Time for a national, publicly-owned, railway?

[scottycelt]

So making shedloads for chums of Tory politicians was never part of the deal then, scotty?!

How innocent I have been

Well even young Red Ed is not that innocently naive, amsey ...

I'm not saying the current system is ideal ... we can all live in hopes that somebody might eventually come up with a better one.

It's just that some of us don't see any point in returning to an even worse system. You only have to look at our mainline terminals, never mind the train service, and remember what they used to look like, though admittedly the good ol' EU can claim some of the credit for that.

It's not that I'm against nationalisation in certain exceptional cases, I'm all for the NHS, for example, again with its warts and all.

But the railways? ... nah ... it's already been tried and failed ... miserably ... though if you said to me we'll get the Germans in to set it up and then run it I might well quickly change my mind!

[amateur51]

It's just that some of us don't see any point in returning to an even worse system. You only have to look at our mainline terminals, never mind the train service, and remember what they used to look like, though admittedly the good ol' EU can claim some of the credit for that.

Have you been to St Pancras/St Pancras International and King's Cross recently scotty. I wonder who was responsible for these wonderful renovations? And the recent facelift at Waterloo is not bad either.

[heliocentric]

St Pancras/St Pancras International

seems to have turned into a shopping mall with a few trains hidden away in the background...

[teamsaint]

Trains in the UK are horribly overpriced and overcrowded compared to those in many European countries, and the pricing system is byzantine. Both of these features are directly attributable to the way British Rail was privatised. Public transport should in any case be a service, not a business. Its primary concern should be its passengers and its employees, not its directors and shareholders. Whether British Rail in its time was well-run or not isn't really the issue.

Ticket pricing. Absolute insanity. Really.
Can anybody give me a good reason why fares can't be something like

Season ticket.
Anytime single
Anytime return
Cheap day return
Advance return....book by, perhaps, 7 days ahead?
always available, any route?
Is that so hard? Would it be so much worse than the current nonsense?

certain routes seem to never have advance tickets. Others only on part of the journey. Very annoying.

[scottycelt]

Have you been to St Pancras/St Pancras International and King's Cross recently scotty. I wonder who was responsible for these wonderful renovations? And the recent facelift at Waterloo is not bad either.

Yes, amsey, I managed to view both the St Pancras and Kings Cross renos in May and then popped across to the Barbican on a brand new Tube train for a Haitink/Concertgebouw Bruckner 5 ... stunningly majestic and wonderful the whole day's experience, believe me!

Haven't been to Waterloo in recent years but that has always been a most impressive station, imv?

[Flosshilde]

Er, yes. The recent record of civil servants running transport-related stuff is, umm, not good.

What transport services do civil servants run? They've all been privatised. British Rail was run by people who were experienced in managing rail services -they were only 'civil servants' in that they were working for a national organisation.

[David-G]

Haven't been to Waterloo in recent years but that has always been a most impressive station, imv?

Indeed so ... except that the concourse has just been spoiled (in my view) by the insertion of a "mezzanine" at first-floor level. For shopping, of course. You can see it here: http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/4941. It obscures the distinguished building facade. (And the escalators significantly obstruct passenger flows at ground-floor level.)

[scottycelt]

What transport services do civil servants run? They've all been privatised. British Rail was run by people who were experienced in managing rail services -they were only 'civil servants' in that they were working for a national organisation.

I hate this notion of of 'civil' or 'public' servants as if their worth to the public and society is any greater or less than the shopworker, carpenter, plumber, electrician, gardener, window-cleaner, painter, roofer, factory-worker etc etc etc ..

Everyone who works for a legal living serves the public and society in some way and many who cannot work manage to do so as well.

If we rightly moan at private businesses and workers for shoddy performance there is absolutely no reason to let the politicians and civil servants off the hook for similar inadequacies ... after all it's still OUR money!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The '60s Beeching destruction of much of the rail network happened long before it was privatised!

We shouldn't blame that entirely on Beeching. The real villain was Ernest Marples, the Minister of Transport who paid Beeching to do it.

[scottycelt]

We shouldn't blame that entirely on Beeching. The real villain was Ernest Marples, the Minister of Transport who paid Beeching to do it.

I entirely agree ... I don't blame the Good Lord at all ... if Ernie had come to me and said ..'hey, Lord Scottycelt, if I pay you a fortune to lead an 'Inquiry' which results in simply suggesting that we close about a third of the rail network on which you are never likely to rely on, anyway, will you agree and accept this challenging appointment?' ... well, I'd have bitten his bloody hand off!

[John Shelton]

I hate this notion of of 'civil' or 'public' servants as if their worth to the public and society is any greater or less than the shopworker, carpenter, plumber, electrician, gardener, window-cleaner, painter, roofer, factory-worker etc etc etc ..

Everyone who works for a legal living serves the public and society in some way and many who cannot work manage to do so as well.

If we rightly moan at private businesses and workers for shoddy performance there is absolutely no reason to let the politicians and civil servants off the hook for similar inadequacies ... after all it's still OUR money!

In what way does "this notion of of 'civil' or 'public' servants" imply some denigration of "the shopworker, carpenter, plumber, electrician, gardener, window-cleaner, painter, roofer, factory-worker etc etc etc ."? If it implies the "notion" of running a public service for public benefit rather than profit, that's nothing to do with denigrating plumbers is it? None of your examples remotely cover any of the rail operators, or the corporate healthcare 'providers' (including now, of course, Virgin) who make money from privatisation, do they? So they haven't anything to do with the work done by 'civil' or 'public' servants, have they?

It is indeed "OUR money." That's one reason why I object to it ending up in Richard Branson's pocket (for example).

[scottycelt]

In what way does "this notion of of 'civil' or 'public' servants" imply some denigration of "the shopworker, carpenter, plumber, electrician, gardener, window-cleaner, painter, roofer, factory-worker etc etc etc ."? If it implies the "notion" of running a public service for public benefit rather than profit, that's nothing to do with denigrating plumbers is it? None of your examples remotely cover any of the rail operators, or the corporate healthcare 'providers' (including now, of course, Virgin) who make money from privatisation, do they? So they haven't anything to do with the work done by 'civil' or 'public' servants, have they?

It is indeed "OUR money." That's one reason why I object to it ending up in Richard Branson's pocket (for example).

Everyone's in any sort of work or business for 'a profit' in order to feed him/herself and possibly family, and in the course of that work they provide some sort of service to the public. I object just as much to OUR money ending up to highly reward incompetent senior politicians and top civil servants who freely squander it.

Only this morning on the Today programme we heard the rather sickly mutterings between BBC employees that working for the organisation is somehow 'a vocational public service' ... .

Why do you object to the money ending up in Branson's pocket if he delivers the goods? After all, his business depends on delivering. Much better that than giving the money to a 'public servant' in the style of Lord Beeching, who very likely couldn't give a toss whether 'the plebs' received any goods in return or not!

[Flosshilde]

Scotty, the 'private sector' is in it to make money, by providing the least possible service (or product) for the greatest amount of money while paying their staff the least they can get away with. They aren't in the least interested in providing a public service. 'Public servants' - ie government employees - are in the job primarily to provide a service to the public.

I object to money ending in Branson's (or his shareholders) pocket because it's my money that I pay to the government to provide services for me & my fellow citizens; not to pay people like Branson who'd spend it on another Carribean island, or idiotic stunts like balloon flights round the world.

[John Shelton]

Why do you object to the money ending up in Branson's pocket if he delivers the goods? After all, his business depends on delivering. Much better that than giving the money to a 'public servant' in the style of Lord Beeching, who very likely couldn't give a toss whether 'the plebs' received any goods in return or not!

It doesn't depend on delivering (the private sector doesn't depend on delivering, certainly not when it gets its hands on public sector services). It depends on a range of factors, including being in the right position to take advantage of a market opportunity, aggressive acquisition of business, and on the fact that most of the time competition is either chimerical (the utilities) or produces an unholy mess (as with the railways). The fact that you like the trains and the shopping opportunities on station concourses doesn't mean privatisation has been cost effective - huge sums of public money continue to subsidise the Bransons et al while they indeed deliver profits, dividends, bonuses. I most certainly do object to contributing my money to a private company paying dividends to its shareholders; I most certainly do object to the inevitable situation where my money has to be used to keep the infrastructure working for the benefit of Branson et al's companies.

The irony is that it's your sort - the people who type public servant in single inverted commas - who otherwise insist on the necessity of cuts, redundancies, and belt tightening. Yet you are quite happy to accept generalisations with no hard figures to back them up about cost effectiveness, efficiency, where the private sector receiving public money is concerned; or, where it suits you and you use the service, just to cheerfully accept the public subsidisation of private profit making, dividend paying, enterprises, whatever the cost because your gratification has been achieved. Sadly that sort of self-centred, me me me, approach is all too typical of the shallow, believe only in doing all right for yourself, country this has become.

(And perhaps you could explain how being paid to do work for someone else is making a profit - since most theories of profit, left or right, would tend to accept that work is done to make profit for the employers / investors / shareholders? A profit on what exactly? On being broke?)

[Dave2002]

i am divided between Scotty's and Flossy's views here. It seems "obvious" that private companies work for profit, and therefore should be less cost effective than public service ventures. However this often is not the case, and private companies, if they don't get too greedy, do seem to "deliver the goods" on occasion, and acually provide better value for money. This is counter intuitive! "

"Private compamies are more efficient" and hence "they provide better service" is often quoted as a sort of mantra. It may often be true, but I feel sure there are also many counter examples.

Re Branson and Virgin, I have thought the Pendolino trains on the WCML were pretty good, and well run.
I also wonder if First have been playing a slightly naughty game in that if Virgin loses the franchise they will have trains with no lines to run them on, so First may be assuming they can obtain the trains at cut down prices. I had thought that almost all the trains (engines, carriages) in the UK were owned by other companies, which hire/lease out the rolling stock to operating compamies, but I'm told that Virgin do actually own their Pendolinios.

I don't know who currently runs the ECML. The trains say "East Coast" but I thought that due to failures of previous operating companies the trains were being run by a public sector organisation. I don't know the details.

Personally I think that franchising for 15 years is too long. I accept that short periods are not going to work for the companies operating the trains, but 15 years is too much. There should be check points within the franchise period for review and possible termination - maybe there are, but I don't know of any.

When it's time for new bids, and possible change of franchisee, there are many complex/complicated issues. Who owns the assets? Can they be transferred? Will this lead to forced sales to new operators? This is possible/likely if there are only two viable contenders, and the assets are route specific. What about employees? The current employees on a line may be the best - so will they simply transfer to the new operator if the operator changea? Will this bring about unrest, if the conditions for empoyees change?

It seems to me that the views of passengers are not taken into sufficient account when renegotiating the franchises.
The service from London to Sheffield which used to be run by Midland was taken over by South West Trains, and some features, such as the complimentary coffee, were lost. I think many passengers were happy with the previous operator.

South West Trains are used to running commuter trains in and out of London, and train quality issues seem relatively unimportant to them. IMO they are competent, but not outstanding.

Re First and their proposals to improve the West Coast service by extending routes to Shrewsbury, for example, did no one notice that a service from Wrexham and Shrewsbury to London operated for a short while, but closed? I think some passengers really llked the service, but it appeared to be financially unviable.