ECML franchise fails .... again....

[4630]

I think that as well as making sure the trains kept running, it was probably even more important to prevent administrators from selling off railway lines to developers to raise money to pay creditors.

 

I could be wrong but I believe that the infrastructure was sold off lock, stock and barrel to Railtrack rather than it remaining in government ownership and just managed by Railtrack.

 

 

The administrators were prevented by the Railway Act from selling off parts of the network during the period that Railtrack was in 'Railway Administration'.

 

The purpose of the administration order is to transfer, as a

going concern, so much of the undertaking of Railtrack PLC as is

necessary to ensure that the management of the network is properly

carried on (section 59, 1993 Act). This is done by

transferring property, rights and liabilities from Railtrack PLC to

a new entity (Schedule 7, 1993 Act).

The Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions

(DTLR) has proposed that the new entity will be a company limited

by guarantee and this is now being referred to as the 'CLG' or

 

'Newtrack'.

[Clearwater]

As an FYI, similar provisions around special administration exist in the water, gas and electricity network sectors. The more leveraged financing structures seek to put in place controls that seek to protect creditors’ interests before special administration is reached. I’d note railtrack’s debt structure didn’t contain such protections

 

David

[D854_Tiger]

The Telegraph's take on this yesterday, cut and pasted for those that don't register.

 

What was it Albert Einstein said about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, has given a new twist to Einstein’s definition of insanity. Transport ministers now appear to believe that failure is a sign of success. “This is what you would expect in a competitive franchise system,” Mr Grayling told the House of Commons when he announced the most recent collapse of the East Coast rail franchise. 

It is, in fact, the third time the East Coast franchise has collapsed in 12 years. The first was in 2006, when Sea Containers, the line’s first private sector operator, over-bid. The second was in 2009, when National Express couldn’t make its bid numbers work, a fate that has befallen its successor. After the fiasco of the West Coast franchise award in 2012, when Virgin took the government to court for wrongly awarding the franchise to an over-bidder, the transport department commissioned a tame report saying it should accept the risk of failure. 

Failure is more than a risk. It’s baked into the franchise system that was designed for a completely different set of circumstances. All but one of the franchises let in the first round of rail franchising were loss-making. Bidding for annual subsidy for a time-limited franchise was a sensible halfway house. If bidders had got the entire subsidy upfront, there was an obvious risk they’d under-perform or even walk away and the taxpayer would be left empty-handed. 

Train operating companies are now highly profitable businesses and don’t need direct subsidy. There isn’t any need for time-limited franchises. But the Department for Transport persists in the belief that it is inviting the private sector to tender to provide a service rather than selling a business. 

Private sector bidders also like the rail franchise structure as they don’t have to pay upfront. They don’t need much capital of their own for a business that has considerable upside potential. But it carries considerable moral hazard. Because bidders don’t pay the full enterprise value of the business,there is a natural tendency to bid an upside case, in effect, to acquire the right to operate the business on the cheap. Bidders typically assume a 3-4pc profit margin, which for a franchise like East Coast implies projected profits of £75m a year. Train operators are high fixed cost firms; a 1pc rise in revenue could increase profits by 30pc. 

On the other hand, there is no value in bidding a conservative case, especially as bidding for rail franchises nowadays isn’t cheap. Bid submissions can run to a thousand pages and cost £10m-15m apiece. The outcome is Britain’s trains end up being run by thinly capitalised, high risk, low investment train companies to a tight, public sector-specified timetable. The days when Virgin put in a bid costing a shade over £1m for the privatised West Coast franchise are long gone. The freedom Virgin had in the first flush of privatisation saw Virgin put tilting trains on Britain’s busiest long distance line, innovate with infrastructure upgrades, new timetables and service offering to attract customers.

 

All that has been squeezed out by civil servants who have acquired more control over the railways than they ever had in the days of British Rail. When it comes to running the railways, the men and women in Whitehall really do think they know best. What we’ve ended up with is a travesty of privatisation in the shape of a state run railway with the livery and uniforms of a privatised one running over infrastructure that’s on the public sector’s books and managed by the not-for-profit Network Rail. Train companies are prevented from responding to weaker demand by taking trains out of the timetable. Because they effectively lease the business from the Government, the obligation to make annual franchise payments makes the structure of their income statements extremely fragile and their tiny balance sheets contain virtually no equity to cushion the business from losses

 

This is no way to run a railway. It needs strong train companies driving investment in the network and service provision, where the reward for success is not losing the business to an inferior rival, as happened to Stagecoach with the Southwest commuter franchise. All this gives rail privatisation a bad name. 

 

Tories pay lip service to the benefits of privatisation and free markets. “Why shouldn’t a mutual, a not-for-profit, or even a charity be able to  bid,” Tory MP Tom Tugendhat asks? The reason should be obvious. Not-for-profit was New Labour’s answer when Steven Byers created the disaster that is Network Rail, an entity accountable neither to its train operator customers or to shareholders – it doesn’t have any, where there’s little sanction for huge cost inflation, late project delivery and poor performance. 

 

“Profit is a price paid for efficiency,” the great American economist Thomas Sowell has written. The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in capitalist economies implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency, Sowell argues. To have a better railway, the scope for the private sector to make profits needs to be transformed. Train operators should be sold off as properly capitalised businesses and Network Rail broken up into customer accountable packages. Most of all, Whitehall needs to let go. Then let privatisation do the rest. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Coryton]

 

All that has been squeezed out by civil servants who have acquired more control over the railways than they ever had in the days of British Rail

 

Nice to see that recognised in mainstream reporting.

[stovepipe]

 

The Telegraph's take on this yesterday, cut and pasted for those that don't register.

 

Train operating companies are now highly profitable businesses and don’t need direct subsidy. There isn’t any need for time-limited franchises. But the Department for Transport persists in the belief that it is inviting the private sector to tender to provide a service rather than selling a business. 

 

Private sector bidders also like the rail franchise structure as they don’t have to pay upfront. They don’t need much capital of their own for a business that has considerable upside potential. But it carries considerable moral hazard. Because bidders don’t pay the full enterprise value of the business,there is a natural tendency to bid an upside case, in effect, to acquire the right to operate the business on the cheap. Bidders typically assume a 3-4pc profit margin, which for a franchise like East Coast implies projected profits of £75m a year. Train operators are high fixed cost firms; a 1pc rise in revenue could increase profits by 30pc. 

 

On the other hand, there is no value in bidding a conservative case, especially as bidding for rail franchises nowadays isn’t cheap. Bid submissions can run to a thousand pages and cost £10m-15m apiece. The outcome is Britain’s trains end up being run by thinly capitalised, high risk, low investment train companies to a tight, public sector-specified timetable. The days when Virgin put in a bid costing a shade over £1m for the privatised West Coast franchise are long gone. The freedom Virgin had in the first flush of privatisation saw Virgin put tilting trains on Britain’s busiest long distance line, innovate with infrastructure upgrades, new timetables and service offering to attract customers.

 

All that has been squeezed out by civil servants who have acquired more control over the railways than they ever had in the days of British Rail. When it comes to running the railways, the men and women in Whitehall really do think they know best. What we’ve ended up with is a travesty of privatisation in the shape of a state run railway with the livery and uniforms of a privatised one running over infrastructure that’s on the public sector’s books and managed by the not-for-profit Network Rail. Train companies are prevented from responding to weaker demand by taking trains out of the timetable. Because they effectively lease the business from the Government, the obligation to make annual franchise payments makes the structure of their income statements extremely fragile and their tiny balance sheets contain virtually no equity to cushion the business from losses

 

This is no way to run a railway. It needs strong train companies driving investment in the network and service provision, where the reward for success is not losing the business to an inferior rival, as happened to Stagecoach with the Southwest commuter franchise. All this gives rail privatisation a bad name. 

 

Tories pay lip service to the benefits of privatisation and free markets. “Why shouldn’t a mutual, a not-for-profit, or even a charity be able to  bid,” Tory MP Tom Tugendhat asks? The reason should be obvious. Not-for-profit was New Labour’s answer when Steven Byers created the disaster that is Network Rail, an entity accountable neither to its train operator customers or to shareholders – it doesn’t have any, where there’s little sanction for huge cost inflation, late project delivery and poor performance. 

 

“Profit is a price paid for efficiency,” the great American economist Thomas Sowell has written. The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in capitalist economies implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency, Sowell argues. To have a better railway, the scope for the private sector to make profits needs to be transformed. Train operators should be sold off as properly capitalised businesses and Network Rail broken up into customer accountable packages. Most of all, Whitehall needs to let go. Then let privatisation do the rest.

 

I don't think much of this article - it seems to think Virgin 'innovated with infrastructure upgrades' on the WCML, and claims that TOCs are 'highly profitable', yet bid on 3-4% profit margins. The claim that TOCs don't need direct subsidy is laughable, with £2.4bn handed over directly, with another £0.8bn indirectly on the latest figures.

 

If I can find that out in just a few minutes of googling, why can't the Telegraph journalist? I'm afraid it's the usual privatisation doggerel one would expect from this newspaper.

 

And the final line '.......Network Rail broken up into customer accountable packages'. How exactly would this be done, when the main lines are used by so many different 'customers'?

[Coryton]

I don't think much of this article - it seems to think Virgin 'innovated with infrastructure upgrades' on the WCML, and claims that TOCs are 'highly profitable', yet bid on 3-4% profit margins. The claim that TOCs don't need direct subsidy is laughable, with £2.4bn handed over directly, with another £0.8bn indirectly on the latest figures.

 

If I can find that out in just a few minutes of googling, why can't the Telegraph journalist? I'm afraid it's the usual privatisation doggerel one would expect from this newspaper.

 

And the final line '.......Network Rail broken up into customer accountable packages'. How exactly would this be done, when the main lines are used by so many different 'customers'?

 

Possibly they meant that running trains is (or rather can be) highly profitable, although in the current structure the TOCs themselves have small margins because of premium payments.

 

I'm not sure what's being suggested here, but it seems to be that instead of having short term franchises making "annual franchise payments" the government should sell off each franchise for an up-front payment and after that leave the companies to make as much money as they can. I'm not sure what the companies would actually be buying - the perpetual rights to have a quasi-monopoly over certain routes (with no mechanism for this to ever change)?

 

And the argument that a not-for-profit TOC would be a bad idea because Network Rail is a disaster seems a bit simplistic. How is this different from the argument that a profit-making TOC would be a bad idea because Railtrack failed disastrously?

[Clearwater]

I've commented before that where I know the real story behind something in the press, I inevitably find the article to be inaccurate on a number of levels. Consequence is to make me more sceptical about any other "factual" story I read in our esteemed fourth estate.

[Coryton]

I've commented before that where I know the real story behind something in the press, I inevitably find the article to be inaccurate on a number of levels. Consequence is to make me more sceptical about any other "factual" story I read in our esteemed fourth estate.

 

Quite.

 

It's very easy, however, to notice all the errors in stories one does know about, yet somehow believe that the others are accurate.

[SwissRailPassion]

It's very convenient to argue over private or public and for Adonis to throw himself into the fray elsewhere but it's a massive distraction from the incompetence and stubbornness at the DfT which is the real story. The anti electrification lunatics who were defeated by Shooter et al are resurgent once more. Meanwhile Network Rail gets away with monumental failures.

[jjb1970]

It's very convenient to argue over private or public and for Adonis to throw himself into the fray elsewhere but it's a massive distraction from the incompetence and stubbornness at the DfT which is the real story. The anti electrification lunatics who were defeated by Shooter et al are resurgent once more. Meanwhile Network Rail gets away with monumental failures.

 

I'd agree in general, but unfortunately it is the delivery of the GWML electrification and MML electrification that has given the anti-electrification lobby momentum (for the time being). I think pulling the plug on electrification is daft, but given how DafT and NR have managed those big schemes I really can't blame those with the purse strings for saying enough is enough as if it was my budget I'd probably do the same.

[lmsforever]

 

The Telegraph's take on this yesterday, cut and pasted for those that don't register.

 

What was it Albert Einstein said about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, has given a new twist to Einstein’s definition of insanity. Transport ministers now appear to believe that failure is a sign of success. “This is what you would expect in a competitive franchise system,” Mr Grayling told the House of Commons when he announced the most recent collapse of the East Coast rail franchise. 

It is, in fact, the third time the East Coast franchise has collapsed in 12 years. The first was in 2006, when Sea Containers, the line’s first private sector operator, over-bid. The second was in 2009, when National Express couldn’t make its bid numbers work, a fate that has befallen its successor. After the fiasco of the West Coast franchise award in 2012, when Virgin took the government to court for wrongly awarding the franchise to an over-bidder, the transport department commissioned a tame report saying it should accept the risk of failure. 

 

Failure is more than a risk. It’s baked into the franchise system that was designed for a completely different set of circumstances. All but one of the franchises let in the first round of rail franchising were loss-making. Bidding for annual subsidy for a time-limited franchise was a sensible halfway house. If bidders had got the entire subsidy upfront, there was an obvious risk they’d under-perform or even walk away and the taxpayer would be left empty-handed. 

 

Train operating companies are now highly profitable businesses and don’t need direct subsidy. There isn’t any need for time-limited franchises. But the Department for Transport persists in the belief that it is inviting the private sector to tender to provide a service rather than selling a business. 

 

Private sector bidders also like the rail franchise structure as they don’t have to pay upfront. They don’t need much capital of their own for a business that has considerable upside potential. But it carries considerable moral hazard. Because bidders don’t pay the full enterprise value of the business,there is a natural tendency to bid an upside case, in effect, to acquire the right to operate the business on the cheap. Bidders typically assume a 3-4pc profit margin, which for a franchise like East Coast implies projected profits of £75m a year. Train operators are high fixed cost firms; a 1pc rise in revenue could increase profits by 30pc. 

 

On the other hand, there is no value in bidding a conservative case, especially as bidding for rail franchises nowadays isn’t cheap. Bid submissions can run to a thousand pages and cost £10m-15m apiece. The outcome is Britain’s trains end up being run by thinly capitalised, high risk, low investment train companies to a tight, public sector-specified timetable. The days when Virgin put in a bid costing a shade over £1m for the privatised West Coast franchise are long gone. The freedom Virgin had in the first flush of privatisation saw Virgin put tilting trains on Britain’s busiest long distance line, innovate with infrastructure upgrades, new timetables and service offering to attract customers.

 

All that has been squeezed out by civil servants who have acquired more control over the railways than they ever had in the days of British Rail. When it comes to running the railways, the men and women in Whitehall really do think they know best. What we’ve ended up with is a travesty of privatisation in the shape of a state run railway with the livery and uniforms of a privatised one running over infrastructure that’s on the public sector’s books and managed by the not-for-profit Network Rail. Train companies are prevented from responding to weaker demand by taking trains out of the timetable. Because they effectively lease the business from the Government, the obligation to make annual franchise payments makes the structure of their income statements extremely fragile and their tiny balance sheets contain virtually no equity to cushion the business from losses

 

This is no way to run a railway. It needs strong train companies driving investment in the network and service provision, where the reward for success is not losing the business to an inferior rival, as happened to Stagecoach with the Southwest commuter franchise. All this gives rail privatisation a bad name. 

 

Tories pay lip service to the benefits of privatisation and free markets. “Why shouldn’t a mutual, a not-for-profit, or even a charity be able to  bid,” Tory MP Tom Tugendhat asks? The reason should be obvious. Not-for-profit was New Labour’s answer when Steven Byers created the disaster that is Network Rail, an entity accountable neither to its train operator customers or to shareholders – it doesn’t have any, where there’s little sanction for huge cost inflation, late project delivery and poor performance. 

 

“Profit is a price paid for efficiency,” the great American economist Thomas Sowell has written. The fact that most goods are more widely affordable in capitalist economies implies that profit is less costly than inefficiency, Sowell argues. To have a better railway, the scope for the private sector to make profits needs to be transformed. Train operators should be sold off as properly capitalised businesses and Network Rail broken up into customer accountable packages. Most of all, Whitehall needs to let go. Then let privatisation do the rest. 

 

This is the most sensible comment on the whole fiasco everyone is to blame it seems and the comments on NR are very interesting.

 

 

 

 

[Chris116]

Having suffered the total mess that is South Western Railway since it started would DaFT like to give First the East Coast line (my apologies to those who travel on East Coast) and can we have South West Trains run by Stagecoach back and get a service running.

Edited February 16, 2018 by Chris116

[jjb1970]

Stagecoach did a good job with SWT, they even had nice liveries (well, I thought so). I find most of the TOCs I use do a pretty good job despite being vilified constantly by certain parts of the political and media establishment.

[Coryton]

Stagecoach did a good job with SWT, they even had nice liveries (well, I thought so). I find most of the TOCs I use do a pretty good job despite being vilified constantly by certain parts of the political and media establishment.

 

You don't use Southern then.....?

[jjb1970]

You don't use Southern then.....?

Nope, I am spared that Daft masterminded catastrophe. Which of course in a way re-enforce the point about TOCs and public and political perception. It wasn't the TOCs that created the meltdown but how many people blame them for the consequences of decisions taken by DafT (including politicians who should know better)?

[cheesysmith]

Talking of SWT, first won the franchise n the promiss of more monies to DaFT, but since they`ve taken over there has been a reduction in commuters. Now DaFT want DOO to cut osts (the only reason that costs keep going up is DaFT, ut thats a different topic), but the franchise gets protection from DaFT over industrial disputes from DOO. Could a franchise be devious enough to introduce a dispute over the DaFT wanted DOO when the budgets don`t match to avoid going into default?

[The Stationmaster]

Nice to see that recognised in mainstream reporting.

 

Yes, but what it then went on to propose wasn't anything of an improvement in my view.

[Coryton]

Yes, but what it then went on to propose wasn't anything of an improvement in my view.

 

Well there is that. But you can't have everything.

 

 I could comment on whether I thought their proposal was an improvement except that I'm not sure what they were actually proposing to do with the TOCs.

 

And it seemed to be based on the premise that all TOCs would now be wildly profitable if it wasn't for those pesky premiums, and I'm not sure that's the case.

 

(Edited out nonsense grammar)

Edited February 18, 2018 by Coryton

[Coryton]

Nope, I am spared that Daft masterminded catastrophe. Which of course in a way re-enforce the point about TOCs and public and political perception. It wasn't the TOCs that created the meltdown but how many people blame them for the consequences of decisions taken by DafT (including politicians who should know better)?

 

I wouldn't let Southern off the hook completely.

 

While they may not have caused the mess, it didn't look as if they were coping with it very well either.

 

It's easy to run a railway from an armchair (or settee) of course, but I would like to think that things needn't have been as chaotic as they were when there was disruption. Information (to both passengers and staff) was very poor, and the management didn't seem willing or able to come to the front line to see for themselves how bad it was.

[jjb1970]

I wouldn't let Southern off the hook completely.

 

While they may not have caused the mess, it didn't look as if they were coping with it very well either.

 

It's easy to run a railway from an armchair (or settee) of course, but I would like to think that things needn't have been as chaotic as they were when there was disruption. Information (to both passengers and staff) was very poor, and the management didn't seem willing or able to come to the front line to see for themselves how bad it was.

I don't see management as blameless. There were staff availability issues that shouldn't have been such a problem leading to a lot of cancellations and their handling of the whole mess was pretty shabby. That said, Southern wasn't always a basket case and I suspect that if it had been running as a normal franchise and not as a management contract operation selected to be the battle ground for Daft and the unions to go to war that the issues would have been resolved and services maintained within the bounds of acceptability. Govia operated London Midland and did a good job and local management on Southern seemed to be doing OK before the DafT induced meltdown.

 

I think looking in as an outsider that Southern is a good example of what happens when the relationship between staff and higher management breaks down. How many of the more local problems were exacerbated by the toxic atmosphere created by the dispute? For managers it must have been the job from hell to be caught between Daft and the RMT (two organisations that deserve each other IMO) and morale must have been as bad as it was among train crews. What normally happens in a scenario like that is the best people move on as they are quite mobile.

 

To me the lessons from it all are that power without accountability is very dangerous (i. e. DafT) and that civil servants and politicians should be kept as far away from trying to run industry's as possible.

[rockershovel]

I've commented before that where I know the real story behind something in the press, I inevitably find the article to be inaccurate on a number of levels. Consequence is to make me more sceptical about any other "factual" story I read in our esteemed fourth estate.

Humbert Wolfe, 1885-1940;

 

Though his works are little read today, the following epigram from The Uncelestial City continues to be widely known and quoted:

 

You cannot hope

to bribe or twist,

thank God! the

British journalist.

But, seeing what

the man will do

unbribed, there's

no occasion to.[3]

[Mallard60022]

There was some local discussion in our local paper this week, quite a lot being positive about the service being taken out for Franchise for the time being as they recognise that the last time it was like that there was a good service and it made profits that did not go to some private company.However I am shocked at the ignorance of some of the locals that were commenting. They have little idea of who has run the line over the years (including  one claiming that GNER was the 'Nationilised' operator) and what has been happening recently. I suspect many of them never use the ECML trains and have no idea that it was almost all Stagecoach and just a tad Virgin that was the operator, especially the one who said that there must be no Union involvement in the the new operaton as strikes had crippled the service  and those across the country, for years. Plonker. There may have been some Industrial action on Northern for a few days around here recently (Sheffield Lincoln service) but this bloke is talking out of his ####. 

Our Station Staff here have a large collection of Uniforms accumulated over the last 15 years and have little time for Franchise management types. Neverteless, they and the on train staff dealing with trains at 36E have been doing a pretty good job under quite challenging conditions for quite some time. I also must just point out that Virgin have put quite a lot of effort into tidying up their Stations up here so not everything has been bad.

I'm just hoping Hull trains get more accfess as they have been providing a great service for ages. I think they have an East Midlands Trains (is that what it is called?) 125 on hire at the moment as well?

P

Edited February 17, 2018 by Mallard60022

[rockershovel]

There was some local discussion in our local paper this week, quite a lot being positive about the service being taken out for Franchise for the time being as they recognise that the last time it was like that there was a good service and it made profits that did not go to some private company.However I am shocked at the ignorance of some of the locals that were commenting. They have little idea of who has run the line over the years (including  one claiming that GNER was the 'Nationilised' operator) and what has been happening recently. I suspect many of them never use the ECML trains and have no idea that it was almost all Stagecoach and just a tad Virgin that was the operator, especially the one who said that there must be no Union involvement in the the new operaton as strikes had crippled the service  and those across the country, for years. Plonker. There may have been some Industrial action on Northern for a few days around here recently (Sheffield Lincoln service) but this bloke is talking out of his ####. 

Our Station Staff here have a large collection of Uniforms accumulated over the last 15 years and have little time for Franchise management types. Neverteless, they and the on train staff dealing with trains at 36E have been doing a pretty good job under quite challenging conditions for quite some time. I also must just point out that Virgin have put quite a lot of effort into tidying up their Stations up here so not everything has been bad.

I'm just hoping Hull trains get more accfess as they have been providing a great service for ages. I think they have an East Midlands Trains (is that what it is called?) 125 on hire at the moment as well?

P

I suspect that this is why Virgin are able to sell their branding. From what I can observe, railway branding is generally a total failure. The “Big Four” are long since forgotten by the public; apart from the LNER having bright green locos called Flying Scotsman, and the Great Western having dark green locos and going to Dawlish, where they brave raging seas and crumbling seawalls like corvettes escorting Atlantic convoys, that’s pretty much the sum of popular recollection.

 

Stagecoach are hardly a name to conjure with, buses these days being mostly the transport-of-Choice of shouty teenagers, unemployed single mothers with huge collapsible baby buggies, and pensioners. The shiftworkers at the vast on-line warehouses out on the ringroad have no viable bus service. Tesco have a bus island, lost amid the vast carpark; most of the other supermarkets don’t. My daughter-in-law could travel to work by bus, working regular hours on a single route, but wouldn’t consider it. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism about “travelling on omnibuses after the age of thirty” seems to be widely demonstrated.

 

What’s left? Commuters seem mostly oblivious to the subtly changing kaleidoscope of generic names, applied to crowded trains in liveries reminiscent of soft drink cans, and nobody else cares at all. My son-in-law uses ECML daily and can’t name the franchise, although he DOES sometimes use the expression “WAGN train” as a generic term denoting “commuter multiple unit” despite the actual franchise of that name being long gone.

 

There is a general perception that the railways are propped up by the State, at public expense, so that French and German taxpayers might profit, and a select coterie of tax evaders might not be inconvenienced. The State in some little-understood way, controls the allocation of franchises, which appear to have little basis in commercial reality. Most people never encounter unions in their daily life, which appear to exist largely for the purpose of protecting someone else’s job by interfering with daily travel.

 

Engine drivers have long since ceased to be avuncular figures who leant out of the cabs of their hissing, creaking charges, chatting to small, holiday-making boys on the platform and commanding respect from their fathers, as skilled men earning good money in a hard trade. Their very trains have long since lost the cachet of “world-beating British designs”.

 

I wouldn’t want the job of selling the railways, in their present incarnation, to the public...

[jjb1970]

I don't think anyone really needs to sell the idea of railways to the public. Given the increases in ridership and high load factors they appear to be selling themselves as despite the various issues with our system it still does a good job moving huge numbers of people. For many commuters in conurbations the train has a de-facto monopoly on commuting transport.

 

Trains are commoditised mass transit. The challenge for TOCs has been to accommodate increasing growth within the available infrastructure, maintain reliability and provide a good service while offering value for tax payers. And on the most part most of the TOCs do a decent enough job. I have few reasons to complain about WCML services and when I was a regular traveller to Bristol was happy enough. When I go further afield I am usually happy. People seem to assume that when it comes to buses and trains they are being ripped off if the operator makes a profit. The profit is less important than the cost to users and tax payers (assuming a service is subsidised). If a company can offer users and tax payers a good deal and make a profit then that should be commended, not criticised. Many seem to assume nationalisation would cut costs as it would eliminate profit, ignoring the fact that the cost to tax payers will be more likely influenced by how efficiently an industry is managed.

[jamie92208]

I have a nephew in his 30's who never travelled on a train as a kid except when he came out with me and my eldest for bike rides. He moved down to Milton Keynes for work and then started using the train to get to meetings in London and now commutes daily to central London. Whenever we call and see him he always has interested and informed questions about railways and the trains that he uses. He was fascinated by the Pendelino's and always wanted good information. He is by no means a trainspotter but as a user of trains on a daily basis is genuinely interested in what makes the system work. So at least one commuter does have interest in what takes him to work.

 

Jamie