Money wasted on the Railways

[Edwin_m]

I'm not sure 'undue optimism' can be verified except with hindsight. The coming of railways assisted the industrial revolution and provided for the first time ever a viable and swift form of transportation in a country of crap roads and people who rarely ventured beyond their own village.

 

The most extreme example probably come a few decades later, when modern London was made possible by what became the Underground - it's impossible to imagine a major European city developing without some sort of rapid transt.

 

But due to the high costs of tunneling and the heavily peaked nature of the passenger traffic, few if any of the privately-built Underground lines made any profit for their investors, except perhaps the ones who managed to sell on to someone more gullible! Instead those investors, and later the public sector, paid the costs with the financial rewards mostly going to property developers. In more recent years this balance has been redressed to a small extent with developers and landowners contributing, voluntarily or otherwise, towards the cost of transport links such as Crossrail.

 

With the exception of the Metropolitan, I don't believe UK railways ever bought land around their planned routes to sell on or develop themselves once the transport link had converted it into prime real estate. In fact I think they were legally prohibited from doing so. I believe some of the few profitable suburban railways are those in Japan, where the money is actually made from the property they own but of course that would be worth much less if the railway wasn't there.

[RJS1977]

Looking back, much of the railway system was built with undue optimism. The Severn Bridge Railway, The GCR London extension, the Lancashire Derbyshire & East Coast Railway, the Settle & Carlisle, the GNR Halifax and Keighley lines, the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire, most small local branch lines..................

 

I would argue that the 7BR and the GCR weren't so much built with undue optimism as before their time - with HS2 proposing to relay part of the GCR and the Severn Tunnel at capacity, both routes would very much have a part to play today!

[kevinlms]

In fact, without going any further onto sensitive ground, under the UK system parties win with far less than 50% of the vote so the best a party can claim is that it was less unpopular than the alternatives.

 

The same applies in Australia, even though we have preferential & compulsary voting. Voting rates are over 90%, yet we had a hung parliament as did you.

 

Kevin Martin

[roythebus]

That's where most parliamentarians ought to be; hung!

[SwissRailPassion]

It was a Labour pledge to renationalise the railways in some form in 1997 - the year that saw the biggest ever parliamentary majority. In 1997 Labour were walking on water and could have been far more radical. Opportunities were squandered once more.....

[frobisher]

That's where most parliamentarians ought to be; hung!

 

[pedant]Hanged surely? Objects are hung, people are hanged.[/pedant]

[edcayton]

Indeed, there is a TV programme called "hung", but as I understand it it is nothing to do with capital punishment.

 

Ed

[roythebus]

Hung? Well....