS2 trains are twice the size so there's twice as many seats so no need to price people off "overcrowded peak trains")

4) Increasing taxpayer subsidy. Given that the majority of rail travellers are of an above average income, and especially on the really expensive lines

The left have painted a picture of Richard Branson having stolen trillions of pounds over the years, but the profit margins are really very small. It might account for £5 on that £160 ticket, but that's not going to make people happy. I'd rather have the option to learn how to get cheaper tickets (typically typing in "trainsplit.com"). Sadly the narrative (see many posts on this thread) is that "privitisation means high fares and poor service". The evidence is that is nowhere near the whole story. Well respected rail journalist Mark Smith does a good balanced report comparing fares in europe and UK, and the reply comes "load of rubbish guvnor, check the prices now". I check the prices now, post screenshots which back up Mark Smith's points, and it's just a downvote with no reply.

I thought HN was a rational place, but it seems not when it comes to the UK railway.

https://i.imgur.com/bvviAcJ.png

£17.60 on the 12:05 departure on Jun 16th on trainsplit with one change - 10p/mile.

And on the well-advertised and more expensive trainline on Jun 17th

https://imgur.com/ymtzPhw.png

£31.50 on the 12:37 direct. £43.50 first class .

The 11:22 SNCF Paris-Dijon on the same date is €31, or £27. The 12:22 is €40 (£35). One way.

https://i.imgur.com/1Zs0APR.png

Everything is more expensive in the UK - salaries are higher too, compared to Europe.

Train fares aren't (although the tax payer in France pays far more for train services -- services which are pretty rubbish compared with the UK.

Compare somewhere like Lesparre (population about 5,000 and 40 miles from Beudeux), which has about 10 trains a day taking 90 minutes.

With Cononley (25 miles out of Leeds) with 4 trains in each direction the next hour.

London might be a beacon, but UK has the poorest regions in Western Europe. In fact some ex-soviet countries do better

https://highpaycentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/High_Pa...

Prices are "criminal" but not worth you doing more than a cursory search for a cheaper ticket?

Austerity literally kills, and often leads to neoliberalism. “The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills” by David Stuckler MPH PhD and Sanjay Basu MD PhD is an excellent read on the subject.

The British, in no exaggeration, get taxed to death. You get horrible value for your tax dollar. I am saying this as an American who lives in Croatia, who pays quite a bit in taxes. However, I prefer to pay Croatian taxes (in addition to my US taxes) as a dual US|EU (Croatian) citizen, just for a stable, relaxed society.

There is a very high baseline level of stress and anxiety living in America. It’s not worth living there again. Seriously, Croatians have a great lifestyle, with perhaps the best lifestyle in all of Europe. Also, if you die of coronavirus in America, it is nothing more than a statistic to both the government and the American population, which is not only unbelievably disgusting, but downright sadistic.

I couldn't be more surprised by this comment as someone born and raised in Croatia.

You are the first person I heard who likes paying Croatian taxes. Do you follow the national news? There's always a steady stream of corruption news, especially recently.

It's ironic you post this in a thread about rail. Croatia has a truly horrible rail system. It's universally mocked as useless.

Regarding COVID, I would have agreed with you that Croatia did great last year in March, but from late summer 2020, it's been catastrophic. And Croatia depends on tourism, so there's a big incentive to get things to normal levels so tourists come. We could have been better than Portugal now.

Also re COVID, have you witnessed the vaccination campaign? Have you seen how many politicians and their friends got vaccinated ahead of the elderly, despite guidelines saying vaccines should be given according to age? The rector of Zagreb university got a vaccine before my grandma. How is that not sadistic?

Croatia has some great pros, such as a relaxed lifestyle, but you're really stretching it with calling it a rolemodel society and good value for taxes

Nobody likes paying taxes. I see it as my civic duty and absolutely worth it for a stable society.

Of course Croatia is no role model society. Corruption is always widespread.

However, we still do have it very good. That is a point that is very frequently understated in Croatia.

They privatised profits, but not responsibilities. I don't know why even a single person thought this was a good idea (unless they were on it for money).

I think the privatisation could work if multiple companies could bid for a given journey / timetable slice, rather than having entire routes for themselves with no realistic way of removing them if the service goes bad.

They did privitise the risk too. After the failure of the east coast franchise recently, the government bailled out virgin, but that's not the fault of the system.

If I want to travel from Birmingham to London I have a choice of 3 different train companies, as well as a coach company and driving (either hiring a car with or without driver, or using my own car). That's tons of competition, and it shows given the choice.

I lived on a Southern line and alternative was Thameslink with uncomfortable trains (crammed seats, no tables for coffee or anything - at least they were running mostly empty as nobody wanted such discomfort). Trains always late, I almost lost my job because of that. I had to get a car and drive 100 miles each day because train journeys were not sustainable. Has anything happened to Southern? I doubt.

Southern was a government funded battle with the trade unions

And both Southern and Thameslink are run by the government (via a management contract to GTR), have been since 2014.

Southern is the reality of modern railway nationalisation, a little better than BR perhaps.

Why didn't you use Southern?

When are you talking about? There was a lot of investment in the (laughably named) Thameslink 2000 program, which was put in place to dig the route out of the mess that the nationalised rail network had left it in by the 90s, it started in 2009 and is still undergoing improvements

Because the trains were not showing up. If a train showed up, there was likelihood of a delay. It was also common that rush hour trains were short - so even if the train arrived, you were unlikely to be able to get in. It was a lottery with odds against you. I was constantly late because of that and employer could only be patient for so long. I am disabled (not visibly) and using Thameslink as an alternative was exhausting (as mentioned - small seats, very uncomfortable). If I recall also Thameslink had much slower service than Southern. I hate driving, so imagine how bad it was if I found eventually going by a car was much better experience for me.

So Southern wasn't turning up and Thameslink was poor?

When was it?

2017 onwards

e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-42707560

So after it was nationalized. Southern and Thameslink are the same company.

You suffered from the political decision that the government made to get rid of guards. No company would take it as a franchise because they knew the fight with the union would impact both profits and users, so they got GTR to operate it under a management basis.

This is now what is happening to every other TOC.

>If I want to travel from Birmingham to London I have a choice of 3 different train companies

Great, now talk about literally any other line in Britain

London to Birmingham is an exception because you have three train companies but also two separate sets of tracks -- the West Coast Main Line (WCML) and the Chiltern Line. This builds a lot of resilience into the system. I wish other lines had this as well.

That said, the WCML is extremely well run relative to the horrow shows in S and SE England.

If you live along the WCML (think Bucks, Coventry, etc), you have two providers: Avanti (formerly Virgin) and London Northwestern/West Midland (formerly Midland). You actually have Southern as well, but they are... not a credible provider.

HS2, if it's ever done, will further reduce pressure on the WCML and increase resilience.

But on the other hand, go up North and there used to be trains which are modified bus bodies[1]. Are those still there? So yes, absolutely, the rail network does need to improve across the country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)

Go up North and you have Northern, which as well as running pacers for years (I think they're all gone now) drained funds, because running a rail network with few passengers is expensive.

That means either higher tax to subsidise it, or it means higher prices on profitable parts of the network to cross-subsidise it

Alternate routes with competitors

London-Edinburgh (West coast vs east coast. West Coast is slower but cheaper)

Bristol-Manchester (XC via Birmingham vs ATW via Hereford - I usually take the slower cheaper Wales train as I prefer the route and the seating)

Manchester-Norwich (via Sheffield-Peterborough, Via London, Via Leeds-Doncaster)

London-Reading (GWML from Paddington vs South West from Waterloo)

Exeter-London (Paddington via Westbury on GWR vs Waterloo via Salisbury on SWT)

Manchester-Warrington (ATW via Newton, EMT via Birchwood)

London-Hastings (via Tunbridge Wells or via Haywards Heath)

And different competitors on the same track

Milton Keynes - London (West Coast, London Midland, Southern)

York - Newcastle (TPE, LNER, XC)

Manchester-Glasgow (Northern+WestCoast, TPE)

Stoke-Manchester (Northern vs XC vs West Coast)

I just don't think that's how rail should work, I'm not booking a flight to go to another country, I should be able to turn up to a train station and get on a bloody train.

That's certainly how I use the rail network (and often the plane network - I've booked a flight from Europe to the far east with just a few hours notice on more than one occasion), and you can do that (unlike in europe where you have to book long distance trains in advance in many countries). I don't see the conceptual difference between going London - Paris or London - Edinburgh though?

This does work in many other European countries, but there simply isn't enough rail capacity for this in the UK.

Turn up to any mainline station during peak hours and you can observe this for yourself (also non-peak hours in many cases). Trains which require reservation have scarcely any standing room.

Other countries would be quick to complain if you don't get the seat that you paid for.

out of all those options, it may even be cheaper to fly

The lack of accounting for externalities with flights may make it cheaper, but there aren't any flights from London to Birmingham, and even if they were they'd be far slower than getting any of the train options, and probably slower than the coach.

The undiscussed upside of this "privatisation pantomime" is that government's are committed to making it work. That means it gets investments and bailouts. Compare that to publicly owned services who get nothing.

The real question here isn't who owns X, it's will the government invest in X...

It's a classic tactic: underfund government services, then point to how they don't work as a pretext to privatise.

110% correct. Just in the last 6 months we've seen all the rail companies (supposedly private) bailed out. TfL, the only real public provider was told to cover its bills itself and eventually accepted a loan on userous terms...

This is happening to the NHS right now.

128k deaths thanks to an overloaded, underfunded system and Boris Johnson's own nurse rage-quits and the conservatives are still gaining electoral ground. It's bizarre.

> I'm sure operators will push back on 'under one brand'

You're probably right, but I don't think they'll succeed. Everyone and their dog can see that TFL has worked well compared to the rest of the country.

I don't particularly like our government, but I don't doubt their commitment to populism. This looks like a vote winner to me so I'd put low odds on a u-turn here.

There would be no need for a U turn. Nothing very substantial has been promised. Note the way they very deliberately avoided the topic of price increases for instance.

I don't doubt this government's commitment to populist rhetoric and the appearance of grand, sweeping changes either. It's a formula that wins them a lot of votes, especially against an opposition that is confused as to what it stands for.

As someone coming from a country (Italy) with nationalised railway I always found the trains in the UK to be pretty great.

Sure, you have a few delays but it's eons better than what I had in my country. I never understood why people were complaining about trains in the UK.

Italy added a private offering some time ago, which I personally never tried, but my friends back home always praise them for working - unlike Trenitalia.

It's sad the government imposed lockdown killed another industry - but I certainly won't rejoice for this nationalisation.

on other hand I am amazed how good are Italian trains ehen I travel there- they are fast, cheap and go almost everywhere :)

The trains in the UK seem ok in terms of the number of services and reliability, but they're so expensive. It's almost always cheaper to fly or rent a car than it is to use the train for anything approaching long distance.

Yes this is the problem. Using the train is often a non-option. What’s costs £25 fuel will cost £70 for a rail ticket and often take longer if you are not going between major cities. It’s even worse if there are multiple people. I would love to commute on the train (use your time more effectively, lower CO2, less stress) but it’s just too costly as it is.

> What’s costs £25 fuel will cost £70 for a rail ticket

Where are you planning on parking when you get there though?

I'd rather pay quadruple for a ticket to London, than drive into London and then try to park a car. I can't imagine driving into a city - seems insane.

If visiting a city centre location then trains are great. If you need to get to a place near a city then trains are the worst, at least airports tend to be outside of the city near the arterial routes.

I am originally from the outskirts of Glasgow and now live on the outskirts of London. For my partner and I to get to my parents house by train takes about the same time (assuming all 4 changes go according to plan), costs 6x as much and is far less flexible than driving. We tend to stop at a cheap hotel midway so we can set off after I finish work.

One trick to driving into London is finding a parking space at a station outside town and continuing on TfL services. E.g. if you are coming from the M40 park at Hillingdon Station.

But often the reverse is true - if your meeting isn't in the middle of London, it's much easier to drive directly to the place than get there by changing trains. This applies even more if your destination is a smaller place.

They couldn't agree more. [1][2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190912051032/https://www.stand...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210225224745/https://metro.co....

It's very strange. In the UK you often pay a fortune to sit on a nearly empty train. This doesn't even seem like pricing optimized for profit, let alone general carbon reduction across all modes of transport.

And it's often cheaper to buy 2/3 separate tickets, for stops along the way of a long journey, than just simply buying straight from A to B.

This is to profit-maximise.

Under the rail franchise agreement during the bid process, the terms might mandate that journeys from A to B cost £10, and that journeys from B to C cost £5. There might be no obligation to price travel from A to D via B & C at a particular cost, so a rail operator might make that more expensive.

It’s silly from the consumer perspective, but it makes sense for the rail operators to do this in order to maximise profits.

Thanks for the explanation. I had the wrong idea that it could be due to, for example, if A->B belonged to a different provider than B->C, providers not reaching an agreement on what % to take each, for the journey from A->C - hence increasing the overall cost for covering demands from both.

No, there's long been a centralised system to attribute the costs to different companies (IIRC, the system is ultimately the descendant of what the British Rail regions and later sectors used to split fare revenue between them).

There's no negotiations between the companies here, though they could ask the regulator (the ORR) to intervene if they believed the algorithm gave unfair results.

No problem! You are right that it’s silly though, you shouldn’t have to split your ticket to get the lowest cost.

In real terms the main reason is to protect commuters and capacity - as a theoretical made-up example during the bid process they might be aware that lots of people travel from Milton Keynes to London so the council wants to put a cap on increases for that route. They might also still have lots of capacity on the route from Banbury to Milton Keynes on a morning, so that is priced much lower than Banbury to London. So if you go Banbury -> Milton Keynes you might get a “discount” for not a lot of people using the line, and travelling from Milton Keynes -> London you get the rate that’s protected for commuters, but if you go between Banbury and London then part of the route is already at capacity and there is less discount on the rate.

Because it isn't.

The pricing, timetables and services were basically all centrally controlled. The train operators put in requests to change them, then the government (or Network Rail or whoever they delegated the power to) would approve/deny them. Since they're sharing access to the underlying infrastructure, they can't do what they want.

Additionally, there are many trains that are unprofitable but the operators are required by law to run them for public interest reasons. When they designed the franchising system, they tried to "balance" each franchise so it had roughly the same number of profitable and unprofitable routes.

The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd. Then on top of that, because decision making and control was distributed amongst 40 or so different corporate entities, trying to make a change to the ticketing system was damn near impossible.

If anything, this new concession-like system will likely be more competitive, even if the government is acting as an intermediary.

>The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd.

As was the idea that this was even possible.

It was never set up to impose market discipline on the rail providers. It was set up to be a profitable investment. So Richard Branson could (as he put it), print money.

Prices fell with privatization (and efficiency went up).

The ownership structure doesn't matter. The UK has lots of publicly-owned and privately-owned transport systems that work well. The problem has been management. This is unlikely to change that.

I live somewhere in the UK that already has publicly-owned rail. Not as bad as the South-East, but it is still bad. I have no real idea how...but they manage it. EDIT: it actually hasn't transitioned yet...so we will see.

I drive to work because it's cheaper to pay for car insurance, road tax and diesel fuel than it is to purchase a season train ticket, not to mention it takes less time to get to work and the commute itself is more comfortable. UK trains are not a sane alternative to driving. Until the Gov steps in and fixes that only people who absolutely much use trains will continue to do so. With ever so popular and becoming the norm remote working, the train service companies are in for a big surprise.

EDIT: Also I wouldn't call UK trains reliable. I see a lot of stations having a fleet of coaches ready or sometimes in use because the trains are out of service. That's very poor.

My experience was exactly the opposite - nicer stations, high speed rail and vastly cheaper prices.

Please, do let us swap trenitalia for southern rail. I'm not such a fan of forking over 1/3 of a median wage for season ticket on a train that is delayed every other day.

Not sure when you last traveled by train in Italy.

Yes, it was shite a decade ago. But all my journeys by train in Italy have been great in the last five years.

My sample size is certainly limited though. About two to three long distance journeys by train/year in that country. But still. A decade ago there were always delays and serious hiccups. No more.

Trains were clean and on time. Mind you, this is long distance. I.e. Milano–Firenze.

I guess the private company, Italo, may be responsible indirectly for this as they generated pressure to up their ante on Trenitalia?

Your mileage with short distance train travel in Italy may differ. I do not have enough experience to hold an opinion there.

In any case, it's much better than in my home country, Germany. Everything is a joke here when it comes to long distance rail travel. Punctuality, service, offering, price, ergonomics (planning, ticket purchase, app).

I travel long distance every two weeks, I feel the pain every time. Literally every 2nd time the train is late by at least 20mins.

Best experience in Europe for train travel to me seems to be France btw.

Italo is lovely. They got the ticket sales right, which has been really hard for the rigid former railway monopolies. It is nice onboard, too. Actually, I chose Italo over Trenitalia the last time just because of the nicer ticket sales system.

With Italo, I could buy tickets well in advance using PayPal, all in English. A lot nicer than some monopolies using some local credit card processing gateways with missing translations and connections.

I've ridden trains in Italy during a few different vacations. The local trains were hit and miss, but the long distance trains were pretty good.

All over the EU, the biggest issues I've had with train service always seem to be strike related.

Then travel more man. Trenitalia is pretty competent for whats out there. They even have boats to move entire train carriages with the passengers inside to islands? That's pretty cool! Here in Spain we have RENFE, and they are pretty good overall, but pricey.

I know that many lines run at deficit so they have to compensate with the ones that don't, but they recently launched AVLO as a low-cost service in response for OUIGO and private competitors coming to Spain, so there was probably ways to make it cheaper...

As an Italian living in Spain for a long while, I can say that 10 years ago the difference was abysmal in favor of Renfe and now the gap it's smaller (due to Renfe not keeping up) but I still think the average Spain's train station and service is better than Italy's. I can still see (refurbished for the 3rd time) trains from ~25years ago operating in Italy nowadays.

>I can still see (refurbished for the 3rd time) trains from ~25years ago operating in Italy nowadays.

If that's the problem, then do not try to use polish railways. You can still find non-modernized EN57 from 60s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKP_class_EN57

Long distance trains can be no better tho...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/973...

I don't see why that's a problem. Airplanes have a lifespan of 30 years.

OK, it's 2021 already, sometimes I forget, so we are probably already north of 30 years. Anyway as I said they have been refurbished and they are OK, at least on the comfort side (AC and heating, sits quality). I hope they are the same on the safety and mechanical side...

I'm really curious as to what route you were on, and also have to assume you've never had to ride the commuter trains.

I've had to commute by rail since 2014, I now have to head out half an hour earlier than at the start, purely to account for consistent 5-10 minute delays.

Atleast once a month the train is packed beyond standing room.

Several times I've had to say fuck it and use the slower, further away tram to have any hope of reaching the office.

And if your train is cancelled (dozen plus times a year) station staff are fucking useless and annoyed you interrupted their chinwag to ask how to get home.

UK trains are really variable.

If you're going from most major cities to London you get a newish train, on a fastish route. If you're going between major hubs you're probably going to have a nice experience.

But the local trains, the short trip commuter trains, can be very old and very very busy. People pay huge amounts of money to be crammed into old, slow, smelly, trains and there's not enough seating so they have to stand.

The carriage supply operates on a "trickle down" model. The new trains get used for London and those routes. The trains that are replaced by the new trains get sent to the South East and South West, who send their old trains to the Midlands, who send their old trains to the North, who send their old trains to Wales. Some of the carriages are really rough.

The free market is only as free as the consumer.

Yea, as if that’s going to end up working well.

Wendover Productions made a great video about this ridiculous system. It’s totally mad. https://youtu.be/DlTq8DbRs4k

Wow that was very good and comprehensive. Glad Wendover decided not to burden the runtime with an unfunny joke every 25 seconds.

They do that on their other channel. That is why they have another channel.

Which one is the other channel?

Half as Interesting. It's more short form, humerous content. Wendover is the longer form, more serious stuff.

> Even as a free market conservative

Interesting that even on hacker news some feel we lead with our political views. lol.

Celebrating nationalisation is a political view, and I think the parent poster wanted to use this as an opportunity to extend an olive branch/empathize with others who hold differing views.

Could be. I don't see too many folks trying to "cross the aisle" though these days. And frankly, I have found that most conservatives are disingenuous about their reasoning for their political views.

But I sincerely applaud your less cynical outlook and wish I shared the same view.

How are customers on trains supposed to vote with their wallets? It's not as if you can set up competing parallel networks running trains side by side between identical destinations at varying levels of speed and comfort.

Capacity is physically constrained, especially on an ancient network like the UK's.

Timetable slots are scarce and have to be centrally coordinated and managed.

There is no sparkly market magic that will make these constraints disappear and somehow give customers more choice about where to go, when, and with whom. And there is no chance whatsoever that operators can compete on price.

The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.

The idea that competition for passengers will somehow make profitability possible is a dilettante-level view that has no insight into how the industry actually operates.

We've already had decades of this kind of thinking, and the result has been mediocre services, vastly increased direct subsidies, and ballooning fares.

I agree wholeheartedly. I would add that the real problem is that the current UK political class is too spineless to take on the responsibility of running a rail network without going broke. So they will continue to maintain some degree of chicanery to provide for plausible deniability when the trains don't run or the system goes bankrupt.

How does Japan do it? Can we try to copy them because it’s very good. My 45 minute journey into Tokyo from Chiba was around £125 per month.

Piecing together the story from https://pedestrianobservations.com and other places, I would not imitate Japan in this regard.

- Japan's terrain is fairly ideal for rail. Yes, mountains make for more work, put people are also naturally congregated near the coast, in valleys, etc. Additionally, the largest cities with the high population form a linear chain from roughly Nagasaki to Tokyo. That means more network effects per distance of rail (there's no penalty separate than time delay for traveling through other cities first).

- Japan has perhaps the best policy around land use in the developed world. See https://www.sightline.org/2021/03/25/yes-other-countries-do-... for some details. This helps greatly with density and clustering around rail stations.

- The privatization was triggered by the fright around Japan's big deficits after the 80s boom, and perhaps still maintained with some fear of that. That doesn't make it a good idea, of course, but I'm willing to call it more "defensive neoliberalism" than "offensive neoliberalism", but maybe that makes it a little less ideological given that Japan was the poster child for all the neoclassical economic doomsday predictions?

- https://pedestrianobservations.com in particular says the privatization and and general being spooked about more debt holds back some construction on paper, but since the rail is so well established already and operationally profitable, there is less to screw up.

In conclusion, I'd say that because Japan gets everything adjacent to rail policy so absolutely well done, and the rail network was already functioning so way, it continues to succeed not because but despite privatization.

1) I don’t believe for one second that Japan has better geography than the UK for rail

2) we can do much better with planning, however I’m not sure Japanese planning is the answer, when I lived there I thought most of the accommodation was horrendous. Europeans wouldn’t accept it.

3) is JR Rail etc. private? It seemed too cheap!

4) how is rail profitable in Japan, but not profitable in the UK. It’s cheaper there and far far better!

I am no expert in the slightest (I would check the things I linked), I'll try to answer

1) Mountains actually helping is my own pet theory, I should disclaim. Japan does seem to have wild swings in density, while England seems to have people/towns strewn about everywhere and London feels kinda sprawly at certain scales. That said UK obviously has cities / regional clustering at the scale of HSR.

Someone should do a proper (fourier?) analysis of sprawl at different different scales and how that effects rail at different scales and until then my theory is just idle speculation, and in any event I don't think Britain can or should blame it's geography when other flat parts of Europe do better, and the Anglosphere clearly sucks at rail on the whole.

2) So Europe is kinda of anti-modern avoiding dense downtowns / CBDs, America is downright evil with it's single family homes, but weirdly still has tall towers people curse driving too. East Asia is largely "correct" in having dense workplaces and living places, which you want if your goal is both less car trips and classic max GDP growth.

I don't think the UK should be like Japan in al respects, but London is emphatically way to evenly low-rise, housing is not cheap enough I hear, and all those rich people LARPing landed gentry commuting 3 hours from their quaint South England rural hamlet is a sure sign something weird's afoot.

If they get rid of the green belt because no one wants to build taller, I will be sad.

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group the story is maybe more muddled than I thought, or maybe that's just the terminology for historical reasons.

4) Well, that I think goes back to the unique economics of rail. I think good rail becomes profitable, but profitable bad rail doesn't become good or isn't even possible!

Mountains don't help. Actually mountains are top pain for building HSR lanes.

Not all Japanese live in city with great train/public transport network. Most people outside Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, is heavily depends on their car. (Remember there are 8 practical car manufacturers in the land). Just referencing Tokyo would be good.

4) Japanese railways get about 50% of their income from ticket sales, the rest comes from owning the high value land around the stations (renting, grocery stores, hotels and whatnot).

That makes a load of sense, the larger stations are like department stores, China’s remodelling while I was there was astonishing. Must have been £100m invested but they’ll definitely reap rewards.

This is actually something Japan got right earlier than others. A lot of European and American train stations are rudown and surrounded by shady activity, whereas Japanese stations are effectively high-level shopping malls.

Japanese capitalism has ... peculiar characteristics. Some companies are "private" in name only, and effectively run in agreement with politicians.

Their traditional approach to life, higher degree of respect for authority, and job-for-life structures, make the Japanese case fairly unique and difficult to replicate.

> It's not as if you can set up competing parallel networks running trains side by side between identical destinations at varying levels of speed and comfort.

Yes, you could. There is an East Coast Mainline and West Coast Mainline and they competed loads over the London-Edinburgh route.

But I think in this age of high-speed trains, overhead electrification and 4+ wide tracks, railways are well and truly a natural monopoly.

But natural monopoly is not about can't have competition, it's about being thoroughly uneconomical to have competition.

> Yes, you could. There is an East Coast Mainline and West Coast Mainline and they competed loads over the London-Edinburgh route.

I've done that route dozens of times in the past. I think it's stretching things to say they are in competition though. For Glasgow it was 40 minutes faster to go up the West coast (if you don't mind the smell of the toilets on the Pendolino) and similarly the East Coast was faster for Edinburgh because it avoided going all the way out to Carluke and back. Of course that missing out the majority of people using those trains were using it starting at an intermediate station, making any competition slightly moot.

I was referring more to the historical competition[0]. I don't think it's as relevant today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_North

> It's not as if you can set up competing parallel networks running trains side by side between identical destinations at varying levels of speed and comfort.

To an extent, this does exist on some routes. Both LNER and Grand Central operate trains up the East Coast Main Line, for example. Then there are destinations served by multiple routes, like Cambridge, Oxford, and Bedford, where each route has its own operator.

Competition is impractical for most journeys, though.

> How are customers on trains supposed to vote with their wallets?

They can't.

> The only way to lower prices is nationalise the entire industry and replace privatisation with direct investment, on the basis that transport infrastructure is a social cost with significant indirect benefits, and cannot possibly be run as a self-sustaining profitable business on a national scale.

Hear hear!

I'm not sure if you realise you're agreeing with me, but yes, exactly, I agree with you, that was my (intended) point too; I wrote:

> bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for (impossible) proper competition where rail users could vote with their feet and wallets.

Note the '(impossible)' - I mean that in the sense that I'm generally pro 'leave it to the free market', but that that only makes sense where you can have effective competition, which as you say, you can't with national (especially physical, electricity for example is fungible and so abstracted that it mostly works being privatised on the consumer/payments end at least) infrastructure like train lines!

In some hypothetical land where there's multiple lines, multiple services by different operators at the same time competing on service and price, great, I'm all for that, let them compete, don't nationalise it, let people vote with their feet and wallets. But we live in the real world; they can't.

> It's not as if you can set up competing parallel networks running trains side by side

No, but there are usually National Express or other coach services available on many routes. For longer routes like London - Manchester you can also fly.

You can also drive yourself - peak time fares are so high that if there is more than one of you travelling it's often cheaper to do this even if you have to rent the car. You can also pay a taxi firm to drive you, which again will often be cheaper than peak fares for more than one person.

If I wanted to create a market in trains I wouldn't hold a bid to run a specific line or route. I would hold a bid to operate specific times on a given line. e.g. Operator A would run the 7:00,8:00 and 10:00 and Operator B would run the 7:30, 8:30 and 10:30.

There are still limits on how much competitiveness that brings to the market (Operators have very little control over delays) but it would encourage the operators to compare in terms of on train service (and potentially ticket prices as well).

> awarding the multi-year contract to the elected government is strictly better than to a private company

This is objectively not true otherwise no-one would every privatise the railway. Although the answer is not agreed, my own experience of working on the public-owned railway in the UK in the 1990s was that public-sector organisations have virtually no incentive to be clever or efficient, at best they are indifferent, at worst they are job-creation systems that cost billions to the tax payer.

The theory is that private companies have a reason to make things more efficient, which is to maximize profit, reducing costs and being overall cheaper to the tax payer.

Of course, this brings it own dangers in terms of service reduction due to unprofitable services but it would be simplistic to think that somehow the tax payer should subsidise those who actually use the trains. Ultimately, they should cost what they cost to run and if that is too much, then they need to change.

I would also say that the services and overall quality are much higher on the privatised railway.

And still nobody has gone to prison from the Railtrack board. They told they government they'd be insolvent if they didn't get an injection of money, then issued a dividend to shareholders.

> bidding for the multi-year contract to operate a line is a poor proxy for

But that was never the reason why railway operations and railway track exploration and maintenance was split, was it?

The whole point of splitting railway operations from track exploration was to ensure that any railway operator in Europe is free to explore any connection that they wish, provided they pay for the track usage and that the track has free capacity.

That's the whole point.

This separation from track exploration and railway operations has been a collosal success in Europe, with multiple private and even public companies stepping up to serve international corridors even with high-speed railway services.

Norway's railroad also went "private" a few years ago, and have butchered it up into (not all):

- we have a directorate of railway deciding where to build tracks, what providers must adhere to, their timetables etc

- one government owned company building - one government owned company building and maintaining the tracks

- one government owned company owning the trains

- another one maintaining the trains

- one government owned company responsible for all ticketing, purchasing, route search, providing timetables etc

- 3 different companies having won a bid for different routes. They have to lease the trains. But since they have monopoly on their route and the directorate decides everything, having multiple hasn't really led to any competition. Sure, they fought somewhat on price for the bid, but for the next 10 years the only thing they really do is provide personnel for the trains.

Nothing here made train a better or more viable alternative for the people. Just 5x the amount of highly paid directors. And more overhead and less cooperation. In fact it's now often more expensive to take train long distance, as you end up paying (price + price) from two companies instead of a single rebated long distance ticket.

One of the companies now driving in Norway is the not-very-popular British Go-Ahead, even.

The best description of this I've seen is "playing at shops": there's no real market, it's just set up to look like one.

The other crazy side to it is that the government still own and pay for the track - the only bit that doesn’t even make any money. And is crazy expensive!

Privatise the profit, socialise the loss.

Tracks are certainly very valuable infrastructure, it's just hard to monetize (and very expensive to build, as you say). So in a way it makes sense for the government to handle it.

The way to monetize is property development and rent around stations. That's how it works in Japan, where private companies sell tickets at a loss and still make profits.

In the UK that land got sold off to private equity and the like who are making the real dough while they funnel some of that into donations to the Tory party.

> The way to monetize is property development and rent around stations. That's how it works in Japan, where private companies sell tickets at a loss and still make profits.

Yes. It's just really hard to do afterwards - having the government expropriate land around the stations and giving it to the railway companies is guaranteed to be wildly expensive and unpopular.

Japan's private passenger railways IIRC make about 50% of their income from ticket sales, the rest comes from leveraging the (very!) high value land around the stations. Many other metropolitan rail systems also get about 50% of the income from tickets, but since the railways don't own the land they have to get the rest through some form of government subsidy.

I think some of the problems with the British privatized rail system is how fragmented it is, with nobody responsible for the whole. And there's lots of government meddling in every interface between all these myriad private companies, providing ample opportunity for corruption and massively misaligned incentives. I suspect it would be better to either nationalize the whole lot under one roof, or then go back to the old pre-nationalization type regional monopolies with a single company owning tracks, trains, stations as well as operating them (a bit like the privatized Japanese railways).

>Yes. It's just really hard to do afterwards - having the government expropriate land around the stations and giving it to the railway companies is guaranteed to be wildly expensive and unpopular.

Expropriation of land would be unpopular (it would get the tabloids in a jitter as they fearmonger that the government is going to expropriate your garden next) but introducing a special tax on nonresidential property within 500m of a train station and subsidizing the price of tickets with it - probably not so much.

"Oh look my season ticket got cheaper" while private equity reports lower earnings and google's tax bill shoots up - this is going to be popular.

It could then be extended to residential property. The government could also go into business itself - building a shopping mall or two and funding government budgets.

This is a frog that could be boiled.

Yes in the Netherlands the railway operator makes a lot of money from their train stations as well.

A train station in 2021 is basically a big shopping mall in a prime location with massive foot traffic.

The Dutch Railways even made a slim profit in the UK in 2020 after getting €1,5 billion in subsidies from the UK government through Abellio.

No idea how this new nationalisation will work out for either party, though.

Track is what defines the railway, maximum speed, 85% of maintenance cost, etc.

UK tried to privatise it, but the firm collapsed and had to be nationalised.

What do private companies add, if on a good day they earn the profit and on a bad day tax payer picks up the tab.

> Track is what defines the railway, maximum speed, 85% of maintenance cost, etc.

> UK tried to privatise it, but the firm collapsed and had to be nationalised.

Yes, absolutely.

> What do private companies add, if on a good day they earn the profit and on a bad day tax payer picks up the tab.

I think the best way to run a railway is to either completely nationalize it all under one roof, or then have it completely privatized, with a single company being responsible for everything. Yes, this would create regional rail monopolies, but OTOH they wouldn't be completely free to extract monopoly prices since there's still competition from other modes of transport (cars, airplanes, buses, trucks).

The current UK system with a myriad public and private entities with very complicated contractual relationships is just a mess. Unfortunately it seems the EU is hellbent on imposing the same model across the EU.

It's a very similar case in Finland, case-in-point when HRT (Helsinki Region Transport) requested bids from operators to run the trains in the greater capital area (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and the neighbouring municipalities).

- Rolling stock is owned by HRT

- Transport Infrastructure Agency (Väylävirasto) is responsible for the tracks and stations

Which means the bid is mainly for personnel operating the trains.

There were couple companies that placed bids for this, most of them withdrew before the end of the call, essentially leaving one competing bid along with VR's (then and now current operator).

In the end, nothing changed and VR still operates the trains using HRT's own rolling stock. The only real change going forward are the plans to have a dedicated maintenance depot for HRT's own stock, since VR does not want to have the burden of maintaining stock they don't directly own.

At least with freight, it's going to be different... right?

There's a law giving HRT the right to handle rail operations in the Helsinki metropolitan area. In the rest of the country VR has a monopoly, and sadly seems completely uninterested in developing commuter rail services in other metropolitan areas. As a result, there are efforts to amend the law to allow other regional authorities the same kind of rights HRT has. We'll see what happens.

They don’t have to lease their trains from the government, they can bring their own trains if they’d like, but leasing is likely cheaper.

The company maintaining the trains do have to bid on the contracts, as well, and can bid for contracts in other countries if they wish.

The directorate of railway was there pre-privatization.

It’s the infrastructure company that decides the timetables, not the directorate. The directorate assigns the contracts, and the contracts specify the minimum fee for a ticket.

Operators are free to decide the interior of the trains, and any additional products on top of the minimum fee. Meaning they can charge more for better seating, reserved seating etc. Vy has their own ticketing service in addition to the government provided one, which they use to sell bus and taxi services to cover as much of your trip as possible. GoAhead doesn’t have their own ticketing service, instead relying on Vy and the government service to sell tickets. This saves them money on development, but makes them lose out on any additional revenue that Vy makes for extra sales.

GoAhead has higher customer satisfaction than NSB (the national train company pre-privatization).

Idealy you’d have more competition between the operators, but since Norway is mostly single track that is difficult to do.

Still, the government will save an estimated 12 billion NOK over the next 9 years based on the current contracts.

That’s not to say it’s all good. Long range travel has gotten more expensive (more than one operator involved) and there are now more directors with million kr saleries. Not to mention that the effects of one of these operators going bankrupt will be worse than if one national company did everything.

I'm one of those (many) people that don't believe in that 12B figure. It is only based on "we used to pay X for this route in the old model, and now we pay Y", but that's two different things to compare and ignores lots of new costs as well. All the offers were also based on traffic growth, meaning subsidies for the tickets in 7-8 years would go down. This would have happened irregardless of the bids (except the contractors have budgeted with it and now carries the risk).

And before when it was the government paying the government owned NSB, it was basically the government giving themselves money. Now whatever profit the new companies make are instead going out of the country. Government takes the cost, others take the profit.

So unless this happens to result in a much better experience for the customers I think it will be a net loss for society. But time will tell, hard to say too much based on the last year.

Considering most train routes operate at a net loss, «we used to pay x but now we pay y» is really the only interesting metric, no?

Profits from subsidies aren’t really profit when you’re the one paying the subsidy.

Keep in mind, that before any profit, the government still makes money taxation (sales tax, employee income tax etc.) and several companies are going to operate at a loss for a few years until trafic picks up. I think government saving money on this isn’t unlikely.

That’s not the same as customers saving money, though.

I agree that time will tell. Until Norway has more double-tracks and can have proper competition, this could go either way.

"Operators are free to decide the interior of the trains, and any additional products on top of the minimum fee."

So by the sounds of it, you have tp hunt fpr tickets on different websites and exchequer looses out, but in exchange I get a different of seat, and packet of crisps?

I am really not getting 'free market innovation' vibes here

If all you care about is the cheapest possible ride, you’ll get that through the government ticketing service.

If you travel the same distance often and want to pay extra for more comfort or whatever, you’ll benefit from using whatever ticketing service the operator wants you to use.

I feel like the decision to do this is based on an outdated idea about how to do business effectively. Take car makers. It used to be that the winners were outsourcing everything except their core competence (engines and assembling/marketing vehicles). But these days it seems like vertical integrated companies are the winners, with Tesla being a good example in the car industry. I think politicians that have pushed for this was inspired heavily by all this out-sourcing happening at the end of the previous century.

It's not that vertical integration is good everywhere. But neither is avoiding vertical integration. You have to use your brain and look at what's beneficial in a given market. And train operation strikes me as a place where vertical integration is essential to long term success and efficiency. If it was actually a free market, I'm sure that it'd converge to a few vertically integrated companies with monopolies in large geographic areas.

I'd also argue that government owned corporations have become better at operating efficiently. Business has almost become a science. You're not as reliant on brute force through competition.

And when government corporations are more expensive, it's usually just because they treat their employees better.

The 'vertical integration vs. outsourcing' seems to be largely a fashion thing. When giant vertically integrated conglomerates are the status quo, you have the self-appointed thought leaders writing business books and speaking at expensive dinners arguing for outsourcing and focusing on core competences. Then as the tides turn and 'outsource everything' becomes the norm, the next generation of self-appointed business thought leaders argue for vertical integration. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I see the same in our company. Every few years we have a leadership shuffle, which then cascades as the new leaders replace all the layers underneath them in the months afterwards. Once things become stable, a new leader is hired and the whole things starts again.

All the new management hires will then want to put their own stamp on things which means doing things differently than before. So we've been going back and forth between different paradigms. Sometimes within months! We seem to be going back between role-based teams ("we have too many silo's, we need to join all technologies of a role in a team!!") to technology-based teams ("we have too little focus, we need to focus on all responsibilities for one technology per team!!"). Literally several times we've made this switch over the last years, back and forth.

It just feels like each new hire just has to change it just to be seen to be doing something by their bosses. No newly hired manager every wants to leave things the same even though they are working just fine.

The thing is that we are very versatile. We can deal with the drawbacks of each model. We collaborate even though we're not in the same team. We can't work properly with all this ongoing reorganisation though. It's like the chair is being pulled out from under us for no reason.

The seperation of track ownership and operation from actually running the trains is mandated by EU directives, so that part is going to be the same pretty much anywhere in the EU. I think some countries like Germany bend the rules a bit by having them run by nominally independent divisions of the same state-owned company (and sometimes go father than is allowed and end up on the losing end of court battles), but the UK is probably going beyond what it could do as a member of the EU here.

What is the EU's reason for that rule?

Control & standardization.

In theory this is meant to be a good thing because it allows for competition between train operators which sounds like it should lead to better outcomes for customers. There's also a desire for companies to be able to operate commercial trains that don't have government backing on an equal footing with the government-chosen operators, which only works if the other train operators also have an arms-length commercial relationship with the track owner and operator.

Also, you need to bear in mind that European governments benefit from the other governments strictly following this rule because it means their train operators can run trains in those other countries, but are often less keen on doing so themselves. So there's an interesting dynamic where a lot of countries insist that of course they're following the rules, it's all the other European countries that are unfairly bending them to benefit their train operators.

Ah that makes sense, yeah I can see say Country A not being keen on giving Country B's trains a fair shake if their own rail company wants time on the tracks.

Before this rule all tracks AND rolling stock would be owned by single, national entities in every country. If you were a Austrian train operator wanting to run trains to Germany you'd have to ask Deutsche Bahn for space on the rail, and they would (obviously) give priority to their own rolling stock.

This would happen to the point where it was almost impossible to organise cross border rail connections.

By seperating the track from the train you can make the train companies compete with each other on a (more) equal footing.

Ironically, most of the 'private' train companies now running on UK tracks are actually Dutch, German and French state owned railway companies competing with each other.

Good. This is wildly overdue. The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail) was a crime of the highest corruption.

Edit: Link broke?

Edit 2: Thank you @bogdan https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the issues that we've had with privatised rail going away - those issues being incredibly high fees, understaffed and underpaid workers, under maintained infrastructure, and a lack of real investment in areas with little to no infrastructure at all (the north).

Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.

Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”.

It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.

Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.

There are nice, fast trains from Paddington to the West, including Oxford.

My experience of road travel in the south was that delays were too frequent for journeys crossing the M25 for me to depend on it. That's from before good consumer traffic analysis apps; maybe those improve things enough.

Cheap, certainly. Also slow, and comfortable's in the eye of the beholder (I can't read in a road vehicle, so not for me). The Paddington services are much better these days, and there's also the excellent (new) Marylebone service. I live just outside Oxford and wouldn't dream of getting the bus.

Actually the Oxford to London bus services have been shutting down because of falling passenger numbers and traffic congestion.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888

A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.

Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up with only two carriages.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)

£100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.

There’s also “leaves on the track”, my personal favourite. Sometimes I struggle to believe trains were invented in the UK!

This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries.

My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.

Most systems with wet leaf problems use sand dispensers for added traction.

And there’s the rub. Is that network rail’s problem, or the operator’s? Network rails’s rails... operator’s train wheels, leaves in the middle. The leaves are undefined, and are therefore probably nobody’s problem but the passengers’.

Yep just wanted to echo this I live in Bristol and have been stung by outrageous tickets prices too many times

It's buses or coaches only now, I'm not surprised everyone drives here

The last time I had to travel from London to Bristol and back, I rented a car from Heathrow airport and it cost me a quarter of the price the train would. It takes the same amount of time, but the car is more comfortable and worse for the environment. The system is so broken in the UK.

£100 per month for six miles each way when bought as a season ticket.

A Bristol to London season ticket is £1300 per month for ~120 miles each way. Bargain!

Something like 160 pounds at peak time from Nottingham to London. Service is good but it's just inconceivable that private individuals would be paying that, all the travelers are on expenses or are self employed contractors/consultants. When I started working and up till about 2005 the same journey was about 40 pounds - a massive increase!

Problem is that there is massive pent up demand. Cheaper tickets mean more people travelling longer distances to work when there isn't capacity. The last thing we need is even more regular commuting to London from outside greater London.

This demand is caused by high house prices and lack of opportunities outside of the SE. Trains are a sticky plaster that gives lots of subsidy to middle class commuters whilst local bus services are cut. Distance is also environmentally problematic regardless of mode of transport.

Ah yes, the Pacers - they were literally based on remodelled bus designs. Did yours smell strongly of mildew?

To be fair they were clean and well-maintained. They also had the benefit of being flushed through with fresh air - a result of the doors not forming a seal around the edges.

We had ones which smelled like the seats had been left in a damp garage for a couple of years.

£100 a month not bad. My season ticket used to cost £4400, for a 25 minute ride to London waterloo, and tube to Hammersmith. Still cheaper than £28 for the day!

Same here, but newer trains no-one was really asking for, and tickets about three x what you were paying (about £290/month and no seats from my stop in, 25 minutes.) The line -- Thameslink -- got so bad the government took over paying the compenstation rebates for distrupted customer journeys while letting the operators continue to trouser all the fares in addition to something a 4 billion pound operating payment regardless of how badly they performed.

This is pure, Tory mansion-building stuff and apparently exactly what everyone who bothers to vote in this country wants. Yay.

Indeed. At the time of privatisation, I commuted to Oxford from a small village that was 20 min train ride away. Privatisation encouraged me to make the switch to the 45 minute cycle ride, which I suppose was good for me. I do remember seeing the automated departures table being 80% filled with notices of cancelled services or trains that were over an hour late.

> It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working

More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried.

Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.

It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over.

Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!

"Great British Railways" -eyeroll-

Well they can't call it the United Kingdom Railways now the UK is falling apart.

Also, more precisely, it doesn't cover Northern Ireland, which is separate and has its own system linked to the Irish rail network.

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

You'd think they could go with the existing British Rail branding. The double-arrow logo is iconic and still in plenty of places.

And given that many of the private franchises took the names of prenationalization companies, it's hardly unprecedented.

Also this is less nationalised than ScotRail, which will actually be state run: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-564...

Can they still do that, now that the ScotRail franchise is (presumably) no more?

The ScotRail brand was operated by the private company Abellio, who lost the contract due to long term failure to meet its requirements of reliability etc - was in trouble before the impact of the pandemic.

Transport is a devolved matter, so that shouldn't be affected. Although this is often confusing and badly reported.

> this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department

Sounds like it's designed to further distance government and it's ministers from any sort of accountability. Just like any government owned corporation.

High fares (and they aren't that high) aren't a result of privatization; they're because of a lack of subsidy. In the UK, despite the obvious environmental benefits, subsidizing rail is politically awkward because it's regressive.

If privatisation of essential services is a crime (it’s not, but it should be), privatising the subsidies and directing them to private companies is much worse.

If one has a basic right to healthcare, education, and freedom of movement, then all those things should be provided by the state.

They are high.

I had to get from the West, to London, and then to the north last week.

Wiltshire to London: ~100miles, £24 London to Derbyshire: ~120miles, £158

I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt about peak times, but I started my journey at 10:30am. The prices make no sense; unless viewed through the private entities ability to gouge.

Whenever I'm in Europe and buy a ticket I spend an extra 20secs at the ticket machine thinking I've made a currency conversion badly before realising, no, European trains are great value and UK trains are an exercise in exploiting a captive market.

You're lying or deluded. STP-DBY, 10:32 on Monday 24 May: £53 Advance, £67 Off Peak. The most expensive ticket is the First Class Anytime, at £145.50.

Yes, it's hard to argue I should be putting my hand in my pocket to pay for the train fare for my neighbour so they can earn a London wage.

People do complain about the fares but the trains are full so it's questionable whether they are too high.

If I'm looking at it from an environmental perspective I'd argue the other options (cars, planes) are too cheap.

Interesting that you see rail as a method to earn a wage.

I think it's positively evil for society that someone on minimum wage can't visit family or relations because they can't afford the fare.

That hurts everyone.

>Interesting that you see rail as a method to earn a wage.

Because that is the reality for the majority of rail travel. Off-peak is an afterthought.

>doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda

Spot on. Only I venture it is worse. More public money to business friends. The point of public transport is to allay the burden of cost to the public, having no choice but to travel for work. I'll say that again - no choice (zero work where they live) and physically travel to work.

Despite the pandemic, an extreme example of people forced to stay home to work, the number of people that had to continue to travel to work was surprisingly high. And, as ever, the people with the least suffer the most. This is a PR exercise by any other name. The devil is in the details, as is being pointed out.

Don't expect the people who lined their pockets during privatisation to lose any money. Do expect Tory party donors to do well in whatever actually happens.

Where on that wikipedia link you cited does it say it was a crime and corrupt?

Wikipedia doesn't make such claims in so-called 'in-wiki voice', since they are contested.

Rail privatisation was enormously complex. If you want to see a clear example of Tories using economic liberalisation to achieve political ends in immoral, a much better example is demutualisation of the building societies.

https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-co...

I think you could describe that as contested as well.

"that"? The account given of the effect of demutualisation in the article I linked to is not controversial. Obviously my claim that the policy of a political party was immoral is, but I know Tories who agree with me about this.

Following the link from that page, the impact of privatisation is debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Reduced subsidies (per journey), massively increased passenger numbers, improved satisfaction and (apparently) a slower rate of season ticket price increase than under British Rail would appear to be some of the positives.

> The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail) was a crime

From that same Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_ye...

So, during the 1948-1995 nationalized period, train ridership was in almost constant decline, and from the 1995 privatization, train ridership started a steady and steep increase.

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

The infrastructure had been renationalized for quite a while. Its the Operators that have still been private, which in general can be made to work. In Britain it didn’t work well.

Given the currently UK leadership, I can't imagine this going to be anything other than a nightmare of bungling and corruption that I will be reading about in Private Eye in years to come.

Note: I have spent the last 7 years working in consultancy, much of which has been involved with both Metro Rail (eg TfL) and Heavy Rail in the UK.

There are certainly some messy aspects to UK Rail, but the current system was not nearly as bad as made out by some posters , and there are some very good arguments against further centralisation.

A lot of the problem as I see it has been the misalignment between Network Rail (running the tracks) and the train operating companies (TOCs).

Firstly, NR is a huge and bloated bureaucracy - it is incredibly slow moving, and many of the problems (e.g. lack of modern rolling stock) can be directly traced back to problems with NR signing off on new rolling stock (they have to authorise each type of rolling stock to be run on each line).

Second, there are definite problems with timetabling - the TOCs are told the timetables they have to run. Unfortunately, the people who designed the timetables haven't worked out that in some congested areas (eg the approaches to Waterloo station in London), there is no way on earth that the timetables and service frequency of movements in and out of the stations are actually going work.

Thirdly, NR's investment in new systems has been very patchy. It is worth noting that the Welsh Government removed control of the Central Valley lines (serving the valleys North of Cardiff) from NR, and took direct control themselves, because they were sick of decades of underinvestment from NR, which generally takes a very London-centric approach.

Going forwards, I'm hopeful that we will see NR effectively split up into regional entities aligned with the TOC regions, so we can get much better alignment between infrastructure and rolling stock / services in each region. This may also enable a more equitable distribution of funding for infrastructure, which would enable infrastructure and service improvements especially in the North.

Finally, commuter rail and long distance passenger volumes have grown vastly over the past 20 years, which is a good thing. What is needed is infrastructure investment (particularly in modern signalling systems - ETMS) to enable trains to run much more closely together, and enable a higher service density. However, I think it is unlikely that the government will be prepared to make this investment.

This isn't an area I know anything about, but is it correct to say that the points you are making are in some sense orthogonal to the nature of the ownership, i.e. public or private?

I struggle to see how much meaningful competition can be achieved, so remain unclear about the value of private ownership, but it strikes me that decentralisation is perfectly within the realm of possibility for a publicly owned entity.

What they fail to mention is that those two aspects were broken up initially by the government after privatisation in the first place because the accountability and running of both aspects simultaneously was so bad.

Network Rail which the GP was mostly talking about isn't privately owned.

Rail Track, its predecessor was privately owned but it collapsed in 2002 after the Hatfield train crash. Following that it was bought by the government to create Network Rail.

The thrust of steve_gh's argument seemed to be that decentralisation of that (publicly owned, as you are noting) body, and particularly alignment with the train operating company regions, would improve the situation.

I wanted to get their views on any industry-specific constraints around the orthogonality of "centralisation" and "ownership", because I feel like they are too frequently conflated (not by anyone in this thread, to be clear), despite not being inherently linked - but there might be some good reasons for that in the context of the current state of the British railway network.

The timetables bit is key here.

the reason a lot of services failed so horribly in 2018/2019 was because as OP pointed out, greyling fucked up the timetabling.

Not only that, they decided to pick a fight with the unions on southern rail, which turned out to end in a messy stalemate.

https://www.londonreconnections.com/ has some good references.

I similarly spent a few years working in this space (TfL, digitising their data and website etc). It always struck me just how nuts the weekly meetings between different station operators and TOCS within the GLA would be, essentially a shouting match to determine who would have to keep their station open that weekend. Resultant timetable changes on the fly were always fun content to keep updated.

Timetabling (at that point) remained very much a manual process, I think they had to bring a poor chap out of retirement who wrote them by hand.

The flexible season tickets are welcome. However, missing from this news report is any mention of making the cost of rail travel more affordable for the public.

The report quotes the former boss of British Airways about "greater flexibility in the way that fares are operated in the future"

What does this mean? Can we expect less expensive tickets?

The UK already has some of the most expensive rail tickets in Europe. Yes, you can book in advance for cheaper tickets, but often there is limited availability, and you have to book at least a month or longer in advance. In short, the conditions which make cheaper tickets available are simply impractical for most passengers, especially regular commuters.

Here is a monthly season ticket comparison from 2017: UK vs Continental Europe:

- UK: Luton to London St. Pancras (35 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £387 (approx $547/€448)

- UK: Liverpool Lime Street to Manchester Piccadilly (32 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £292 (approx $412 /€344)

- Germany: Dusseldorf to Cologne (28 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £85 (approx $120 /€98)

- France: Mantes-la-Jolie to Paris (34 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £61 (approx $86 /€71)

- Italy: Anzione to Rome (31 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £61 (approx $86 /€71)

- Spain: Aranjuez to Madrid (31 miles) | Monthly season ticket cost: £75 (approx $106 /€87)

Source: https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/uk-commuters-spend-6-times-much-...

Why should frequent travellers get 50% plus discounts on journeys? When I travel to london I pay about £1 a mile in the peak on a fast train. A season ticket holder pays about 20p a mile.

Because buying in bulk gets you a discount, one of the most universally understood things in economics.

That’s not what it is though - if I buy 20x £300 returns it costs £6,000. If I buy a monthly season ticket for the same journeys it costs £1500.

It’s rare to get such large discounts too.

>However, missing from this news report is any mention of making the cost of rail travel more affordable for the public.

I thought that omission was glaring also. #1 concern of the public is price and they pretend it doesn't exist.

It's a strong signal that prices will increase YOY above inflation.

In fact we have foreign governments operating train service in UK and turning a profit:

Https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/trains-uk-railways-renationalise-countries-operators-companies-a9058961.html

And you will may have to stand up all the way for many of those journeys on UK trains.

It wasn't mentioned in this article, but a commonly repeated complaint during COVID times is that season tickets don't work for people who commute 2–3 times per week and work from home the rest of the days.

A possible flexible solution is to have the option of buying bulk tickets for a discount and using them whenever you want.

Most will sympathise with public run railways (rightly or wrongly) so it is worth highlighting some positives from private companies running of the railways.

The private companies have pushed for a very large increase in the number of operating trains, with around a 50% increase in the past couple of decades, they are trying to squeeze every drop possible out if the tracks.

The train companies are also often making a loss on these routes, commonly subsidised by foreign Europeans governments looking to expand their rail business, Dutch or Italian tax payers should be annoyed at how their taxes are being wasted.

Profits are also capped so these are not potential cash cows people suspect. British tickets are expensive because the government doesn't subsidise the ticket price, which is a separate debate.

The Public Vs private debate will continue until the end of time, the truth is there are benefits to both systems.

Disclaimer, my wife is senior in a rail franchise, as well as being left leaning, fwiw.

> Profits are also capped so these are not potential cash cows people suspect. British tickets are expensive because the government doesn't subsidise the ticket price, which is a separate debate.

The system is capped and collared meaning their profits are guaranteed by the government as well as limited. This system incentivised them to underperform on their contract, buy assets, claim losses. When the franchise completes they liquidise and pay out big bucks to shareholders. They very much are the cash cows that people think they are.

Yes, the comment you've replied to is spouting a pretty important mis-truth by trying to make out they aren't profitable for the franchisee.

Some of the franchises did make decent profits, westcost/virgin etc. This generally happens at the end of the franchise once most of the up front investment happened. A lot of other franchises make a loss so it isn't quite so black and white.

With the previous model a lot of the risk was on the private company, if times were good profits were there, in bad times they made losses. Now with the new model the risk has gone over to the UK government, for better or worse.

The new setup should guarantee a low level of profitability for private companies, with a theoretical lower max, what will be interesting is to see how many companies actually bid.

The private companies actually own very little when running a franchise, most things are leased, such as rolling stock which is largely owned by German funds if memory serves. Investments into stations/parking/ticketing etc is left in place for the next person to take the keys.

Appreciate that, but vast swathes of the North and rural areas will never be profitable. As a result, entire areas of the country have rolling stock that was supposed to be dropped in the 80s, a couple of services a day, or aren't even electrified.

The one that always stands out to me is the fact that the last train from Liverpool to Sheffield (two major cities) is at 9:30pm because it wasn't profitable to continue services after that time. As a result, flight delays from Liverpool Airport (again, a major airport) can leave you stranded in that city – or facing an eye watering taxi bill.

I completely agree, Northern trains are a disgrace.

I don't think it was a failure of private companies though, rather Network Rail failing to deliver. The government has speced electrification for decades like you say. The cost of eletricifcation has gone through the roof, mainly due to health and safety (good thing). We have also lost a lot of expertise in electrification, much like how we lost the skill to tunnel.

>The train companies are also often making a loss on these routes, commonly subsidised by foreign Europeans governments looking to expand their rail business, Dutch or Italian tax payers should be annoyed at how their taxes are being wasted.

Last i checked one or 2 examples they ran a profit. Surely they can run a loss/be funded initially but if you get that money back out it's not really what you describe it as no?

Fantastic. Train fares in the UK are prohibitively high. It is at times cheaper to fly via Spain than it is to travel to London from the North East by train, as this story demonstrates.

https://metro.co.uk/2017/06/27/man-flies-from-newcastle-to-l...

Yup. I lived in London for a year and pretty much just traveled by train the whole time. I feel like I missed out on a lot of cool trips around the city because train tickets were absurdly expensive.

Are you suggesting fares will come down? If so, based on what?

There is no way the Treasury has agreed to renationalisation in order to put the fares down. Expect them to go up, if anything.

Isn't transport by plane just cheaper to provide than rail? You don't need to maintain railway lines, bridges, tunnels, points, overhead power lines, signalling or intermediate stations. Routing congestion is reduced because planes can move in 3D. There is no rolling resistance and air friction is reduced due to flying high-up where the air is thin. Airports are built away from city centres, where land is cheap. The natural monopolies of rail-track providers are avoided. I think it would be amazing if train travel was as cheap as air travel.

The energy requirements are vastly different, rolling stock is a lot cheaper than airframes etc.

Good points. A 737 costs about $90M and seats about 162 people. Let's say it lasts 10 years and does 4 journeys per day, that's 14600 journeys in its life. So $38 per journey is needed to pay for the plane. A train costs $15M and has about twice as many seats. So, yeah train wins.

According to https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_121.shtml Trains are about 8.5x more energy efficient than planes. So yeah, trains win that too. For context, planes do about 80 MPG per passenger.

On the other hand, building HS2 might cost £75 billion. It might carry 100 trains per day, so 32000 passengers per day, if all the trains were full. That's 11.7M per year. If it runs for 25 years without costing anything more, that's 292M passenger journeys, so £256 per passenger journey.

I _think_ that demonstrates that the infrastructure costs are larger than the costs of extra energy requirements and airframes. But we're clearly into "it's complicated" territory, so I concede.

This sounds like many niceties, BUT the elephant in the room is the utterly uncompetitive way private contractors are chosen to run the routes, and as a result, high prices / low quality of the actual journeys. Operators have a nice oligopoly on the routes, with barely any competition for tenders.

One example is that different routes have different hardware requirements. And guess what, the only provider who has the right kit available immediately is the one whose contract is just expiring. Please name your price and sign on the dotted line.

One would hope that being a single entity at the top, they would be able to help negotiate better rates around the country .. but then as it is a government project it will probably end up more expensive!

I read the article with that question in mind, it doesn’t mention any changes to sourcing the contractors.

Here's the formal press release from the UK government:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/great-british-railways-fo...

And this is the actual document weighing in at 116 pages:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Pages 52 and onwards: "Replacing franchising" details the exact vision on how those contracts are to be set up. It states:

> TfL Overground services and many railways across Europe, including local and regional services in Germany and Sweden, use a concession model to contract with private partners to operate trains. These contracts have been more successful than franchising in enabling operators to be held to account for running trains on time, delivering passenger satisfaction and controlling costs.

> Our new system of Passenger Service Contracts will build on this approach. Great British Railways will specify the timetables, branding, most fares and other aspects of the service and agree a fee with the competitively-procured passenger service operator to provide the service to this specification. In most contracts, fare revenue will go to Great British Railways, with operators delivering to the specification and managing their costs in doing so. Operators will take cost risk but will need to balance that with service quality, in order to be efficient while also meeting the needs of passengers.

> Operators will be held accountable and risk termination of their contracts if they are not delivering punctual, effcient and high-quality services. The government will retain its operator of last resort function to enable services to continue seamlessly for passengers in such cases, just as it did with Northern Rail in early 2020. Learning from the experience of the pandemic, it will adapt this function as the sector is reformed so that operators can be held to account more effectively to targets in their contracts and so that interventions can be made in the interests of passengers and taxpayers if this is required.

> Passenger Service Contracts should broaden interest and open up the market to new commercial partners, including those who can help to modernize and improve the railways by bringing expertise in technology and innovation. This diversity should increase competition between bidders and therefore create better outcomes for taxpayers and passengers alike.

It's a white paper on which there's a consensus: "this is how we would like to move forward". It's not a detailed business plan though. The entire thing only exists on paper at the moment. The next steps are working on a concrete implementation. Which can still deviate in many regards from this vision.

The UK already axed the franchising model late last year. There's a concrete need to replace it with a different model. That's what this paper is trying to answer. And there's a clear vote for a "concession model" over a "franchising model"

The questions you're posing are valid, but they pertain to the finer details. The answer you're going to get if you'd ask those involved would be: "we're going to figure this out in the next stage."

I still don't understand what's the difference between the old franchising system and the new concessions. Can you ELI5?

So, this is about control.

Largely, the two systems are alike. They both grant permission to an organization to operate a railway service. The difference is in how the relationship is defined.

Franchising typically is about giving license to a franchisee allowing them to use intellectual property, know-how, products and so on in exchange for a fee and adhering to a set of obligations. The franchisee then is free to setup a business selling branded services and products.

A concession contract is different. It's an (exclusive) right which is granted to a concession holder giving permit to use an asset required to operate a service. Between private parties, a typical example would be a concession stand in a sports stadium (permit is giving for you to operate a drink, food, souvenir stand on the premises). Usually, the concession holder will pay a fee to the concessionaire.

A public service concession is a subcategory, and, depending on local legislation, works in a different way. The management contract doesn't provide leeway for the concession holder as to how to operate the service. The management contract specifies almost everything: fares, timetables, performance indicators, awards/penalties and so on. The operator collects revenue on behalf of the public authority.

So, why sign up for a public service concession? Because the concession holder gets a predictable source of revenue through public funding.

The theoretical benefit to the public is that the mode of operations resides with a public body which holds responsibility, and therefor can be held publicly accountable in a direct way as to how railroad systems are operated. In practice, disparate political interests can (and will) influence and even cause friction in how these concessions are governed.

That doesn't mean franchising is necessarily the better option. In this model, public control over the entire operational aspect of railway servicing is largely relinquished to private actors, any requirements set towards franchisees only represents a minimum bar for quality of service which they need to attain.

Shifting dynamics within the private market of franchisees (actors entering/leaving/getting acquired/...) may also impact the overall reliability of services. In a concession model, there's an (perceived) assurance that the same actors will continually operate a service for a predefined period of time according to set requirements.

As to which model is "better". I think exploiting national railway services is a complex problem domain which requires specific business expertise. Beyond the occasional reading online, I can confidently say that I'm absolutely not in a position to attribute absolute value to one over the other. Especially not at a point where information for this concrete case publicly available is limited to a white paper.

Thanks for the thorough explanation!

> Franchising typically is about giving license to a franchisee allowing them to use intellectual property, know-how, products and so on in exchange for a fee and adhering to a set of obligations

Note that over the past 15 years or so, the franchises have had much more in way of obligations set on them from on-high (the Department of Transport, Transport Scotland, and Transport for Wales) than British Rail ever did, and in many ways the service provision is much more micromanaged by political motives than has historically been the case.

That said, due to the nature of franchising it was often the franchisee that took the blame for the franchiser's decisions in setting the contract (and _many_, nay, _most_ of the problems with the GB rail network come from government decisions).

I thought all the rolling stock was owned by a different company to the ones running the actual franchises. Which is separate from controlling the timetable. Although very confusing.

That didn't work for Virgin trains, after running a service for 22 years, undoubtedly still having the right kit in place, and probably the best on-station support staff in the UK for disabled travellers. It was a good service, shame to see it go.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/10/stagecoach-...

I found it ironic that Virgin lost their contract, considering they operate by far the best service in the UK.

The UK does not and cannot have a free market for train travel, so we should stop pretending that it's possible.

Private companies have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted to run train services in the UK. Profit always came before passenger comfort, safety and value for money. I don't believe that the state is better at everything, but in this case they're going to be the least bad option!

UK rail suffers from the service provider having zero accountability to the paying customer at the point of service. It’s the DMV on rails.

Obviously there are no competing train companies / train tracks / signalling systems. If you want to vote with your wallet you only have two ways of leveraging better service: demand compensation or stop using the trains altogether.

The problem with a nationalised rail system is... it will also have zero accountability to the paying customers!

What would be really helpful would be to have an independent and powerful ombudsman who can crack down on sloppy service, and I’m pleased to see this given brief mention in The Guardian’s coverage. We shall see.

Sounds like it's going to be similar to the local London trains. i.e private companies running the system with "Transport for London" branding.

For anyone who appreciates 1980s British comedy, there's a sketch by Ronnie Barker about the joys of British Rail.

"I told BR to be off. Then they offered me £1000. I said I'm not a man who can be bought. Then they offered me £2000. Good evening."

"We're going to replace the existing fare structure, with a very unfair structure"

"British Rail intend to maintain our standards. But now for the good news!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV2lmSDKvO8

It's just blindingly obvious to me that some services absolutely have to come under some kind of longer term (and therefore state) control, and preferably away from the whims of political change.

You absolutely can't build infrastructure, education, health in 4-year cycles. These are 10,20,50+ year projects. Personally I'd have these under control of something cross party, totally away from electioneering.

I was always wondering how the experiment in British rail would write its next chapter.

The logic of privatization seemed odd to me: "You have a choice now -- if you weren't satisfied with the service you received on your trip to Manchester, you can go to Leeds instead!"

Some intercity routes are (were) open access, particularly the East Coast. Of course this was dependent on spare capacity being available.

The elephant in the room is that UK rail is too complex to be managed in siloes and it should be renationalised for the national good and to save money.

Japan managed to do it just fine. Completely private, excellent service, fastest trains, huge infrastructure.

As far as I've seen, Japan is the only country that can make a complex rail system work with private actors. There are many factors for this, including:

1. Japanese rail operators are in most cases multi-industry conglomerates that own land, surrounding infrastructure, hotels, retail, and more.

2. The national investment in rail in Japan is much greater than that in the UK.

3. Modern post-war Japan was literally built around the rail network, and this was not accidental nor a matter of happenstance. Rail access is ubiquitous across urban and suburban areas (not just in Tokyo,) and even rural rail services are in a different category than those in the UK.

Applause for the Transport Supremo for getting this done (for reference check Bed of Nails from Yes Minister).

Ah yes, the Transport Muggins!

Maybe this will remove the need for adjudicating between the companies currently involved - from the White Paper:

"Previous adjudications include, among other things, who was responsible for a train being so crowded that a passenger fainted, causing delays while they were taken off; and whether a pheasant is a small bird (in which case, according to the principles at the time, the train operator was to blame for a delay caused by hitting one) or a large bird (Network Rail's problem)."

The title seems heavily editorialized.

The Guardian's "UK railways to be simplified but still substantially privatised" seems more accurate:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/19/uk-rail-ove...

I could be mistaken but if I understand correctly, this is similar to how the TfL is run. If it is, this will be a huge boost and is a step in the right direction. TfL has its faults, but, in my experience, it is a thousand times better than anything the franchised train operators have been able to deliver.

What is actually changing here? The article says GBR will be responsible for ticketing, prices and schedules, which makes sense that you can buy a ticket for anywhere on the rail system regardless of which company happens to operate which line at whichever moment.

What I don' understand, is that the article says that the 'government has ended rail franchising', which AFAIU was the process where private companies bid to handle certain routes. Now this is to be replaced with 'concessions', which AFAIU is a bidding process where private companies bid to operate certain routes. What's the difference?

A concession means the private company operates the railway for a set fee and a set operational standard, the state owner will retain ticket revenue (and risk). This is how the London Overground concession works.

A franchise basically gives all operation responsibilities and ticket revenue to the private operator, in return, the private operator gives a lump sum bid for the contract at the beginning.

There must be a better way to set up incentives.

Eg.

Company is chosen - they get a temporary monopoly on a route, for free instead of having to pitch a ridiculous low ball

But...

Every time a train is late, they pay £100,000

Every time a train is cancelled they pay £1,000,000

They pay £10 for every passenger complaint.

Etc etc

Why would a company sign up to be flogged like this, though?

Does the state pay the company when delays, cancellations and passenger complaints are a result of publicly owned infrastructure and timetable planning?

The existing management contracts pre-COVID19 (primarily London Overground and the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern railway (yes, that's all one company!)) _did_ have penalties for late running, partial cancellations, or full cancellations.

One can argue whether increasing the fines would lead to better service, or whether it would just increase the cost they bid for the concession to cover those costs, effectively resulting in increased subsidy.

There's also the fact that in many cases there's limitations to what the concession can do: the existing ones have had much decided by the body granting the concession (such as rolling stock, thus limiting their ability to procure more reliable rolling stock if needed), and they don't have any control over infrastructure (and e.g. signal failures or flooding).

I've found that these two YouTube video's do an okay job explaining the actual 'market forces' actually at play here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njJ94o1B0qI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTq8DbRs4k

It takes a bit of understanding why regular market forces kind of can't apply to a system like rail transport.

I suspect a key divide in reaction to this news is between those of us who are member British Rail and those of us who don’t. I do. It was like stabbing yourself with broken glass.

Lots of comments about how this is a good thing, but if private companies are still running the trains, and fares are set centrally, how are they expected to make a profit?

Reduce the staff, or reduce the staff salaries. Either way, unions get involved and there will be strikes just like the "good old days". More retail in and around stations perhaps?

I look forward to being able to just a buy a single ticket from X to Y and one that perhaps doesn't cost 5-10 times as much as it would to drive.

This is an interesting shift. When I lived in the UK, I was rather fond of how well public transport worked - in general, and trains specifically. In my native Belgium, on the other hand, it's all basically shit. While Belgium is slowly pushing for less state control in public transport (allegedly on account of EU competition rules), the UK is now changing direction.

Can anyone summarize the background of this decision? Has there been passenger backlash against the current system?

Guess it depends on what you consider to be shit. Public transport in Belgium is incredibly widespread and affordable, and while trains are somewhat often delayed (but people love to kvetch and exaggerate all the time, https://punctuality.belgiantrain.be/nl/dashboard) due to years of neglect of the infrastructure, at least you don't have to pay an arm and a leg as you would for e.g. a short trip between London and Brighton. Public transport in London is pretty good, but doesn't strike me as being way better than it is in big cities in Belgium like Antwerp or Brussels.

Their way of calculating punctuality is pretty misleading. It takes into account the predicted arrival at the final destination, without taking into account where passengers actually go. Delays along the route are hidden that way, even though most passengers don't go from origin to terminus, i.e. hardly anyone travels from Liège to Ostend, but the start & end of that 2hour+ journey are what's used to compute delays.

If they were to count what percentage of passengers arrived on time, things would look radically different.

Adding to that: a 5 minute delay on a 2hr journey is fine, but a 5 minute delay on a 12 minute journey is awful.

As for cheap .. I wouldn't exactly call trains cheap in Belgium. Especially if you factor in how uncomfortable they are, how most stations have zero accessibility options, how frequently things go terribly wrong, and how nonexistently awful their customer support is.

This is the kind of talk I often hear from people who never take public transport. The question then arises: do they not take public transport because it really is that awful, or do they actually have no idea whether it's truly awful because they don't take it? Or a little of both? :-) One thing you ought to know, though, if you often travel by train, is that trains in Belgium almost never make up for lost time, that's just wishful thinking on the part of the conductor and instead delays just seem to cause more delays, so arrival time at the final destination (together with delays to/from Brussels, which is where most people go) is not a perfect metric but not all that bad.

Anyway, just joking around, public transport in Belgium could be better, that's for sure.

I hope this decision leads to better value railway journeys for regular people.

I love taking the train places, for me when I’m going on holiday the journey is part of it, I find rail travel to be low stress and relaxing. The trip from St Pancras to Amsterdam (4hours) was very calm.

I hope that one outcome of this change is that other people rediscover leisure travel by rail.

That said the anorak in me will miss all the different liveries for each of the companies

If you want to see a good train service look at Japan. Went there for a holiday and used the train service all over. They are a classic example of what a train service "should" be like.

Fast, efficient, cost-effective. The only time trains was a little difficult was in the super-peak hours on the underground in the very dense parts of the cities.

I think the world should learn from Japan in many aspects.

They also apparently make a rather healthy profit

I'd like to second that - Japan has an amazing train (and subway) system.

Here's a great explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFpG3yf3Rxk

The UK's rail "privatisation" has always been bizarre, for practical reasons.

* Because rail is vital national infrastructure, important to keeping congestion down, and needs to be accessible even to poor people, every train operator receives government subsidies.

* So travellers can buy tickets for a complex four-train itinerary and large stations can have multiple operators sharing platforms, much of the ticketing system (including the main types of ticket on offer) is centrally controlled.

* Because it would be nigh-impossible to have multiple companies trains with different prices (or different on-time performance) operating on the same route, each route is essentially a monopoly †.

* To prevent price-gouging of commuters on monopoly services, the rate of increase of ticket prices is capped by government. (And yet despite the subsidies and price caps, some train tickets remain absurdly expensive)

* It would be absurd for a company losing a rail franchise to get stuck with a bunch of trains they no longer need, or a bunch of employees in the wrong part of the country they have to fire. So when a rail franchise changes hands, the trains, drivers, stations, and station staff move with it.

* Any long-term investments in things like new trains won't pay off in the duration of a single rail franchise - so they have to be agreed with the government upfront.

* Rail workers are represented by powerful unions, and industrial disputes tank the train operators' performance numbers, so operators can't control their staffing costs - they can only wait out a long industrial dispute with government backing.

* To prevent rural communities losing their rail service (or having it reduced to unusable levels) the government tells the franchisee where the trains must stop, and how often.

* Because tracks and signals all have to be maintained to the same national standards, and often multiple trains will use the same tracks, the train operators don't own the tracks or signalling equipment. So they can't upgrade track for automation or to run more/faster/more reliable services.

* Because re-tendering a franchise is very time-consuming, train operators who under-perform are seldom replaced or punished (except by making less money than they hoped they would)

All of this means the train operators are boxed in on every side - Can't run more trains, can't run fewer trains, can't raise prices, can't change pricing models, can't embrace tech like driverless trains, can't cut staff. Their only powers seem to be choosing the train's colour scheme, taking the blame for poor performance, and giving some bigwig a fat salary.

Given that the trains have always been de-facto under state control, making that true de-jure makes sense.

† Except for one or two services like london-to-birmingham, and competition from cars and teleworking.

> (And yet despite the subsidies and price caps, some train tickets remain absurdly expensive)

This is by design; the subsidy per passenger km has been going down over time, with a greater proportion of costs being met by farebox revenue. And given that's a governmental decision, will GBR actually change that?

8000 pounds for a 50min train ride season ticket is absolutely insane. Are the trains fancy like the orient express?

Another point of view: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/19/uk-rail-ove...

the people on the Wendover YouTube channel did a video on this back in March which explained the issue really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTq8DbRs4k

A tried and true management system: To appear effective, centralize things that are distributed, and distribute things that are centralized. You can claim benefits either way. And in a few years, put it all back again and claim more benefits.

I know this one. Privatize and pocket money. Mismanagement with both unions and suppliers lining their pockets for a while. Then bailouts and/or expropriation and the bill goes to the taxpayer, again. Rinse, repeat.

It's not impossible that one day our rail network could stand shoulder to shoulder with GOV.UK and the NHS – which I don't think it's too hyperbolic to suggest are both the envy of the world.

This is very strange. The BBC article has gone 404 and there’s nothing on the guardian or daily mail. But I also heard this discussed on radio 4 earlier. Odd. 8:04am.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/19/uk-rail-ove...

I'm looking forward to seeing the new GBR company privatised in 20 years, making a small group of people a very large amount of money. Again.

Still loads of smoke. I want to see the fare prices. If they’re flexible and affordable then maybe I can move out of London!!

France went private more than a decade ago. It made no sense to me at the time, I’m wondering what’s the post mortem on that.

And so the privatization experiment come to an end. Bye bye Thatcherism. I hope this silly belief in the cure-all of "small govt" will die with it.

Sure govt's should not supply all food, or luxury good, or ... But public transport, schools, hospitals, ...

I think we should make a good set of rules by which we can decide which typed of biz should be in private hands, and what we prefer public.

The Fed, Blackwater, prisons, rail, hospitals, banks... What could possibly go wrong?

For what it's worth, even Thatcher thought rail privatisation was "a privatisation too far" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

Thatcherism went beyond the namesake :)

> The Fed, Blackwater, prisons, rail, hospitals, banks... What could possibly go wrong?

This is not a universal truth. Come enjoy an African government hospital, then sample one of the listed private hospitals.

"There exists a private hospital in a country of superior quality to a public hospital in the same country" is a weak claim. Even weaker is "there exists a private hospital in the world of superior quality to a public hospital also in the world".

I'm fairly certain that the claim you're replying to is that private hospitals in the countries in question are consistently better than public ones.

If that was the claim, then why consider African hospitals instead of any hospital?

because:

1. its were I live

2. its where glib statements about the virtues government-run organisations slam into cold hard reality. More so than say Switzerland.

3. try get an EU/US/CA/AU/NZ/JP expat to work in Africa and expect his family to use government hospitals. Really, try.

Because those are the countries in question.

Private hospitals are usually nicer than public ones everywhere, but that's obviously to be expected.

However, that misses the point of state involvement in education and healthcare, which is universal access. Of course people with money will have access to (good) schools and (good) healthcare. The state is involved so that everyone has access to those services.

Education and healthcare also have network effects. If people near you are ill then you're likely to also become ill. If people around you think taxation is theft and coercion then they can band together and elect people with similar brain worms into government.

No it doesn't, this is absolutely not the end of privatization. Private companies will still be running all the trains, the only difference will be they'll be run under the branding of GBR so that people can't complain about the private companies.

All this does is move the accountability away from the private companies.

Sadly.

This type of "privatization" doesn't make the government any smaller. There is still exactly the same amount of coercion and government control.

Building railways roads and essential national infrastructure... Coersion?

Yes. Taxing people to pay for those things requires coercion. Preventing other people from providing completing services requires coercion.

Tax could befall only businesses, which are coerced anyway (as you need a license to start a business). Then the businesses increase prices for their products, for which consumers ultimately pay (uncoerced).

I have lives in 3 coubtries and never seen a government preventing anyone from building private roads, railways, etc. Somehow essential infrastructure is not a popular business investment

Also by that logic stopping people from dueling or stabbing each-other on the street is coersion . Stopping coersion by mafia is coersion. How is this a usefull concept?

So how are they prevented from building competing tracks and more importantly how would one build competing tracks if allowed?

Yes please! It's long overdue! The state of current rail services cannot possibly be any worse!

I want to know how much money will be spent painting fucking Union Jacks on all the trains.

This is fantastic news.

I'm reading all the comments here in my head with a proper British accent.

Working link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

Dang.

Um, I was flagging to dang that the URL was broken. Thanks for the nice down votes tho!

The link is now 404, new link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

OP's URL doesn't work for me, but the article is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

Moved to url: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57176858

They changed the URL after I posted it. Can someone update it?

This is a working link.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57176858

Page 404s. A bit like a British rail scheduled service.

Some issue with the bbc.com vs bbc.co.uk split I assume. The UK version is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

Page not found??

Love to be proved wrong. But public transport's goal never was to turn a profit. It's a public good, and should be measured by its "public good"ness.

Extracting profit feels like something that disproportionately targets the poor/working class and leads to either an exploited workforce and worse service... without a reduction in overall costs.

Now this trend of a "Nationalised Brand" over a "privatised service" just feels like insult to injury...

Can capitalism hurry up and eat itself so we can try something else...

Japan is completely privatised, extremely efficient, huge network, fastest trains in the world, and is profitable. One of the many ways they did it was by converting stations into mini-malls and charging rent. Also, a strong partnership with the state helped.

Huge network... Japan... sure if you’re Taiwan I guess you’d think it’s huge.

for the size and the topography of the country, yes, it's huge. shinkansen network alone is 1700 miles.

or, if you prefer a larger country, china's network is 24000 miles.

... Chinas rail is state owned enterprise... kind of proving my point.

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