Major changes to Network Rail proposed

[Coryton]

I remind you that 'nationalisation' would let the DfT mandarins (who have orchestrated the whole breakdown in industrial relations at Southern over the past 12 months for what looks like the pursuit of political ideology) let lose on a much wider scale. Do not fall into the trap of imagining direct Government control (as opposed to Government control by proxy through pretend private sector companies) would be any more efficient or better for users.

 

 

Except that then they wouldn't be able to wring their hands and say nothing to do with us, 'guv, we just let the franchises...

[Gary H]

It's something that we HAVE to fight, and not let chrome dome grayling destroy the pay and conditions we have fought for over the years.

Network rail break up is the tip of this government's ice berg . Even if it takes an all out national strike all grades across the industry must stand up for themselves

 

I think that if all this nonsensical rubbish does kick off, the recent DaFT and Southern woes will seem like a fairy tale in comparison.

[caradoc]

Interesting article on the BBC News website, raising some doubts about the plans:

 

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38201570

 

Regarding the advantages of vertical integration, what is being proposed is not full vertical integration on the BR model. Assuming that typically, the majority passenger operator would take control of its routes, this would leave the other passenger operators in the area, the freight operators, and the Open Access companies all still as separate entities. With Network Rail in charge, it has to consider all operators needs and treat them all as equally as possible, and compensate them for its failings.

 

Regarding my example of BR's neglect of the Oxford/Worcester line in the 80s, a time of decreasing passenger numbers it may have been, but withdrawing the majority of through trains and replacing them with inferior stock was guaranteed to accelerate the decline ! If Network Rail has to impose speed or other restrictions due to infrastructure faults it has to compensate the operators affected, therefore there is more of an incentive to maintain the railway. 

 

By the way, I wonder who in the brave new world would be responsible for timetabling, and would have the final say ?

[Captain Kernow]

The good thing about Network Rail was that they didn't care about closing the track to carry out needed work as it didn't effect their profits whereas it will effect operators profits so they will put it back as much as possible which is pushing the limits for safety.

I wouldn't put it quite like that.

 

The good thing about Network Rail is that it (generally) understands the effects of disruptive possessions on customer's (TOCs & FOCs) operations and business, and generally endeavours to keep the possessions as short as possible, commensurate with including appropriate contingency allowances in the timescales. An enormous amount of work went into planning all recent major blockades and other weekend possessions that I was involved with until I retired, and I'm sure they still do!

 

Work that is undertaken within possessions is generally stuff that needs doing, whether it's part of a major project or part of on-going maintenance and renewals. Of course, there have been examples of possession planning c*ck ups, and perhaps the GWML electrification hasn't been universally well-managed, but it isn't a case that NR 'don't care' about closing the line for work to be done.

 

In fact, one of the key things that I effectively introduced (on my part of the Western at least) on a progressive basis from 2003 onwards, was an integrated approach to operational contingency planning for first of all the major blockades, and then for disruptive weekend possessions. NR is still a fairly silo-orientated organisation, and was even more so back then, so what I was doing was looking across the silo divides and working with various teams/departments to bring all the risks together and mitigate/manage them.

[Captain Kernow]

No I'm not a railwayman, I'm just one of the many millions of passenger/taxpayers who are utterly fed up with paying through the nose for the extravagant, incompetent and greedy ways of the current British railway. As for your reference to 'The Stationmasters' statement that all could be solved by adding more resources to the already gigantic bill for the railway, well, that is just risible.

 

Grayling has the right analysis so far. The problem is in the way the railway was de-nationalised, that the current structure just builds in un-necessary costs which the passenger/taxpayer has to fund. Whether that means that he will come up with a solution that will resolve the problem without re-nationalising the railway is another matter. Personally I doubt it.

Well, as you have admitted that you are on the outside of the rail industry, perhaps you will give those of us who are either still on the inside or recently left the courtesy of knowing certain things that are not (by their nature) known to those that are not (some of us such as Mike and others actually have a long 'tradition' on this forum of trying to explain some of the inner workings of the industry to everyone on here, in some cases this has to be limited if you are still a working railwayman, although I no longer have such restraints).

 

As such, I deem any 'risible comments', therefore, to be yours. In making such a statement, you appear to be deliberately misconstruing what has already been said and implied.

 

Knowing Mike Stationmaster on a personal level, and knowing the depth of his knowledge and railway experience (which many on here rightly acknowledge), I am dismayed by your staggering arrogance in seeking to impose what is merely your personal opinion as some kind of 'fact', and seemingly on the same level as his (and others') contributions.

 

There are indeed things wrong with the current model, as some of us 'insiders' have conceded, but a massive re-organisation on the lines of what is suggested is definitely not the answer.

[jjb1970]

I think we should wait to see what is actuallyproposed before getting too carried away. I suspect there is an element of political kite flying here to gauge reaction and then when the speech is delivered it may seem quite reasonable compared to some of the speculation, that is an oldpolitical trick.

 

In terms of the underlying idea I think it is unlikely to be positive, although I may be wrong. To me it is another example of why the railways should not be nationalised as it is just another round of political interfering and another fashionable idea of the moment. Of course private companies are not immune to that either, but there tends to be more accountability and financial/performance drivers to act against never ending initiative overload than in the public sector in my experience. Most of the real problems I see with the modern railways (other than isolated local issues that are often down to what side of bed a particular member of staff got out of that morning) stem from DafT micromanagement and interference and the fact that governments just lurch from idea to idea looking for some magic wand that will make everything perfect. Some of those ideas may have been quite good and well considered but they never seem to be given the time needed to demonstrate their value before the next brain wave arrives. At the moment we have a hybrid public/private system, the only bit that is privatised in terms of passenger service is the service delivery bit, it is fundamentally a state railway service which contracts out the service delivery component.

 

On Chris Grayling, I suspect he is a very engaging chap to meet, as most politicians are. People tend to forget that one of the most important skills of any politician is the ability to communicate effectively with potential voters and to project a positive image for themselves and their ideas. I also suspect that as with most politicians he is fundamentally a well intentioned person who genuinely wants to improve the lot of the country.

[Captain Kernow]

I would enlarge the TOCs so they equate approximately to the grouping companies so their size is about right for economies of scale. I would have a specific TOC for Scotland.

 

These enlarged TOCs would merge together local, inter-urban and mainline services. Therefore there would be an LNE, LM, S, W and Sc TOCs. Should stop the TOCs from being so parochial.

 

The TOCs should take responsibility for the infrastructure in their geographic area.

 

OK, so it's back to 1923 - 1948, plus Scotland?

[newbryford]

. I would have a specific TOC for Scotland.

 

 

 

Errrrr - what would you call it?

 

Scotrail?

 

Cheers,

Mick

[96701]

No timescales for it to happen either. CP6 business plans are still being developed by NR, who were told to sell land to make money. Where would that go if NR's (ie taxpayer's) assets are handed to private companies?

[phil-b259]

No timescales for it to happen either. CP6 business plans are still being developed by NR, who were told to sell land to make money. Where would that go if NR's (ie taxpayer's) assets are handed to private companies?

 

No just land either - wasn't there some sort of plan around 6 months ago to make NR flog off bits of the functioning railway (something to do with Telecoms or major stations IIRC) and lease them back to free up capital?

 

Once again a case of a short term dividend at the expense of the long term costs.

Edited December 4, 2016 by phil-b259

[Captain Kernow]

No just land either - wasn't there some sort of plan around 6 months ago to make NR flog off bits of the functioning railway (something to do with Telecoms or major stations IIRC) and lease them back to free up capital?

 

Once again a case of a short term dividend at the expense of the long term costs.

Agreed.

 

The land sale announcement worried me considerably, as much of my more recent career also included scrutinising (and usually opposing) the plans by the NR Commercial Property team to sell various parcels of land off. Many such proposals would have compromised the operational railway, either currently or at some point in the future. There were even one or two hapless individuals in said Property team who just didn't get 'operations', 'safety' and 'rules & regulations', and even when presented with comprehensive opposition, still tried to push their madcap schemes through. Fortunately the Property Clearance system within NR worked in favour of the status quo, but it could take a lot of time to go through the detail of some Property proposals, and with continuing reductions in staffing levels, (plus the retirement of many with sufficient experience to quickly tell the difference between a good and bad scheme), I fear for the future.

[The Stationmaster]

No I'm not a railwayman, I'm just one of the many millions of passenger/taxpayers who are utterly fed up with paying through the nose for the extravagant, incompetent and greedy ways of the current British railway. As for your reference to 'The Stationmasters' statement that all could be solved by adding more resources to the already gigantic bill for the railway, well, that is just risible.

 

Grayling has the right analysis so far. The problem is in the way the railway was de-nationalised, that the current structure just builds in un-necessary costs which the passenger/taxpayer has to fund. Whether that means that he will come up with a solution that will resolve the problem without re-nationalising the railway is another matter. Personally I doubt it.

 

Perhaps you ought to have read what I actually said about resources (and what Southernman46 said on similar lines) while at the same time you seemed to totally ignore where you started -  looking for a simpler structure while actually seeming to support what will inevitably be a far more complex one except in perhaps some very restricted areas.

 

And where do you get extravagant and greedy from - where is the real evidence to support either of those words  (note -  haven't questioned incompetent).  The only extravagance I can see is at the top level - in DafT, and various organisations such as RSSB and probably the upper echelons of NR.  There's certainly no extravagance at the front end of the industry, the bit which actually makes the train's run where railway folk are, after many years of being sat on, finally getting a reasonable recompense for their responsibility and labour for what are in many cases safety critical jobs where getting something wrong could actually kill people.

 

I don't doubt the industry needs to strip out cost - I think I have shown some ways in which that could be done but unless what is coming from Grayling is going to be very different from what is being trailed you can forget that nonsense about fares coming down as no big  cost drivers are being removed and I can't see how extra money will be injected.

It still seems strange to me that a structure which is how many railways still operate now, and the remainder did for most of their history, should turn out to be the "wrong" way to do it. In principle I would have thought that being able to take a top-level view of what was necessary, rather than the outcome being determined by negotiation between two organisations with different goals ought to be more efficient. But I've never tried to run a railway.

 

I wonder how Americans would react if it was suggested that their railways would run more efficiently if the track was taken away from the (largely) freight companies to be operated by a new state or privately run company? 

 

But if vertical integration really is going to be tried out, I hope it will be trialled in one area first.

 

If I recall correctly the Isle of Wight line was originally vertically integrated - and the franchisee promptly outsourced infrastructure to Network Rail. I'm not sure what that tells us.

 

But on the other hand how many have followed, in some form or other what has happened in Britain - most of Europe (with limited degrees of commitment and success in one or two cases) and Australia with the latter certainly not being driven by EU Directives.  Look at the treatment passenger trains - and only a  few of them at that - get on some US railroads, timetables reduced to works of fiction as the owning railroad gives priority to its own trains.

 

As I said vertical integratio involves numerous compromises and those compromises will be different when you involve any part which either has its financial input tightly limited (say by The Treasury as happened on BR and now increasingly on NR) or where those investing private money tend to look nowadays for quick returns.  The inevitable 'compromise' there woudl seem to amount to not spending money - and repairs and continuing maintenance are, as Railtrack proved all too clearly, areas where you can get away for a short time by not spending money.

[locoholic]

So, there is a problem with the railways that Chris Grayling thinks he must be seen to be trying to fix, and as usual (see also the NHS on numerous occasions) the "solution" is some kind of tinkering with the administrative structure. But of course this does nothing to address the root cause of the problem, but Grayling won't be in post by the time this becomes apparent.

 

If the problem is stripped right back to basics, at its root is the inability of the railways to exist without public subsidy at a time when both government and individual finances are under very great pressure. The temptation is to cut costs by reducing maintenance. This is happening to the railway's main competitor, the public road network, where the consequences are borne by the users in the form of increased vehicle maintenence costs and accidents, which attract very little interest from the media, even though the net cost to the public is very high. The railways are tightly regulated and rightly can't neglect maintenence.

 

Then there is the problem of overcrowding. If the roads are overcrowded, who is to blame? The other drivers, or the government for not building more roads? But there seems to be no public appetite for a major road building programme and increasing Vehicle Excise Duty to pay for new roads is never discussed. But when trains are overcrowded, the reaction is to increase fares to fund investment.

 

The BBC article suggests that the government is proposing that the new Oxford to Cambridge line should be a vertically integrated concern, presumably as a kind of pilot project. If this idea was applied to the whole network, we would be going back to the situation pre-1923. If small railways weren't working in 1923, when the railways had relatively weak competition, it's difficult to see how it is the solution to the problems of the railways in the 21st century, but equally it is hard to see any way of disguising the fact that railways are an expensive form of transport.

[John_Miles]

I'm not sure railways are that expensive. Road gets lots of subsidies, many of which are hidden like the NHS having intensive care beds to cope with road traffic victims. Roughly speaking UK roads kill 10 people per day and injure 100. If you work out what that costs, it is a lot of track renewals. I believe that the railways still have to pay for British Transport Police (no doubt someone will correct this if I am wrong) whereas the policing of roads comes out of what used to be called the rates. Lorries are the major cause of road surface damage but their road taz doesn't reflect this.

[Glorious NSE]

It still seems strange to me that a structure which is how many railways still operate now, and the remainder did for most of their history, should turn out to be the "wrong" way to do it. In principle I would have thought that being able to take a top-level view of what was necessary, rather than the outcome being determined by negotiation between two organisations with different goals ought to be more efficient. But I've never tried to run a railway.

 

I wonder how Americans would react if it was suggested that their railways would run more efficiently if the track was taken away from the (largely) freight companies to be operated by a new state or privately run company? 

 

A vertically integrated railway operated on a commercial basis for pure profit (as the US freight railroads do very successfully) is a very, very different beast to what BR was, or even what pre-BR British companies were though - the vertical integration element seems to my eye to be more a default hanging over from their origins as profit making companies rather than as an intentional statement that it's definitely the best way to run a railway.

 

 

[SM42]

I was agreeing with you as you started, but profit was not the key driver at Hatfield - it was ignorance.

 

To some extent that was what I was driving at .

 

Add ignorance (as a new breed of railway manager, who has an ever diminishing  opportunity to learn from old hands, comes through ) to the seemingly new objective of wringing as much profit out of the system as possible during a short franchise and the calucluated risk taking becomes ever more tempting  with possibly more risk taking and less calculating.

 

It seems now that the safety aspect of running a railway is considered almost as a given and as such can slip to the back of the queue as  performance and avoiding costs are come to the fore.

After all, pressure from the media and travelling public is always on timekeeping, cost and capacity. I hear very few express how content they are at arriving at destination safely every day , if a little late occassionaly

 

Fortunately it appears there is still a strong safety culture witihin Network Rail (as an infrastructure specialist) but as time goes on the basic principles may  get diluted and I would suspect this would be even more pronounced within a TOC where the basics of track and signalling  maintenance are not a core skill.

 

Andy

Edited December 4, 2016 by SM42

[Mark Saunders]

Remind me; is this the same lot at Marsham Street who said that getting rid of the toll booths (but not the tolls) on the Dartford Crossing would reduce traffic delays?

 

At least Scotland got rid of both!

[Glorious NSE]

Except that then they wouldn't be able to wring their hands and say nothing to do with us, 'guv, we just let the franchises...

 

Wanna bet?

[The Stationmaster]

With respect, you are saddling me with opinions here that I didn't express. For what it is worth, I don't like nationalisation and you won't come across many avowed socialists who will say that. I have never come across another one!

 

My view is that the TOCs are absolutely ideal subjects for mutualisation, that the season ticket and railcard holders should own the service provider. That way the management of the TOCs will have no choice to pay regard to the people who actually use and pay for the railway, not to mention managerial salaries and pensions.

 

And while I'm setting the world to rights ...

 

 

I would enlarge the TOCs so they equate approximately to the grouping companies so their size is about right for economies of scale. I would have a specific TOC for Scotland.

 

These enlarged TOCs would merge together local, inter-urban and mainline services. Therefore there would be an LNE, LM, S, W and Sc TOCs. Should stop the TOCs from being so parochial.

 

The TOCs should take responsibility for the infrastructure in their geographic area.

 

The compensation culture must stop. In order to get compensation a TOC must get a judgement in a court or tribunal that their business was harmed either wilfully or due to incompetence on the part of the owner of the infrastructure. As most changes to the infrastructure are intended to improve the service and those day-to-day incidents that do occur are just that, incidents with no wilful intent to harm a TOCs business this should improve matters.

Your final point is interesting - part of the problem from a cost viewpoint is the compensation system (not a culture, it is a system imposed at privatisation in order to 'create a financial discipline' within the industry).  Unfortunately (in my view) it has become a massive end in itself as most parties seem to see it as much as a money machine as a penalty system.

 

There is no need whatsoever to involve the legal trade - simply adding to the money they take out of the industry - as you simply need an industry committee (like the one I used to serve on) to adjudicate on the correct or incorrect application of the agreed procedures.  However what does need attention is a major review of the way the system is applied and used - hence my reference to outside Rules possessions and i would take that further and say the compensation regime should not apply to possessions within Rules of The Route but it would obviously apply to over-runs.  It is an area where I suspect large sums potentially haemorrhage from NR and I suspect they usually exceed costs incurred by operators, and I do wonder how much nowadays comes back the other way?  I also wonder if anyone has ever understood how to apply the original idea of bench-marking when it comes to penalty payments.

 

I can't really understand why TOCs should take responsibility for infrastructure - they have neither the knowledge nor the organisation let alone the long term length of a  franchise to enable them to sensibly do so.  If franchises lasted for, say 25 years that would give them an incentive on infrastructure matters but anything less and you're inside many renewals cycles/ the book life of projects and even 25 years would probably lead to a Railtrack approach of deferment of work as they near their end.  Net result another potential Railtrack like mess.

 

I'm not entirely sure of the relevance in the 21st century of the geographical areas of the Grouped period - )Great) Western makes sense but the Southern was always an assemblage of three different Pre-Group railways and that is reflected in the current franchises.  Would the LNE and LM carve up Scotland between them or do we have a separate 'Scottish Region?   We then come to the problem which took years to solve on BR - when it was all under one ultimate master - of how you deal with Cross-Country type services with many more nowadays crossing such boundaries - would they be separate TOCs or would we get back to the days of 'cross-border' joint services or even 'penetrating lines' (one relatively short lived BR answer to the problem) or running powers (and recreate the RCH).  The country has changed a lot since 1948, and probably almost as much since the BR Regions disappeared in 1992 - in a reorganisation intended to get rid of some of the problems created by their being Regions (although it created other potential headaches which, generally we worked around; that incentive to work around has probably now gone with those of us who did it).

 

So you come back to the old question - if you relate trains operations and their commercial parts to traffic flows and, say, conurbations (such as the West Midlands) you train operating organisation is immediately at odds with an infrastructure organisation organised on purely geographical lines (such as, say, the Scottish or Welsh border).  This is where the advantage of a national infrastructure provider/owner becomes a sensible answer although it then has to be broken into sub-divisions in order to get management to the right level near the frontline of its activities.

 

BTW I can see nothing in the present process which would prevent a 'mutual' organisation bidding for a  franchise - provided it is not BR (which it obviously won't be) and can submit a compliant bid and fund its bond then off it can go and invest £1million++ to put together a bid when a franchise is out to tender.

[TheSignalEngineer]

Re-orgs,re-orgs. In my 30 years service before privatisation I can remember being affected by about 15, of which at least two were still-born and three others were overtaken by the following one.

In the late 1970s/ early 1980s there was a team based at Euston House whose sole function was to think up re-organisations. It didn't matter who or where as long as there was a re-org going on somewhere. i think it was to keep the Unions occupied so they didn't have time to cause trouble elsewhere.

[gismorail]

Oh Dear another shuffling of the pack making the whole operation of was once the envy of the world one big gamble .....sounds as if Network Rail will become even more like a civil service department dishing out directives and reprimands to the real railway people. 

[96701]

MerseyRail is a fairly small self contained TOC with a network of HV substations. I wonder how much more it would cost if there wasn't the economy of scale that NR enjoys?

Edited December 4, 2016 by 96701

[Nearholmer]

As one of the few here who believes strongly that vertical integration is usually the best way to run a railway, maybe I should say why I believe that.

 

For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying that I support what Mr Grayling intends to announce, firstly because I don't have the faintest idea what he is going to announce, and secondly because I suspect that whatever is announced will need to be handled with long tongs, and looked at very carefully, for the reasons set out by locoholic and others.

 

So, vertical integration is a good idea because it puts relationships in the right order, and thereby ensures that everyone's mental compass is set in the right direction. The customer pays the railway company for a train and station service; the railway company provides that service; the railway company sources whatever it needs in order to deliver that service, through a combination of in-house and bought-in provision ........ those who pay the piper call the tune.

 

Dead simple if no subsidy is involved, but, of course, subsidy is likely to be involved in most passenger railway operations in Britain to some degree or another, so how should that work? The public authority through which subsidy flows should buy specific provisions that the railway company won't provide of its own volition (times of day, days of the week, controlled fare-levels, peak-time capacity etc), whatever it deems appropriate and affordable, on behalf of the public, from the railway company. The public authority can be at national, regional, or local level, as appropriate.

 

The above can apply with private-sector railway companies, or public-sector railway companies, and in some countries it works with a mixture of the two (Switzerland, I think, is an example, although the ownership of some of the 'private' companies there traces back to public bodies).

 

We have got so used to the idea that a TOC is a thing that can't look after infrastructure, that we seem to loose sight of the concept of a railway company ....... which is odd given that we are surrounded by integrated enterprises, private and public. If you spend a minute considering applying the model currently applied to our railways to, say, supermarkets, you will see how strange it is!

 

And, to be even more controversial, I can't quite see why smallish railway companies should be considered an impossibility, where small fits the bill. The competences needed to run, and maintain in safe order, a simple, especially non-electrified, low service-density, railway are not rare or exotic. None of the UK tramways is particularly large, yet they manage competently, and I could argue that they are more complex than many rural railway operations. I take the existence of a top-notch safety regulator as a given.

 

So, a possible future (I'm crystal-ball reading here, not advocating) is one in which ownership of more parts of the rail network is passed to Scotland, Wales, and English regional and local authorities (tramways and some urban railways are already owned by regional/local bodies), the rest remaining nationally held by DfT, and each of those owning bodies either creates a publicly owned railway company to operate and maintain it, or lets (hopefully long) franchises to private railway companies to operate and maintain it for them.

 

My central argument is that to run railways all that are needed are three sorts of bodies, railway companies, a safety regulator, plus freight operators, given that many freight hauls transcend conceivable passenger railway company boundaries.

 

Having lit a few touch-papers, it's probably time I went back to 0 gauge toy trains for a bit!

 

Kevin

 

PS: politicians can never be taken out of the equation; they've been in it from the outset, for land-take and economic regulation reasons, and, where subsidy is involved, they are democratically elected guardians of the taxpayers purse, for better or worse!

[96701]

The intention is that the burden of paying for the railways in this country should fall with the customer, not the taxpayer. This is all well and good, but somewhere along the line all services have to be paid for one way or another. There are certain lines that will never make a profit, so if one takes 'the taxpayer contribution must be minimised' to its logical conclusion, most railways would become far too expensive for people to use. 

 

There must be a better way of running our railways than the current model. I happen to work in Wales. ATW's franchise is coming to a close. The Welsh Assembly want to take control of Wales' railways, so a deal has to be struck between Westminster and Cardiff as to how that will happen. This could result in the railways of Wales and Scotland being run in different ways with the rest of the network being run in a third way.

 

Neither of these three ways will be 'the right way' for all people.

[phil-b259]

 

I can't really understand why TOCs should take responsibility for infrastructure - they have neither the knowledge nor the organisation let alone the long term length of a  franchise to enable them to sensibly do so.  If franchises lasted for, say 25 years that would give them an incentive on infrastructure matters but anything less and you're inside many renewals cycles/ the book life of projects and even 25 years would probably lead to a Railtrack approach of deferment of work as they near their end.  Net result another potential Railtrack like mess.

 

I'm not entirely sure of the relevance in the 21st century of the geographical areas of the Grouped period - )Great) Western makes sense but the Southern was always an assemblage of three different Pre-Group railways and that is reflected in the current franchises.  Would the LNE and LM carve up Scotland between them or do we have a separate 'Scottish Region?   We then come to the problem which took years to solve on BR - when it was all under one ultimate master - of how you deal with Cross-Country type services with many more nowadays crossing such boundaries - would they be separate TOCs or would we get back to the days of 'cross-border' joint services or even 'penetrating lines' (one relatively short lived BR answer to the problem) or running powers (and recreate the RCH).  The country has changed a lot since 1948, and probably almost as much since the BR Regions disappeared in 1992 - in a reorganisation intended to get rid of some of the problems created by their being Regions (although it created other potential headaches which, generally we worked around; that incentive to work around has probably now gone with those of us who did it).

 

this is the key to vertical integration the ability TO PLAN FOR THE LONG TERM. When they were formed the 'Big 4' had no idea that they would only be in existence for 25 years - and you have to ask yourself would the Southern been quite so enthusiastic about electrification for example if it knew it would only be around as an independent entity for 18 years (ignoring the 7 years spent under government control during WW2).

 

Again I refer to Chiltern - they DID invest in infrastructure, but only because they were given a 20 year franchise and thus would be able to reap the benefits for many years.

 

The big problem is the DfT / Treasury / Whitehall refuse to learn the lessons of the Chiltern franchise and let them out for such a duration that the TOC feels happy contributing to new infrastructure etc. I assume this is because politicians cannot stand leaving the work of previous administrations alone - particularly if the previous Government was made up from another political party. 20 year franchises run the risk that party X may never get the chance to meddle with it as voters have a tendancy to swap partys after two or three terms in power.

 

Thus while supporters of vertical integration may raise some valid points, for it to be as - or more effective than the present setup requires a radical shift in political thinking, something conspicuously absent from Whitehall thus far who continue to fail to see that they (not TOCs, NR, etc) are actually the biggest problem with our railways today