It's true. Beeching only wanted to mothball the railways after closing them down, keeping the tracks in place so that they could be brought back into service if seen as profitable again (like we're seeing with so many railway lines now). It was Marples' idea to tear them all up and pave over them with new roads. A transport minister who just so happens to be the chairman of a road construction company? Absolutely no conflict of interest there!
@@presfieldgoalie very true. What a set of plonkers. Now it is regrettable but was plainly ill thought out and short sighted from the outset what took place back then.
My late grandfather knew Marples in his youth, both coming from Manchester. In conversations he told me that Marples was always " rotten to the core." even at an early age.
I agree. Beeching is and was always used to call the operation the Beeching Act. But other dark forces actually did it, not Mr. Beeching. Mostly Marples.
A wealthy landowner in Cornwall had a sub contracting company who took on people with a couple of days “training” and sent them off for a 8-10 hour van trip, which they slept in, to work on the potentially lethal 3rd rail system on the southern region. I wonder how much this was happening elsewhere.
I was on the the recieving end of that sort of thing literally hundreds of times! We would travel from Cornwall up to places like Salisbury, Wimbledon, Bristol, Twikenham to name just a few for a Saturday night shift and drive home after 12 hours on site., get home dinner time on Sunday. You were only ever paid for the time on site so it worked out about £3 PH if you factored in the time you were away from home! Im talking late 90's here. It was a nitemare, looking back I wonder how I stuck it but we did as we were desperate for the money. The Salisbury job was 2 , 12 hour days shifts, we actually slept in a hay barn on the Saturday night to save money on B&B. Often pitched up tents in fields back in those days, lived like tramps. The agency I worked for would threaten you with no work mid-week if you wanted a weekend off too. It was tough!!
Don't think my Dad ever forgave Railtrack, he'd been with BR for decades, rising from a train guard up to a network controller. Once Railtrack came along he was offered a "voluntary redundancy", don't think there was anything voluntary about it
Don’t worry about all the crashes, failures and delays, as long as the shareholders can asset strip it and get a cut then all is well. What a shitshow, from the country that invented the railway. Well done. Selfish greedy bastards.
What a right royal cock up. Some things are too important to be left to the whims of the private sector. P.S. People tend to think stuff like British Rail was government owned. It was actually public property. It was owned collectively by every UK citizen and its upkeep was one of the things we expected in return for paying our taxes, i.e., we were not getting something for nothing. When they flogged it off the government did not pay every citizen out, i.e., the actual owners were not compensated. It was a robbery on a massive scale. Much the same goes for all the other privatizations. For the most part it was not the government's property to sell. It was ours.
Absolutely right. Successive governments, mainly the tory governments since thatcher but Labour also sold one or two organisations, have “sold the family silver” as my dad used to say. Trickle down wealth was promised from all this. Yet the U.K is now so poor.
You know that basically all of the EU has privately-operated infrastructure upkeep, right? The problem with Railtrack wasn't the fact they were a private company - it's the fact they were for-profit and had to answer to shareholders.
"The cost to the taxpayer of keeping British Rail afloat was one of the biggest deficits to the state". This is misleading and inaccurate. BR didn't need to be kept "afloat" like a failing company; it was a provider of a basic transport service, much like the Highways Authority. In no country in the world is the rail service 100% free of charge to taxpayers. Back in 1980, taxpayer subsidies to BR were £590m, representing 29% of income. This was lower than in other large European countries. £590m in 1980 would be around £2bn nowadays, still less than the £11bn spent on maintaining the road network and the £180bn for the NHS. It is also far less that the cost of the privatised railway at around £12bn.
This is exactly the problem America is still having with Amtrak, half a decade after it's formation. Amtrak has never been given what it needs to be successful and is then derided as a failure in an attempt to further defund it.
Railways start from the trackbed up. If the track infrastructure isn't fit for purpose, neither is it fit to run trains on. Visual inspection and routine maintenance cannot be missed or overlooked, for fear of disastrous consequences if anything should fail in service. No room for sloppiness, or cavalier complacency. Lessons to be taken seriously as can be seen from the wrecks of previous occasions.
What makes it worse they knew about many of the track faults and chose to ignore them , wouldn't even put speed restrictions on for fear of cost from train operators
Excellent video. The Railtrack years were indeed the railways' darkest period. As an employee throughout that time, the only thing that kept me going was my deep seated conviction that such a state of affairs couldn't possibly last.
Heard some say this might've been the beginning of the long road to reversing privatisation, which I can definitely see in retrospect. Its hard for me in my opinion to see that while Network Rail has done a much better job overall than Railtrack ever did, the publicly owned company essentially exists to maintain the network so that private companies can essentially profit off what they do. From that perspective alone I think nationalisation of services makes a lot of sense. Hopefully we are going to finally turn a page with our railways in the next few years.
Start with the "Utilities", the eye watering amounts of profit would benefit every citizen in the country. No private shareholders to satisfy so profits can be spent on service improvements, lower charges or reduction of individual taxes. All these "Publicly owned assets" were losing money, but as soon as they were privatised became extreemly profitable. Guess Government actually chose to employ incompetants, where as private corporations insist on people who know what they are doing.
An interesting video, not just for train enthusiasts but but for anyone interested in the history of UK travel and general UK history. As I don't use the railways myself I'm nevertheless glad to hear that things have improved, but dismayed and not altogether surprisied to hear that good old taxpayer foots the bill for failed private companies once again. The latest fiasco involving the water companies is yet another example of shareholders benefiting from poorly run entities while under investment leads to public and environmental harm. The fines being imposed in lieu of this are a sham in my view becasue the customers will ultimately pay the penalties through increased bills, meanwhile shareholders and bosses walk away with our, sorry, their cash!
02:47 that locomotive was the original design that Yugoslavian Railways manufactured under licence in the 1950s onwards, some still in use in Serbia and further afield. That orange livery is iconic!
Worst thing that ever happened was privatising the rail network. All because various governments didn't want to fix the railway network. used to go around the Hatfield bend alot.
In 19 Minutes of fabulous video, I can see a minimum of 28 places where the track would not be acceptable here in Switzerland. Everything from run down rails to bouncing sleepers and worn out points.
Bloody hell. And here we are again in 2024 at SNCF going in the same direction… If only our French (and European) politicians would learn the lesson. Long live Network Rail and Great British Railways, and God help SNCF 😢
A national rail infrastructure (land, track, stations, and train control) network is a strategic, national land transport infrastructure asset like a national road/highway network is and can not be operated on a 'for profit' basis.
Yes, it should be seen as a public service and funded as such but that all changed back in the 60's, if I'm correct. Railways in the UK were never properly funded by governments and the road lobby, road haulage companies and other players have had a big part in this. Road building costs over the decades were being funded by government and this contrasts heavily with the way the UK railway system had to accept a poorer position, funding being reduced year-on-year. What we have now is not a public rail system, its a shareholder's dream......
Hey, at least yall have a passenger train service. Despite living in the "richest" country on the planet I have never been on a train outside a amusement park. Im in my 20s and only saw my first passenger train in 2020. I was super surprised. It was dark out so the lights were on inside and barely anyone was using it. I dont even know where you would go to get on a train in my area. Apparently there is one. It seems rather pointless because I would need a car to get to it, then I would need a car after it took me where ever I needed to be. Some friends and I thought about taking a train to NYC once but quickly dropped that idea when we saw the costs. It was significantly more expensive than a airplane despite being slower. Days slower. I envy yall over there. I like driving but options would be neat.
Ruairidh, I'd love to see you create a documentary on the controversial London Tilbury Southend 'misery line.' How could a route so simple be one of the most awful?
Some lovely footage of Ashford at the end there and the cheeky train ferry footage! They had to come off the train side by side so they didn't unsettle the ferry
This process of separating the operation called 'railway', has a really bad taste to it. The title alone smells of imminent failure and chaos. Why did Britain never ever look for ideas in the two countries that have trains that actually work: Japan and Switzerland. You can smoke everything else.
Thank you. We experience the same in my country (The Netherlands). Thus far luckily without major accidents. Yet the total quality of rail transport has gone down quite a lot. It is a clear example of a EU decision which was and is wrong. Rail infrastructure has to be in the hands of the government. It is almost impossible to run this as a profitable commercial business. But people with knowledge about any business are hard if not impossible to find in Brussels. Yet we still allow them to govern many parts of our lives.
Bring British Railway, instead of private companies running our trains, I sure before private companies running our trains, the trains were running nicely without any problems
If the brits where to be succesfull with this then they should have kept the tracks as the ownership the state. Then operators could bid for certain areas...
If the company was in administration, which is the same thing as bankruptcy, how was there any value at all to the equity? And any debt should've been paid off at a sharp discount. I would expect a Third World country to have done a better job of managing their rail system
Thatcher's Tenure set a Precedent for Mismanagement and indifference to Safety requirements. All that mattered was Dividends to be paid to shareholders...
True. And this didn't just apply to railways. Take the Zebrugge ferry disaster, and Townsend Thoresen's sloppy approach to safety, and general culture of complacency. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister at that time; but didn't see that it was her or her government's responsibility to insist on improvements to safety...but those of the ferry industry itself. Later, she and her (then) government were forced to act, and implement new safety procedures; but only after public outrage. Initially she simply wasn't bothered. That tells you everything.
Hi, I love your videos but quite a lot seem to suffer from the audio being clipped. Some parts of your commentary has very brief parts missing from it . Some sadly become unwatchable Cheers Russ
The government can be a major investor in a non profit. Or industry operators who bennefit from the bennefit from the work it does, usually being an independent facilitator. And it needs commercial financing to invest into the infrastructure it can then rent out to train operators. Pretty standard stuff..
@rogerk6180 Seem to have some loose usage of terminology here. Generally in economics and business investing implies inputting assets/money in a venture thru "direct ownership" (stock) with intention to recieve returns/dividends/profits or investing in "indirect ownership" (such as bonding) also implies returns in such as interest/profits. Both come with some degree of ownership control of the operation. Since by usual definition of a "non-profit" it cannot benefit any of its members/components by distributing its excess revenue above such as simple wages or purchase of goods and services but must put the extra revenues back into its own infrastructure therefore a non-profit in usually accepted economic terminology cannot have investors--only such as subsidies, donations, or gifts with NO "strings attached". The exception here would be a simple loan with perhaps some interest (to cover such as transfer/handling costs) involved in the repayment but no ownership or control involved.
So now that Brexit has taken GB out from under the thumb of Brussels, they can combine track and trains back into one smoothly, efficiently running company..?
Always made me laugh when the unions blamed privatisation for causing Hatfield, Potters Bar and Ladbroke Grove accidents whilst forgetting Clapham Junction and all the other accidents under a nationalised BR.
Clapham Junction crash brought about the Hidden report governing working hours / days , BR learned from their mistake's , then along came rail track ignoring all lessons learned just for profit . Union's were totally correct to blame rail track , the company was a disorganized shambles driven by profit and ignoring safety . I know first hand as worked through the Rail track times on the railway , inept privatization still erodes safety on our railways
@@squeaksvids5886 Since we re-nationalized the network (rail track ) . I personally know of 2,000 ton coal train with no brakes ! luckily it got signal against it then derailed on trap points . Reason for this they can now run 24 hours without brake continuity test even though loco is uncoupled many times . Continuity test was religiously done whenever recoupled in BR days, incase mistake's had be made , this train ran through one station were passenger could have been standing . If not been checked at signal and derailed it would have entered busy passenger route . Yes it was caused by a simple mistake then stood over night (air leaked off ) but mistake would have be caught in BR days by a simple test (but it requires more ground staff ) So yes safety has been eroded to save costs but we have been lucky
@@squeaksvids5886 Network Rail have changed the culture by investing huge amounts to avoid the very situation that Railtrack ignored, that's a good reason as to why the system is so much safer now. The shareholder and stock market culture of Railtrack was, thankfully, wiped away to put safety and maintenance/renewal ahead of the previous profits margins focus. And yes, there were incidents when BR existed but you're not comparing like with like. Railtrack was set up as a company focused on financial gain, this video shows that, so much so that the engineering expertise needed to keep railways safe didn't exist within the actual company, it put its trust in contractors and sub-contractors, many of whom had no proper railway engineering experience. That's also why the unions were right when shouting about the privatisation. Railtrack was obscene but so was the government that valued the rail system so low when they sold it off to greedy, selfish shareholders, many of whom cared only for their shares and not the safety of the railway. What we have now is safer exactly because the engineering expertise has been out before the private profit motives of Railtrack.
Privatizing government owned assests doesnt work but contracting workers to a hit targets or face dismissal works generaly saves money and stops strikes imagine if every western countries still owned their airlines train services and other industries making money for government
Capitalist crap. I was a big user of BR and it was fine. No country has a perfect railway system. It was all part of the tory plan to mess up anything connected to Socialism, making things like BR look bad by underfunding them as they have done with the NHS also. BR's modernisation plan was not a failure as far as I could see. You talk a lot of biased and inflexible journalistic baloney at times. Everywhere privatisation is a ghastly mess. We now have no real rail industry like we have no car industry mainly due to lousy governments and inept management. Nationalised or privatised, if the people running the industries are incompetant idiots then it will constantly fail proving competition is divisive and confused and nowhere near as productive as collaboration/cooperation.
Far more cash (Tax payers ) goes into the privatized railway (adjusted for inflation ) makes you wonder what BR would be like now with the same investment as TOCs get now
I'm retired at 27, went from Grass to Grace. This video here reminds me of my transformation from a nobody to good home, honest wife, $35k biweekly and a good daughter full of ❤️ I’m forever grateful Rose M Elaine
1:43 This British Rail InterCity 125 High Speed Diesel Electric Express Passenger Train Is A Bit Like The Japanese Bullet Train In Japan. Thanks Mate. XXxxx ❤😂😅😂😅😂😅😂😅😂😅😂🚅🇬🇧🇯🇪🇦🇺🇨🇳🇺🇲
It wasnt Beeching, he was a Scapegoat it was Marples the transport minister who had vested interest in transport companies.
It's true. Beeching only wanted to mothball the railways after closing them down, keeping the tracks in place so that they could be brought back into service if seen as profitable again (like we're seeing with so many railway lines now).
It was Marples' idea to tear them all up and pave over them with new roads.
A transport minister who just so happens to be the chairman of a road construction company? Absolutely no conflict of interest there!
@@presfieldgoalie very true.
What a set of plonkers.
Now it is regrettable but was plainly ill thought out and short sighted from the outset what took place back then.
My late grandfather knew Marples in his youth, both coming from Manchester.
In conversations he told me that Marples was always " rotten to the core." even at an early age.
@@BegudMaximan-zp2tcIt wasn't ill thought out, or short-sighted. It was part of the globalist plot to destroy the world.
I agree. Beeching is and was always used to call the operation the Beeching Act. But other dark forces actually did it, not Mr. Beeching. Mostly Marples.
People should have gone to prison over Hatfield, Potters Bar etc. Life is cheap in the UK.
Yes, I agree completely.
The world's gone woke. Why don't you just send every minor criminal to prison
Great Heck too but he got a slap on the wrist
@tangiers365: ‘woke’ 😂
“Corporate manslaughter” is probably the least exercised criminal offense ever.
A wealthy landowner in Cornwall had a sub contracting company who took on people with a couple of days “training” and sent them off for a 8-10 hour van trip, which they slept in, to work on the potentially lethal 3rd rail system on the southern region. I wonder how much this was happening elsewhere.
I was on the the recieving end of that sort of thing literally hundreds of times! We would travel from Cornwall up to places like Salisbury, Wimbledon, Bristol, Twikenham to name just a few for a Saturday night shift and drive home after 12 hours on site., get home dinner time on Sunday. You were only ever paid for the time on site so it worked out about £3 PH if you factored in the time you were away from home! Im talking late 90's here. It was a nitemare, looking back I wonder how I stuck it but we did as we were desperate for the money. The Salisbury job was 2 , 12 hour days shifts, we actually slept in a hay barn on the Saturday night to save money on B&B. Often pitched up tents in fields back in those days, lived like tramps. The agency I worked for would threaten you with no work mid-week if you wanted a weekend off too. It was tough!!
You only have to read the published reports of official rail accident inquiries to know that it was rife - and still happens far too often, even now.
Don't think my Dad ever forgave Railtrack, he'd been with BR for decades, rising from a train guard up to a network controller. Once Railtrack came along he was offered a "voluntary redundancy", don't think there was anything voluntary about it
A yoeman's work as always, sir. These rework videos are great - brings a lovely shine to stuff that some of us didn't see from early on. Love it!
Don’t worry about all the crashes, failures and delays, as long as the shareholders can asset strip it and get a cut then all is well. What a shitshow, from the country that invented the railway. Well done. Selfish greedy bastards.
I don't think Railtrack EVER had anything other than bad publicity.
What a right royal cock up. Some things are too important to be left to the whims of the private sector.
P.S. People tend to think stuff like British Rail was government owned. It was actually public property. It was owned collectively by every UK citizen and its upkeep was one of the things we expected in return for paying our taxes, i.e., we were not getting something for nothing. When they flogged it off the government did not pay every citizen out, i.e., the actual owners were not compensated. It was a robbery on a massive scale. Much the same goes for all the other privatizations. For the most part it was not the government's property to sell. It was ours.
100%
Never trust a Tory. Especially when they offer to hold your wallet and wrist watch for you
Too many are easily fooled, take brexit as a prime example.
Absolutely right. Successive governments, mainly the tory governments since thatcher but Labour also sold one or two organisations, have “sold the family silver” as my dad used to say. Trickle down wealth was promised from all this. Yet the U.K is now so poor.
You know that basically all of the EU has privately-operated infrastructure upkeep, right? The problem with Railtrack wasn't the fact they were a private company - it's the fact they were for-profit and had to answer to shareholders.
"The cost to the taxpayer of keeping British Rail afloat was one of the biggest deficits to the state". This is misleading and inaccurate. BR didn't need to be kept "afloat" like a failing company; it was a provider of a basic transport service, much like the Highways Authority. In no country in the world is the rail service 100% free of charge to taxpayers. Back in 1980, taxpayer subsidies to BR were £590m, representing 29% of income. This was lower than in other large European countries. £590m in 1980 would be around £2bn nowadays, still less than the £11bn spent on maintaining the road network and the £180bn for the NHS. It is also far less that the cost of the privatised railway at around £12bn.
This is exactly the problem America is still having with Amtrak, half a decade after it's formation. Amtrak has never been given what it needs to be successful and is then derided as a failure in an attempt to further defund it.
Well done, Ruairidh, a good and well-deserved hatchet-job!
Railways start from the trackbed up.
If the track infrastructure isn't fit for purpose, neither is it fit to run trains on.
Visual inspection and routine maintenance cannot be missed or overlooked, for fear of disastrous consequences if anything should fail in service.
No room for sloppiness, or cavalier complacency.
Lessons to be taken seriously as can be seen from the wrecks of previous occasions.
There is no room for privatisation and greedy shareholders.
What makes it worse they knew about many of the track faults and chose to ignore them , wouldn't even put speed restrictions on for fear of cost from train operators
Currently live in Hatfield myself. I always take the time to pay my respects at the memorial on Great North Road
Excellent video. The Railtrack years were indeed the railways' darkest period. As an employee throughout that time, the only thing that kept me going was my deep seated conviction that such a state of affairs couldn't possibly last.
Heard some say this might've been the beginning of the long road to reversing privatisation, which I can definitely see in retrospect. Its hard for me in my opinion to see that while Network Rail has done a much better job overall than Railtrack ever did, the publicly owned company essentially exists to maintain the network so that private companies can essentially profit off what they do. From that perspective alone I think nationalisation of services makes a lot of sense. Hopefully we are going to finally turn a page with our railways in the next few years.
Start with the "Utilities", the eye watering amounts of profit would benefit every citizen in the country. No private shareholders to satisfy so profits can be spent on service improvements, lower charges or reduction of individual taxes. All these "Publicly owned assets" were losing money, but as soon as they were privatised became extreemly profitable. Guess Government actually chose to employ incompetants, where as private corporations insist on people who know what they are doing.
Exactly mate, they may have spent millions on upgrades but how much of it went to the network compared to the subcontractors pockets ?
The APT turned out quite well i think. If it rains at Crewe heritage center it is handy to keep you dry. 😀
Who could forget the sick feeling in the pit of the gut watching Ken Loach's The Navigators.
An interesting video, not just for train enthusiasts but but for anyone interested in the history of UK travel and general UK history. As I don't use the railways myself I'm nevertheless glad to hear that things have improved, but dismayed and not altogether surprisied to hear that good old taxpayer foots the bill for failed private companies once again. The latest fiasco involving the water companies is yet another example of shareholders benefiting from poorly run entities while under investment leads to public and environmental harm. The fines being imposed in lieu of this are a sham in my view becasue the customers will ultimately pay the penalties through increased bills, meanwhile shareholders and bosses walk away with our, sorry, their cash!
02:47 that locomotive was the original design that Yugoslavian Railways manufactured under licence in the 1950s onwards, some still in use in Serbia and further afield. That orange livery is iconic!
Worst thing that ever happened was privatising the rail network. All because various governments didn't want to fix the railway network. used to go around the Hatfield bend alot.
The Uk railway network has perhaps one of the most fascinating and ups to downs history in the entire world ❤🚄
There was a period of time during the nineties when there seemed to be a rail accident every few weeks. Horrible.
Incredible they were even allowed to oversee the network with all the things mentioned😢
In 19 Minutes of fabulous video, I can see a minimum of 28 places where the track would not be acceptable here in Switzerland. Everything from run down rails to bouncing sleepers and worn out points.
These issues must have been remedied as a quick Google search says the UK has one of the safest railway networks in Europe.
Bloody hell. And here we are again in 2024 at SNCF going in the same direction… If only our French (and European) politicians would learn the lesson.
Long live Network Rail and Great British Railways, and God help SNCF 😢
as usual,the Govt decision makers walk away from any responsibility
A national rail infrastructure (land, track, stations, and train control) network is a strategic, national land transport infrastructure asset like a national road/highway network is and can not be operated on a 'for profit' basis.
Yes, it should be seen as a public service and funded as such but that all changed back in the 60's, if I'm correct. Railways in the UK were never properly funded by governments and the road lobby, road haulage companies and other players have had a big part in this. Road building costs over the decades were being funded by government and this contrasts heavily with the way the UK railway system had to accept a poorer position, funding being reduced year-on-year. What we have now is not a public rail system, its a shareholder's dream......
I want my taxes and my train fare to go towards Infrastructure, not share-holder margin.
Yep see south eastern. Utter slags.
When dividends take priority over safety.
Hey, at least yall have a passenger train service.
Despite living in the "richest" country on the planet I have never been on a train outside a amusement park.
Im in my 20s and only saw my first passenger train in 2020. I was super surprised. It was dark out so the lights were on inside and barely anyone was using it.
I dont even know where you would go to get on a train in my area. Apparently there is one. It seems rather pointless because I would need a car to get to it, then I would need a car after it took me where ever I needed to be.
Some friends and I thought about taking a train to NYC once but quickly dropped that idea when we saw the costs. It was significantly more expensive than a airplane despite being slower. Days slower.
I envy yall over there. I like driving but options would be neat.
Whoa! Are you saying things get so much worse once they are privatized?! Well I never would have guessed
Very good , Railtrack was a disgusting situation , terminal for some unfortunate ones ! [ god rest in peace ]
Ruairidh, I'd love to see you create a documentary on the controversial London Tilbury Southend 'misery line.' How could a route so simple be one of the most awful?
I love how you’re doing remasters of your older videos
We had / have the same nonsense in Denmark except for the accidents.
A video on my birthday? Well, now you're flattering me😅 Thanks, Rory!
The beaching axe & privatisation killed rail travel in the U.K. it has never recovered since
Something about the way the narrator pronounces certain words & numbers 😂 I like it
0:31 Absolutely gorgeous viaduct
@ 1:11 is that train running on Jacobs Bogies? Looks like the coach layout would suopport that sensible decision?
any body willing to bet the directors and major shareholders came out of this imbroglio
just fine, and richer than when they got into Railtrack?
Capitalism working as intended
Some lovely footage of Ashford at the end there and the cheeky train ferry footage! They had to come off the train side by side so they didn't unsettle the ferry
This process of separating the operation called 'railway', has a really bad taste to it. The title alone smells of imminent failure and chaos. Why did Britain never ever look for ideas in the two countries that have trains that actually work: Japan and Switzerland. You can smoke everything else.
Awesome video as always 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Imagine how different our railways would be if British Rail still existed... hopefully I can change that one day.
Should have never privatised British rail and sttill shouldn't have to this day
See Germany if you want to know what happens if you continue your lack of investment.
Every time I see Balfour Beatty now on the side of a van I cringe at it. Fascinating how incredibly poorly the railways were handled.
Thank you. We experience the same in my country (The Netherlands). Thus far luckily without major accidents. Yet the total quality of rail transport has gone down quite a lot. It is a clear example of a EU decision which was and is wrong. Rail infrastructure has to be in the hands of the government. It is almost impossible to run this as a profitable commercial business. But people with knowledge about any business are hard if not impossible to find in Brussels. Yet we still allow them to govern many parts of our lives.
Bring British Railway, instead of private companies running our trains, I sure before private companies running our trains, the trains were running nicely without any problems
You have a very different and rose tinted memory of BR than most people. Still, it’s not working now either so who knows what the answer is?
If the brits where to be succesfull with this then they should have kept the tracks as the ownership the state.
Then operators could bid for certain areas...
If the company was in administration, which is the same thing as bankruptcy, how was there any value at all to the equity? And any debt should've been paid off at a sharp discount. I would expect a Third World country to have done a better job of managing their rail system
Well, yes, a third-world country would, but the UK is a sixth-world country now.
Hold on...what time is it? [check tablet] No, it's eighth-world.
Thatcher's Tenure set a Precedent for Mismanagement and indifference to Safety requirements.
All that mattered was Dividends to be paid to shareholders...
True. And this didn't just apply to railways. Take the Zebrugge ferry disaster, and Townsend Thoresen's sloppy approach to safety, and general culture of complacency.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister at that time; but didn't see that it was her or her government's responsibility to insist on improvements to safety...but those of the ferry industry itself.
Later, she and her (then) government were forced to act, and implement new safety procedures; but only after public outrage. Initially she simply wasn't bothered. That tells you everything.
Hi, I love your videos but quite a lot seem to suffer from the audio being clipped. Some parts of your commentary has very brief parts missing from it . Some sadly become unwatchable
Cheers Russ
how can a non-profit have investors? and why would Network rail get comercial financing!? this is so baffling
The government can be a major investor in a non profit. Or industry operators who bennefit from the bennefit from the work it does, usually being an independent facilitator.
And it needs commercial financing to invest into the infrastructure it can then rent out to train operators.
Pretty standard stuff..
@rogerk6180 Seem to have some loose usage of terminology here. Generally in economics and business investing implies inputting assets/money in a venture thru "direct ownership" (stock) with intention to recieve returns/dividends/profits or investing in "indirect ownership" (such as bonding) also implies returns in such as interest/profits. Both come with some degree of ownership control of the operation.
Since by usual definition of a "non-profit" it cannot benefit any of its members/components by distributing its excess revenue above such as simple wages or purchase of goods and services but must put the extra revenues back into its own infrastructure therefore a non-profit in usually accepted economic terminology cannot have investors--only such as subsidies, donations, or gifts with NO "strings attached". The exception here would be a simple loan with perhaps some interest (to cover such as transfer/handling costs) involved in the repayment but no ownership or control involved.
So now that Brexit has taken GB out from under the thumb of Brussels, they can combine track and trains back into one smoothly, efficiently running company..?
Correct. This was the key reason ASLEF and RMT were urging members to vote leave in the EU ref.
The great Buddliea and infrastructure neglect campaign
RIP the ppl that lost their lives.
What an utter shit show.
Looking forward to your video on Royal Mail and its ongoing demise
So the problem with the UK rail network is that NO BODY KNOWS WHAT TO DO WITH IT
My so complex thanks
Always made me laugh when the unions blamed privatisation for causing Hatfield, Potters Bar and Ladbroke Grove accidents whilst forgetting Clapham Junction and all the other accidents under a nationalised BR.
Accidents happen, but Hatfield & Potters Bar were a direct result of poor maintenance, caused by private companies putting profit before safety.
Clapham Junction crash brought about the Hidden report governing working hours / days , BR learned from their mistake's , then along came rail track ignoring all lessons learned just for profit . Union's were totally correct to blame rail track , the company was a disorganized shambles driven by profit and ignoring safety . I know first hand as worked through the Rail track times on the railway , inept privatization still erodes safety on our railways
@@nounoufriend1442 Yet our railways have been for a decade or more been the safest in Europe!
@@squeaksvids5886 Since we re-nationalized the network (rail track ) . I personally know of 2,000 ton coal train with no brakes ! luckily it got signal against it then derailed on trap points . Reason for this they can now run 24 hours without brake continuity test even though loco is uncoupled many times . Continuity test was religiously done whenever recoupled in BR days, incase mistake's had be made , this train ran through one station were passenger could have been standing . If not been checked at signal and derailed it would have entered busy passenger route . Yes it was caused by a simple mistake then stood over night (air leaked off ) but mistake would have be caught in BR days by a simple test (but it requires more ground staff )
So yes safety has been eroded to save costs but we have been lucky
@@squeaksvids5886 Network Rail have changed the culture by investing huge amounts to avoid the very situation that Railtrack ignored, that's a good reason as to why the system is so much safer now. The shareholder and stock market culture of Railtrack was, thankfully, wiped away to put safety and maintenance/renewal ahead of the previous profits margins focus. And yes, there were incidents when BR existed but you're not comparing like with like. Railtrack was set up as a company focused on financial gain, this video shows that, so much so that the engineering expertise needed to keep railways safe didn't exist within the actual company, it put its trust in contractors and sub-contractors, many of whom had no proper railway engineering experience. That's also why the unions were right when shouting about the privatisation. Railtrack was obscene but so was the government that valued the rail system so low when they sold it off to greedy, selfish shareholders, many of whom cared only for their shares and not the safety of the railway. What we have now is safer exactly because the engineering expertise has been out before the private profit motives of Railtrack.
What an absolute mess... Railtrack not your video of course 😂
Rail privatisation has worked so well, much like electricity and water. Those responsible for these debacles should be held to account.
Privatizing government owned assests doesnt work but contracting workers to a hit targets or face dismissal works generaly saves money and stops strikes imagine if every western countries still owned their airlines train services and other industries making money for government
Hopefully the lives lost wearent for nothing , that we have globaly learned from it....
The emphasis on drawing out the end of words, and saying dates in American formats make this insufferable
Trackage honestly.
RailtracKKK
The privatisation came with obligatory disasters, thanks Tories!
Capitalist crap. I was a big user of BR and it was fine. No country has a perfect railway system. It was all part of the tory plan to mess up anything connected to Socialism, making things like BR look bad by underfunding them as they have done with the NHS also. BR's modernisation plan was not a failure as far as I could see. You talk a lot of biased and inflexible journalistic baloney at times. Everywhere privatisation is a ghastly mess. We now have no real rail industry like we have no car industry mainly due to lousy governments and inept management. Nationalised or privatised, if the people running the industries are incompetant idiots then it will constantly fail proving competition is divisive and confused and nowhere near as productive as collaboration/cooperation.
Agreed!
Far more cash (Tax payers ) goes into the privatized railway (adjusted for inflation ) makes you wonder what BR would be like now with the same investment as TOCs get now
Incompetence or sabotage?
By ‘reworked’ you seem to mean ‘renarrated, only now I sound like an absolute tw@.’
It's a tough listen, isn't it! I'm baffled as to why he's chosen to go down this path.
I'm retired at 27, went from Grass to Grace. This video here reminds me of my transformation from a nobody to good home, honest wife, $35k biweekly and a good daughter full of ❤️ I’m forever grateful Rose M Elaine
How can someone get connection to that Woman y'all speaking bout !!!?......
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There is her line!!! under this comment!!! «
Put the digits together.
2 seconds in. Can't watch with that AI voice! Get a proper narrator!
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