Something the big-four understood, that the British Government didn't, was that those small money losing lines were feeders for the large express lines, which did make money. Those small lines were a reason to not get into a car, and thus remain a captive audience for the railway. These days, I get into a car to drive 20miles to the mainline station, and then ask myself, why use a train for the remainder of my journey? - the only time I see that as a positive, is when I go to London and can abandon the car at an out of town tube station, and use the tube from there (less stress all around).
Plus from the view of society they serve a vital role in giving children, young people, the elderly and anyone else who can't drive mobility freedom if they live in a small community.
@@hedgehog3180 They also give those who *can* drive additional freedom of choice. Which in turn frees up road capacity for those who *must* drive (or refuse not to.)
How to disimprove a branch line (or, indeed a bus service): cut back on trains at times when people need to use them (morning and evening peaks), and then measure passenger numbers at the quietest possible time of day.... no demand for *this* line, let's close it!
That was Beeching's idea that people would drive from their home in a village to a junction station where a branch line joined the mainline. But once in their cars people didn't want to get out of them and so they drove all the way to work and home again. It was great when there wasn't the volume of traffic on the roads that there is today for it worked a treat. But now it's grid lock traffic everyday because people have become so used to driving from A to B that they don't want to change back and rail fares are not the cheap alternate they once were in peak traffic periods.
"We should abandon the idea that railways have to make a profit." ABSOLUTELY! Why railways are held to a standard that roads don't have to is baffling. Roads don't make a profit, save for a miniscule number of toll roads, in fact they cost MASSIVE amounts of money each year.
I agree with this. The railway is a means of getting a massive amount of cars and lorries off the road each year. The rail freight industry cannot compete cost for cost with road haulage which is absurd. Look at royal mail taking all their 300+ wagons out of service to use road instead this october. It is all going the wrong way. Why can I travel france right across for like 20 Euro for the whole day yet here I would be lucky to get 5 stations up the line for double that. They do not want us using rail in this country at all.
@@mightynosebleed7476because you obviously don't understand that France is in the Process of complying with the Final process of destroying the national state railway, the eu fourth railway package, and has already tendered a couple of routes to the private sector, with many more tenders at the bidding stage. France has some of the highest track access charges in europe (a charge invented by Brussles in their eec directive 440/1991 back in 1991, and applicable to all eu railways, france has very high charges). It also has some of the highest railway debts in europe. All our trains could be free to use, just like the NHS is. If that's how you want it to be. But being free at the point of use, or cheap, does not mean that the industry itself is cheap to operate. And it is a fact, that the eu railway packages have made the railways way more expensive to the taxpayers, and transfered lots of taxpayers money to private companies profits via subsidy. Look at Germany, and the recent news articles about how poor its railways were during euro 2024... Germany is very close to being fully compliant with the eu fourth railway package. And all the damage it has done. Fortunately, brexit returned the democratic, legal and political ability to us, to reintegrate and renationalise our railway. So even if fares aren't going to be cheaper, the system as a whole will be, and will therefore be cheaper to the taxpayer and country overall.
@@onodera3964 We should think less about idealistic safety targets, and think more of the opportunities for the private heath sector! [tongue-in-cheek mode]
A few years after privatisation, I was working in a legal office, and I saw a Crown Court indictment for the theft of a Midland Mainline sandwich between Kettering and Leicester. My first thought was that theft of a British Rail sandwich might have led to a plea of insanity.
I am a Canadian from Vancouver, British Columbia. I visited the UK a couple of times in the 1980's. I quickly learned that a British Rail Traveller's Fare sandwich was pretty dire & understood why my English friends slagged BR catering!
We often do not do things because they were”not invented here”. I found this very much during my professional career in the industry. That’s one of the reasons that we still struggle with leaves , rain,, snow and every other excuse to use bustitution.
'Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.' - Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes Minister.
"It is clear that Cabinet Committee is agreed that the new policy is an excellent plan, in principle, but in view of the doubts being expressed, it was decided to record that, after careful consideration, the considered view of the committee was that while they considered the proposal met with broad approval in principle, it was felt that some of the principles were sufficiently fundamental in principle, and some of the considerations so complex and finely balanced in practice that in principle it was proposed that the sensible and prudent practice would be to subject the proposal to more detailed consideration with and across the relevant departments with a view to preparing and proposing a more thorough and wide-ranging proposal, laying stress on the less controversial elements and giving consideration to the essential continuity of the new proposal with existing principles, to be presented for parliamentary consideration and public discussion on some more propitious occasion when the climate of opinion is deemed to be more amenable for consideration of the approach and the principle of the principal arguments which the proposal proposes and propounds for approval." And all in one sentence! Sir Humphrey once again.
I work in a national government department (not in GB). As I come to the end of my tenure, I understand the truth and the brilliance of this series, and recommend it to my new hire colleagues (at least the ones I feel are astute enough to pickup the numerous subtexts in each episode and the overarching storyline) as an introduction to working in a parliamentary government.
The railways have, as you rightly point out, always paid their way. They got people to work and this generated prosperity for all, not just The Chaps. Arguing otherwise is like saying "Damn it all, Tristram, I just can't get round the feeling that my circulatory system isn't, you know, pulling its weight."
In Slovakia, there were talks about selling the state-owned railway company and most people were saying: ''just look at how that went in Britain''. Pricing was the main issue. You can get pretty much anywhere in Slovakia by train, but Slovaks also love their cars (they make lots of them). Most families own 2 - 3 cars + you often get a company car for work. This created a huge problem with parking in Slovakia and the only way to keep people off the road is to keep train travel cheap. They did not increase the prices since 2012, train travel is free for kids under 6, free for students (6 - 26), elderly (62+) and disabled people, most trains are new, and very safe. You can go on a school trip to another city or you can go hiking in the mountains or explore a different town for the day with your friends and it won't cost you anything. I think that's great because it keeps young people entertained and out of ''trouble''. I don't want to get political, but I think British youth is getting wild (I live in the UK). You start coming up with stupid ideas when you are bored and stuck in your bubble, because traveling around your own country is too expensive. What I love about train travel in Slovakia is that prices are set and don't go up just because you are buying a last minute ticket, only IC and International trains need a bit of planning because of seat reservations, but they are still cheap. An InterCity train from Bratislava to Košice (2nd largest city) costs 19€ (27€ in First Class) for a 440km journey. I believe that affordable train travel is never a bad idea for the society. May I just add that the free train tickets cost 15 million euros per year, which is just under 3€ per person per year. For all the stupid things some governments spend the tax money on, this is actually a useful thing and it's definitely worth it.
we privatized some of the railways here in Estonia at about the same time as the UK did it, one of the companies is even named in a similar manner: southeastern railways. So as a result we're paying them out of the state budget to keep operating and they get to make money off it. Instead of just keeping it state-owned. There was another company, but they sold the tracks for scrap not long after. I'm not even sure why we're building Rail Baltica, because here we too have to make profit off railroads and moving goods on our railways costs 3x as much as it usually does in Europe and moving cargo on our roads is roughly 10% of that cost. edit: I mean, moving cargo on railroads has pretty much disappeared here
@@artem-hnko Slovakia is "tiny" with a tiny budget. UK is larger, with a lot more resources and money, this excuse it lame. Also, Slovakia is 80% mountainous and still managed to provide reliable, affordable service for everyone.
Very important video. The focus on hypothetical problems is holding us back from actually correcting the serious existing ones. We can’t keep holding ourselves back out of fear that fixing a horrendously broken system might lead to a new problem or two.
The UKs privately owned railways do not work well. If they don't work in public hands then nothing has been lost. Franchises are not being bought out, they are simply not being renewed.
@@TheRip72the problem is they arnt privatised at all, the government still owns all the track and tells them what to do, if it went back to proper privatisation like before there would be real competition and real risk so then some of the companies could actually understand the concept of running a business, what they need to do is get something running for cheap, people may hate the likes of pacers but the things that replaced them are not necessarily for the routes, even heritage railways can make a profit, if 100 year old technology is doing a better job is modern technology really better?
My grandfather was head accountant for British Railways under Dr. Beeching in the 1960s at Euston House in London his name was William Brown , and he told me that he told Beeching that a lot of the branch lines could have been saved. Unfortunately Beeching didn't agree with him and had to retire in 1970. He died in 1986.
we need a serious reverse Beeching, and it should have happened in the 90s/ 2000s, even 2010s was not too late as long as the money is used efficiently. Unless labour manages to complete a HS2 sized project in 3-5 years, then we I highly doubt there will be sinificant progress until 2040
I know we all blame 'Beeching's Axe' but it was the government that made the final decision, however there does seem to have been decisions made with minimal research and indecent haste!
'Ferries are better handled by outside companies.' - thems is trigger words! I live on the Isle of Wight. The ferries - which are a key piece of transport infrastructure, creating a bridge for railways and roads across the Solent - are monstrously expensive. They are used as a cash-cow by investment companies because ever since privatisation they have formed an unavoidable ransom strip for the people of the Isle of Wight. You would think, considering the eye-watering ticket prices, that they would at least link up with the timetables of the trains, but you would be so wrong. You might also imagine that they run at times of the day or night when trains are running. Again, wrong. National ferries are part of the national infrastructure and should be nationalised.
@@Croz89 Yes, there is theoretically an alternative. Is it realistic? No. To press the point home, A car plus a driver often costs over £180 for the 3 mile return trip and can potentially cost much more.
Well presented. I was a signaller at Kings Cross in the 90's. When Railtrack took over, the first thing it did was get rid of all the staff that maintained the track and signals. (All given to Jarvis, Balfour Beatty et al.) Having been on 18 years at that point, this action rang my alarm bells. Being a new broom, Railtrack asked for volunteers for redundancy and I jumped ship. Within ten years, I was proved right, with the disasters of Hatfield and Potters Bar. Both of these locations were on the 5 panel NX sytem of the time. As you said, BR was not perfect, however, the local Pway and S&T gangs knew their patch and actually looked after it. And finally, it has been good to see that the Double Arrow symbol has survived all of this. 🙂👍
If something is not profitable, but still crucial and needed, the public sector has to take responsibility for it anyway. Only very few and very central lines can be profitable if you consider all costs. Private sector just can't provide a nation with trains if profit is needed. The government taking over must mean that government is prepared to spend money to get good service. I hope ...
Who could have thought that the private sector would prefer roads, a piece of infrastructure wholly paid for by the government, over rails, a piece of infrastructure they had to maintain themselves.
As a passenger what I would value most is if a ticket from A to B is exactly just that. Not a ticket from A to B valid only via C at time D on train type E run by company F.
So is Swindon to Cheltenham valid via Bristol Temple Meads? What happens to the break of journey rights? LNER have done exactly what you have asked, at the cost of £400 London to Edinburgh standard class return.
You would love Switzerland, where it's possible to just buy a ticket for an express train from Zürich to Bern and take any of the trains on that corridor (like the half-hourly IC8; there's just some restrictions like via where it goes if that affects the cost) in the next 24 hours or so
In fairness, I believe that the ferries SHOULD be under the same umbrella (at least somewhat) as the rail network. They can effectively act as extensions of the rail system, after all. At the very least, things should be coordinated to a high degree.
Buses too. More importantly than ferries imo. The thing I dislike the most about public transport in the UK is the separate tickets for bus and rail. In other countries, a single is valid for 90 minutes - 2 hours in a particular area, regardless of mode as long as you don't go back on yourself and most people have a monthly ticket for their region. In Germany, it's €49/month for the whole country. Buses and trains have screens on board, showing which bus and train lines you can change to from which platforms at the next stop and bus platforms out front of the train station are numbered consistently with train platforms. Trains also have route numbers because it's easier for a passenger to remember. We already have this with our buses, e.g. we don't call the 38 bus line "the Arriva service to Hackney, calling at Millfields Road, Clapton Girls Academy, Hackney Baths, Clapton Square, Pembury Circus...etc." On some bus networks in the UK, a single is only valid on the first bus you get on, not an entire single journey and they don't even sell monthly tickets for all local and regional bus and rail modes so you can't go exploring at the weekend and just see where you end up. The destination has to be decided beforehand so you can't just change direction on a whim. They expect us to ration our use of public transport and this sadly makes the car more attractive.
Many of the problems with the current rail system are due to the way it was privatized; the structure prioritized making the sell-off difficult to reverse rather than providing a decent service. For another example of what happens when you privatize infrastructure, look at Thames Water; they're apparently unable to afford the necessary updates to their systems and may go bust in a few months, but they've still somehow managed to pay out 10s of millions in dividends etc.
I remember in the 1970s that every comedian had a BR joke in their armoury. 10 years after privatisation we realised how lucky we'd been. OK, sometimes the environment was a bit jaded & scruffy & the food was a good reason to take a packed lunch but it was cheap. & What we thought was unreliable service actually seemed pretty good compared to what followed. I travelled all over the country back in the late 70s / early 80s for gigs & football matches, almost always by train. & that was as a low paid teenager. No way would that be possible now. One time in Preston, after missing the last train to Brum, the bloke sweeping up let me sleep in the guards office & even provided me with tea bags, milk, a blanket & a kettle ! I had a nice kip & caught the first train in the morning. Imagine that now ! Different times indeed. How much of the disastrous mess they can actually put right & how long it will take is open to question but good god it's worth a try. Most abysmal privatisation of all time, closely followed by water.
On a serious note; the 1948 Nationalisation of the railways was vital to the very survival of our railways. They were worn out and dropping to bits after 6 years of hammering during WW2.
The railways were owed a huge amount of money by the government for the work done during the war. Nationalisation was a handy way for the government to dodge that. The Big Four railway companies would have been OK if they'd been paid properly.
@@andrewhotston983 I'm not disputing your comment, and it's quite possibly true, but can you provide sources of corroboration please? Given that it was wartime, and railway workers in the main were a protected occupation, I see no reason why coal would not have been 'on tap' to The Big Four given their logistic important.
I recall an interview with William Whitelaw (one of Thatcher’s ministers so hardly a union rabble rouser) who stated that his grandfather’s shares in one of the big four hadn’t returned a dividend in 25 years at point of nationalisation. They were nationalised because they were about to go bankrupt and leave the county without a rail network at all which would have caused massive economic harm to any developed nation, but to a war ravaged Britain desperately trying to rebuild itself it would have been catastrophic. Railways are one of those pieces of infrastructure that are necessary for the economic wellbeing of a nation but simply don’t return a profit and so cannot be left to the market to provide.
@@vinh7251Railways are NOT necessary for the economic wellbeing of a country. There are plenty of countries that have no railways, and there are plenty of places in the UK that have managed without a railway for the last sixty years.
As a regular traveller on the rail network (particularly in the South) I 100% agree with everything you said in this video. Nationalisation might bring risks, but we can't be frozen in inaction because of "what ifs" while our infrastructure continues to crumble for the sake of shareholder returns. Also a single national network could open up a lot of opportunities that would otherwise be much harder for several private companies to accomplish. For example, it would be easier to set up a universal payment system for the whole country (like TFL's tap in/tap out system), it could help establish infrastructure standardisation (which, hopefully, brings the end of third rail power once and for all), it could grant higher bargaining power for sourcing equipment/services (like rolling stock), etc.
We can’t afford to electrify diesel lines such as Chiltern, Oxford or the new East West Rail. There is no hope of converting the huge southern 3rd rail network to Overhead.
When faced with a service that has to be monopolistic (due to e.g. infrastructure limitations), it's pretty much always better to have a state monopoly than a private one: at least the state monopoly won't have, as it's primary reason for existing, siphoning off cash to shareholders.
@@stuinNorway The previous 14 yrs in the UK have been terrible primarily _because_ of said siphoning! It's literally the opposite of what you're saying.
@@caramelldansen2204 Except they've been terribly good at siphoning off state funds to their mates... which is the exact opposite of being the exact opposite of what he was saying.
I'm not sure if you can say that they've been siphoning off a lot of cash. In fact, profits have always been very marginal for TOCs. And they've also brought in a lot of investments that would have been hard for a government, where railways are the last priority, to achieve.
@@91Durktheturk But at the same time, with the infrastructe being nationalised (officially since 2011; de-facto since 2005) and operations being private, there's very little incentive to improve the infrastructure in ways that benefit operations (e.g. electrification). With both operations and infrastructure under "one roof" (whether public or private really, but privatisation of the infrastructure was an unmitigated failure) this is less of an issue.
The current "privatised" system consumes more public subsidy than British Rail cost (adjusted for inflation). That was the same even before the state took back control of the worst run services. It is also less punctual and less reliable when you look at the actual statistics. So despite the reputation BR had back in the day, it was a far better service than what we have now. It's biggest issue was underfunding, first due to post war austerity and towards the end because of that woman and her rabidly ideological hatred of public services.
Biggest issue was rail unions striking and forcing traffic onto the roads, and a disastrous 1955 Modernisation Plan that wasted millions on outdated steam trains and poorly designed and built diesels, in order to buy the votes of the workers in the rail industry.
@@andrewhotston983 Unions do not strike, if you treat the workers with respect and pay them decent amounts of money. The most recent strikes were intentionally caused by the post-Covid Conservative government announcing that thousands of jobs would be axed and railway maintenance would be postponed. In Scotland, the devolved government went against the Westminster parliament policies and strikes there ended. Essentially, people who work on the railway are people who want to work. They are public servants who want to make the railways safe and they want to make sure that passengers who get onto a train are alive at the other end of their journey. When the country has a Westminster Parliament that decides to run down services the workers in those services get unhappy and you get strikes.
‘Underfunding’ is always the problem of nationalised industries, they have to compete with all the other demands for taxpayers cash, like the NHS. The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.
I think your greatest points here are 1) the railways don't need to make a profit as they contribute to the economy, and 2) investing into a railway can make it more attractive.
The worst part of having public transport is politicians that insist that it should "pay for itself". That attitude results in bad service and cost cutting. Public transport is a SERVICE that is provided by the government. Yes, it would be lovely if it could be free to passengers but we all know that isn't going to happen. By the same token, politicians are living in a fantasyland if they think it will make a profit. Provide a good service, charge a reasonable fare and you will have a ton of knock-on effects that will improve life for everyone. Just live with the fact that it will never, EVER turn a profit and stop trying to pretend that it will. Suck it up and do what you're supposed to do: protect and support the citizens that are in your charge. Newsflash! That is going to COST money. If that makes your head hurt, then find something other to do than politics.
@@mikethebloodthirsty They don't seem to work very well as a public service, but as long as they get government subsidies, shareholders will get their dividends.
I like the idea of a standing organisation for infrastructure improvements. I’d hope this would be beyond just the railways. There are a lot of common skills, and any one form of improvement usually works better when planned together with others (e.g. planning the new towns together with roads, rail, water and power).
@@GreenJimll New Zealand used to have one... yeah, it got thrown out basically because 'on time, under budget, fully featured, pick two (at most)' almost universally resulted in things being over budget But it Did result in such fun things as a (no longer a) station built out of brick that stood up to a major earthquake with minimal damage. As is the usual pattern, it was deemed that hiring private contractors when needed would be cheaper... and it was... for a bit... until it turned out that the beurocracy needed to keep a lid on their shenanigans and nonsense ended up costing basically as much as the ministry had, and constant issues cropped up with equipment not existing, not existing in sufficient quantity, or currently being at the wrong end of the country because that's where the most recent job that needed it was... the Ministry solution to this was simply to have more equipment, or buy it in if they didn't. Most contractors don't have the budget to be doing that if they can possibly avoid it. Not if they're honest, anyway. And then there's the usual shenanigans with the 'lowest bid' deliberately being just enough to lock the project in, but not enough to actually finish it, forcing the government to pay more to get it done, where one of the mildly more expensive bids was only expensive because it had accounted for that sort of thing Properly...
I appreciate this insight into renationalisation. The biggest single smoking gun I can find for it is that it seems many private operators are in fact other countries nationalised operators. If they are the only ones who have the expertise to run the railway anyways, why not just run things ourselves, especially with subsidies needed in the current system just to keep certain services going.
Even worse is when other countries (Norway, I'm looking at you), decide to go the UK way and split up what was until recently a nationalised railway, and in the latest round of allocations of operator licences for the trains in our part of the country they awarded it to a company that has shown itself to be very good and running railway services extremely badly. Yep, they appoiinted "Go Ahead" the contract..... NOOOOO !!!!
But if you call those _subsidies_ *investment* and use them to move profit from the tourist supported services to local services that would benefit the rest of the population not in London or adjacent to the three mainline routes. Then it sounds more like a service for the country and the people, rather than a burden that we all must suffer. Because there is profit to be made, otherwise the private investment companies would not be grabbing slices of the pie to divvy up amongst their shareholders. It's only the regional services that struggle due to the lack of infrastructure modernisation and expansion. If Labour use nationalisation to expand and modernise public transport and not to fill the government purse, then it might be viable given decent management. Somehow I envision a period of conflict rather than construction. I hope I'm wrong.
I am a strong advocate in that we should not privatize essential services......rail, electricity, water and the like. When they are their costs become prohibitive due to a requirement to make ever increasing profits for shareholders.
I find it surprising that water would even be privatized. I just looked it up and 3/4 of Americans get water from fully public sources. I don’t think I’ve lived anywhere in the US where we didn’t get water from the county.
Yes the shocking (or not so) revelation is that many of the privatised utilities and infrastructure are now partly or fully own3d by the national utilities or transportation companies owned by other countries!!!! Hmmmmm, the short term gain dissolves into the ether and long term foreign nations profit from the UK. A certain political party should readjust its target ......
Watching this from Canada 🇨🇦 being from London back in a nationalised day. Very interesting, first video of yours that I have viewed. Not for profit is in the strategic national interest! Totally agree! Thank you!
So glad to hear this. As a regular visitor to the UK, I remember when you could take the train to the Cathedral City of Wells. The last time I visited Wells it took two busses and a train to get there. This is a lesson that we in the USA need to learn. Some things are just better for society when run as a service to the nation.
4 місяці тому+10
When I was a small boy, 70+ years ago, I remember boarding a train with my parents in the small village I grew up in at 0745 and arriving in Edinburgh Waverley at about 1030. Totally impossible to do now by any means of public transport. Dr. Beeching in his infinite wisdom closed these lines. There is a section rebuilt but not enough.
Even from where I live in north east Somerset, it takes two buses to get to Wells. The railways go round the edges of the county but nothing goes through the middle, across the Mendips and connecting Radstock, Midsomer Norton, Wells, Cheddar, Glastonbury, Street and Shepton Mallet with Bristol, Bath, Yeovil and Taunton.
“Stupid name sounds Victorian” as an outsider to the UK. I would think that would be good. Victorian England is so cool and it was probably the height of the empire.
Great video! I’m a Brit living in Australia 🇦🇺 where in Victoria there are private metro trains and State government regional trains which works well .
As a Scotsman, I will say that during the past year of commuting with public transport from one Scottish city to another, the “off-peak all day” scheme that emerged from nationalisation provided just enough incentive to justify getting the train over the bus. It went from being an extra £10 for a journey that was 30 mins shorter to just 4 or 5. I have high hopes for this.
In the U.S., there have been debates over whether Amtrak should be privatized or not. The pro-privatization side always cited the privatization of Britain's railways as a good example. The problem is that Amtrak's business model was always different from BR, mainly that Amtrak mostly runs on private track owned by the freight railroads (which were never nationalized for the most part).
The US should operate a two-tier railway nationalisation model: * For railways that run between states, Amtrak should be tasked to get as many Americans to switch from Interstate highways and domestic flights as possible. And they should be judged on modal-shift from road to rail and flights to rail. * Within individual states, there should be smaller commuter rail networks based around individual cities owned by the states themselves. Each state railway company should be tasked with reducing traffic on highways into it's cities. These state owned transport companies should also operate fleets of good quality buses and should be judged on modal-shift from car to public transport. You have cities in the US, with abandoned subway systems. With funding these could be put into operation and used to reduce car traffic. The people who continue to drive would then have less traffic to compete with, in the rush hour and the cost of maintaining roads would be reduced.
Half of Amtrak's problem is those very freight railways actively sabotaging it's operations by contriving to not meet their obligations regarding the state of the track and giving Amtrak trains priority so they're not constantly waiting on sidings.
@@DavidShepheard Among other issues, the fact that freight runs on the same rails limits expansion. In Seattle there is a public run passenger commuter rail, and everyone wants to see it run more often, but its expansion is limited to contention with freight traffic and increased cost since it's borrowed rails. The only place passenger rails are owned by the public passenger carrier is in the Northeast Corridor with the Acela -- which, surprise surprise, has been a smashing success and a serious outlier among Amtrak line cost effectiveness. But if you want to run new rails, you've got to buy often overpriced land, do EISes, and not to mention contend with neighborhood interest groups (NIMBYs) who don't want train noise encroaching on their suburban micro-manors. In fact, much of the length of the Acela that runs through populated parts of Rhode Island has to run at a conventional non-express speed to minimize noise levels for exactly this reason....
Since I learned the details of the scheme, I've always called it "BR's half-assed privatization". The government wanted to give the appearance of privatization while still retaining ultimate control of the whole system.
I am now retired but, in my career, I have commuted into London since 1971 and so have experienced rush hour train travel both before and after privatisation. For the most part, my experience of privatisation has been favourable, primarily because of the roll out of new rolling stock and the introduction of new routes such as Thameslink. Prior to privatisation, most of the rolling stock was older than me and very basic - no air conditioning or power sockets for laptops etc. Everybody likes to moan about Thameslink because it's often overcrowded, but that's because it's a route that people want to use. Prior to 1988, it didn't exist and anybody wishing to travel through London had to change stations and use the Underground. The main problems with privatisation are caused by the train operators, as you said in the video. A good example of that was that Thameslink did not operate a driver training programme, preferring instead to poach drivers from other operators with the result that trains were often cancelled because of "driver shortage". All entirely self inflicted. Keep up the good work.
"caused by the operators" but aren't the operators just playing the game as laid out by the government? If cost is tangible and the risk of reduced maintenance is intangible, and they are called to account every year on the tangible, then it's the game, not the player, that is to blame.
@@stevecarter8810 You are, of course, correct that the operators are just playing the game as set up by the government, so the government is equally culpable. However, I don't think it's valid to say that the risk of reduced maintenance is intangible. The Hatfield disaster being a case in point.
@@allangriffiths9555 maintenance, like safety, security, or a drummer in a band, share the property that while they are working fine they look like waste. Once they mess up you realise you should have invested more, but until that point you just have the feeling you're investing too much.
Allan, what you are describing I think is mainly the replacement of commuter stock dating mainly from the early 1950s to the mid 1960s with modern stock when those trains reached the end of their economic life. It so happened this was mainly post-privatisation, but it wasn't primarily as a result of privatisation - indeed there was an initial reluctance by the privateers to ditch the cheap and reliable electric slam-door stock until forced to by H&S legislation. Also Thameslink as a concept dated from the early 1980s under BR and was introduced 8 or 9 years before privatisation. Indeed BR championed the concept of 'Thameslink 2000' and the privatised railway took over two decades to finally get BR's vision done. Air conditioning was introduced on NSE trains from 1988 (electric class 442) and diesel (class 159 and 166) from 1991/92 - all under BR. Prior to this Gatwick Express used air con vehicles, from 1984. A limited number of Inter-City trains bypassed London heading to Brighton and Dover since the late 1970s. Finally you can't blame BR for not putting in USB chargers, as they were not in general use in the 20th century!
Regarding the insanely complicated fare structure - just have Peak and Off peak and a decent discount for season tickets. A couple of weeks ago I paid £180 for two return tickets for a 70 mile journey to London. and only then for a nine-day city break staying in a Premier Inn. It's only around 45 minutes into London on a fast train, If the fare (for a cheap day return) was significantly lower I'd have many day trips to Lonon for shows and museum visits.
In a perfect world tickets would be sold from lat-long to lat-long with the price based on the distance and the average speed, without regard for route. The burden of optimisation (including the last mile) should be on the network designers, not the users!
12 years ago I travelled from Warsaw to Kielce in Poland, a distance of 120 miles for £13.75 on their new express train. Towards the end of the journey there was a heavy downpour that dislodged the overhead cable connector and we were rescued by a local train in 40 minutes. The same scenario in the UK would have charged an astronomical amount for the fare and left passengers stranded for hours in the event of a similar mishap. Something is very wrong in this country and Jago's suggestion of a Ministry of Infrastructure Works sounds like a step in the right direction. I hope someone in government takes it up.
@@stephenspackman5573 I can't compare national level railways (because thanks to the disaster of privatisation, intercity passenger trains to/from the city I live in consist entirely of tourist excursion trains that make one trip each way a day and don't even operate five days a week most of the year, priced accordingly), but the busses in my city these days have abandoned even that. Every trip costs the same flat fee. Kind of. I think the ferry might cost more than a bus trip, and there's the whole '1 free transfer (which may actually be free return depending on how far you're going and what you're doing when you get there due to how it's set up) per paid trip' thing, and then the 'after two trips you actually paid for, all subsequent trips that day cost nothing' and 'after eight trips you actually paid for in a week, all subsequent trips that week cost nothing' thing, but they gave up on fare zones entirely.
Very nicely done short video. Biased here but I firmly believe vital utilities/infrastructure/resources should be publicly owned/majority government stake in them. Railways are one of them.
A very interesting video with some great points, if only a person like you was at the controls Jago. Unfortunately polictics like the privatised rail network doesnt reward longer term planning and sense, but as you said we can choose to be optimistic.
Nationalised institutions like the railways shouldn't make a profit but rather be an investment for the future generations, exactly what you're saying.
My father was the company secretary of Travellers Fayre/British Transport Hotels, then deputy company secretary of British Rail. He steered both through privatisation as there was a lot of legislation to do. His view was that the public sector shareholder (Dept of Transport) was dreadful - they interfered and took the profits for roads. He did not expect any improvement from privitisation.
Another brilliant and thoughtful video. You said a lot that i had already thought - and a good deal more that made me think “oh , what a good idea,” Thanks Jago
As a small SME trying to get a technology which would massively reduce the cost of structural surveying and maintenance planning, I can tell you that it's basically impossible to get NR to agree to sit down and talk. The dangled carrot of "we can make your staff more productive and improve the management of your line" doesn't overcome the hurdles of getting an SME in to work outside the context of their Framework agreements. For the uninitiated, framework agreements are a way that big companies don't have to competitively tender for work. If you think that sounds like a cartel of big engineering companies who could, if they chose, rip off the client.... then you wouldn't be alone. Frameworks should be illegal - they do a disservice to infrastructure in general.
Some excellent talking points and I agree with you on nearly all of them. Also, thanks for lots of shots of York Station (my home town!). If you're ever back in town give me a shout!
I used the trains a lot as a student in the 80s and use them a lot now and for the area around Leeds and the ECML they are WAY BETTER. The train I need out of York used to even hour during the day then, and stopped at 9. Now they are every 15 minutes and stop for just a couple of hours in the middle of the night. My local station has a service between 06:30 and 23:30 and they are every 30 minutes with a service 4 times a day to London.
Here in SW I can stand on multiple Station Roads and still fail to find the vaguest hint of a railway and the limited services that exist are geared to tourism, not transportation. I'd take the bus, but that stopped running years ago too.
I travelled by train from Essex to Suffolk today to attend a family funeral. Started the journey on the Elizabeth line, only one stop though to it's terminus at Shenfield. Whilst waiting for my connecting train I noticed the London bound trains where absolutely packed when they stopped at Shenfield, and people had trouble getting on, but this was just after 08:00, glad that I don't do that journey anymore. My connecting Greater Anglia train pulled in on time, and it was pick a seat, any seat, there was oodles of room. Arrived at my destination bang on time. The journey took 1hr 12mins, and return fare was 22 quid, because I booked 2 weeks ago. The return journey was also hassle free and on time. I haven't had any issues with Greater Anglia services.
That's one of the most successful franchises - try again in 3 years once Sir Keir's union friends have had their grubby hands all over it and it certainly won't be the same. And then try holding someone to account for the failing service and well..there won't be anyone as it will be run by the government. Anyone who thinks pure nationalisation is the panacea should look at ScotRail and their current problems.
I think its worth pointing out that the main reason rail transport isn’t profitable is because the companies have to pay to use the railroads, whereas normal roads are paid for by the government and free to use. If trucking companies had to pay the costs for the damage to the roads caused by trucks then rail freight would suddenly become a lot more viable.
@@50upss to be clear the road tax on trucks would have to be literally thousands of times higher than the road tax for cars because that is how much more damage they do to roads than cars thanks to the four power law of road damage(Ax the weight over axle of vehicle = A to the power of 4, so 2x the weight=16x the road damage, for trucks that can be easily 10x the weight of a car over each axle this means they are doing 10,000x the road damage), it is to the extent that when planning the lifetime of stuff like bridges, roads, etc designers only look at expected heavy goods vehicle traffic because they cause the vast majority of road wear. So you’d get individual trucks having road taxes in the millions.
Out of everywhere I went by rail last week, the west coast mainline was the main problem so far as timings went. Delays primarily. As an American the ticket costs were somewhat better or comparable to our own costs.
@@d.lam.8178 From my limited experience of US rail infrastructure, trains in the US tend to be absurdly cheap (typically city subsidised metro or regional rail) or absurdly expensive, not much in the middle.
@@Croz89 Even absurdly cheap, say a commuter service is still expensive for what it is. Honestly some of the cheapest fares were south of London, and those were comparable to a round trip on the MBTA near me
@@d.lam.8178 I think some of the flat fares in US cities are very cheap if you're going for a long trip, like less than $3 for what might be an hour long journey. And some of the weekly caps are insanely low, like $34 on the MTA in NYC. The weekly caps on TfL in London *starts* at nearly $54, and that's only for zone 1! If you wanted one for all zones it's quite a lot more.
@@d.lam.8178 A lot of US cities have flat fares for metro systems and some commuter rail, so it can cost as little as $3 for a single trip from one end to the other. Weekly caps can also be very low, like $34 for the MTA in NYC. For TfL in London, caps *start* at around $54, and that's only for zone 1! If you want to use more zones the price can increase to over $100. For my 20 minute commute by rail, for example, it's about $9 for a return trip off peak, and $10.50 peak. For a weekly fare for just that trip, it's about $45.
Excellent comments! In Australia parts of our network was privatised and where the track and above rail were privatised it was a disaster! Various state government had to buy it back. Now interstate track is owned by the federal government except Adelaide to Darwin freight is privatised, below rail state assets are owned by the state except in SA and most passenger services are back in government hands or are about to be! All privatisation did was run our networks into the ground! Cheers
I watch a couple of Japanese transport-nerd yt channels. We originally taught them how to railway, and now I think we should try to emulate what they do. I've no idea how it's subsidised, but their transport system looks like a joy to use, and I'm jealous. That have a lot of ferries that must operate at a loss. I'm not saying we need the ferries, but they seem to look after their remote communities. They've prioritised easy transport for all.
@@kjh23gk This was my impression, yeah, but I didn't want to say it without being sure. I guess the idea is that the rail companies are still incentivised to make the trains good so that people go to the retail outlets in and around the station. I don't know how it works to keep rural lines open, unless they own a lot of land in the towns and villages they serve.
Actually, the rolling stock companies element of the privatization makes a lot of sense. If the railway operators are to be flexible companies, they should not be burdened with the issues resulting from being tied to rolling stock. By the same token, much of the world's airline fleet is leased, with a further component of short-term "wet" leases (or subcontracting), which allows airlines to respond to market demand and other conditions reasonably quickly. What does NOT make a lot of sense is taking the word from a company that they will operate at a lower cost than their similarly-equipped competition and not default on any of the KPIs (or default in general). This is not free-market competition, but make-believe. The franchise tendering system effectively did away with competition and offered virtual monopolies to operators. Competition would have been letting at least two operators compete offering equivalent services and letting passengers choose the one who provides better value-for-money. It is really hard to organize on the local level, where services pretty much need to be subsidized, and there is very little opportunity to make a significant difference in quality or cost. It does work in long-distance travel, as examples of Italy or Sweden show, along with Flixtrain and national railway companies encroaching on each other's territories more and more often.
I didn't even know other countries had a dedicated infrastructure department the way you describe. It really underlines how insular the UK (and especially its press) can be - nationalisation, lower fares, etc are routinely described as "unicorns", even though there are working examples just across the channel. Thank you for a very clear-headed overview with a measured opinion from someone who knows the field. You're a bloody good one, Jago.
The lesson from Wales is that improvements take time, passengers need to be patient, but after years of poor service they're not always ready to be. The Welsh Government has put money into railways, but the changes come slowly. The previous Arriva franchise was terrible, mainly because it was too good at attracting passengers but couldn't afford to improve trains and services - a paradox. TfW Rail is trying hard but it's a very slow process as lines need electrification, trains need replacing etc etc .
Wonder if we could get something like the Deutschland-Ticket for trains, unlimited travel on trains for a fixed price a month (probably excluding some train)
We could easily have something like that. We just have to get rid of the stupid idea that "ticket prices need to be high to control the number of passengers" and tell the people running British Rail to come up with plans to increase capacity.
In Thw Netherlands, we do have for the psst ca 15 years, a separation between Rail Network and rail operators. To be honest, for the core network lines, the latter is just 1 compsny (NS, the former Dutch Railways), but for the more rural lines the other companies are competitative, generally. Privatisation can be dione in a sensinle way ...
I worked for British Rail for the Area Civil Engineers dept, for what is now the South Western Railways region (Waterloo to Exeter, Portsmouth Harbour, Weymouth, Reading, Guildford & Dorking) under its inevitable decline in the 80s. The Clapham disaster was the nadir. People began to wake up regarding its safety and just how parlous the state of the network was actually in. The sectored model, that gave us NSE and Inter City, was a bold step, but we could see it was a way to show private equity which parts of BR were going to become viable private enterprises. The trajectory on which BR was headed was a huge mistake, but I had departed before the restructuring and eventual privatisation began to take its effect. I would love to see a nationalised rail network that serves society and the economy as Jago suggested, but that needs commitment not just from this govt, but subsequent ones, no matter their political persuasion.
Agree, but the commitment is on _us…!_ We could (can) obviously not demand anything from private corporations - without (stock) ownership, we’re not legally entitled to do so. Neither are government ministers, by corporate law. However terrible a public entity may become in running the railway, we can _at least_ legally and democratically influence said entity. Without being rich, and joining a think tank to do so… 🤓
"inevitable decline" is one way of putting it I would describe it as "slow strangulation" Only a people's govt can organise society for the people. I hope this isn't too controversial! ...We don't have that.
@@romulusnr Well, state communism has its grave issues - As “normal humans” we get greedy party members instead of greedy private shareholders. What I DO think - and have experienced (I’m 58) - is that whatever we define (need) as public service or welfare, must remain in public ownership. Add democratic and worker influence, and just accept that such services will never "make money". Leave "the market" to everything else - what we "want" or feel an urge to "achieve". Whatever we can never democratically influence anyway… Competition is OK if you really wish to participate - a free choice. Now, everything is competitive - and ir seems to wear us out. Even the so called winners…?
I live in the middle of nowhere. However the village over has an old unused station. I'd be able to get into a major city with a 10 minute bike ride and a 20 minute train ride. As it stands I can't do that and so my job pool is limited to the nearby town. Which is not bad but not great.
I agree with you. Public passenger service has been greatly hobbled in the US. Privatization has failed in Germany. Can't think of any place it has succeeded, other than freight hauling. I will be looking forward to future success in Britain. Love, love, love your channel, Mr. Hazard.
it's something of a failed experiment in freight hauling in the USA too, most of the freight companies are in self inflicted death spirals only held at bay by government intervention, having substantially damaged the preexisting infrastructure along the way (and actively engaging in shenanigans to avoid meeting their obligations to Amtrack, making that entity worse than it otherwise would be).
It’s seemingly succeeded in Japan, but many (including branches of JR) argue that’s due to their real estate interests rather than direct income from trains. Just like the Metropolitan Railway did. Which is also something BR tried to do in the 80s before they were told “you run trains, not offices and hotels” 🙄
Except public passenger service in the US is technically nationalized. Although not very well, mostly thanks to anti-tax hawks, and a fair bit of cronyism to boot
@@kaitlyn__L NotJustBikes recently made a video about Japanese trains. Apparently the rail companies make a loss on the rail side, but a huge profit on the property side. The property around the stations is made profitable because it's on the rail network. There is a worry that the rail companies might try to offload the rail side of things onto the government, thus socializing the losses. The rail network is so important for the company the government couldn't abandon it (the same way England can't allow the water companies to be abandoned).
@@kaitlyn__L In addition to what @kjh23kg said, there is also the factor that the efficiency of Japanese private rail also comes with the same conditions that private business brings everywhere else: inhuman expectations from workers (crashes unions often blame on insane requirements on timeliness), overwork, etc.
Jago. I totally agree with your comment about long term commitment to new works. I suggest it should include not only the building of whole new railways but a continuous rolling program of electrification etc. The set-up costs for each successive project would be much reduced.
"railways don't make money".... but they do, as you point out! They bring in so much value to the communities they serve, and that value *does* make money; and it makes a lot more than the trains cost to run.
That's what he means - the railway in and of itself does not make money, but it helps make money elsewhere, leading to an overall profit to society (financial and otherwise). The railway should be accessible to all financially - at the moment ticket prices are ridiculous, and it is much cheaper for me, on my own, with my disabled Railcard, to drive somewhere and pay for parking than it is to take the train. Forget travelling with anyone else. How does that make any sense? And that's on a line that is already nationalised.
@@CharityAngelSpectrum I've literally found it cheaper to get a return flight from London -> Berlin -> Edinburgh, than it was to book a return ticket London -> Edinburgh on the train.
@@BigShrimpin_ That's just absurd. In no world should it be cheaper to fly. Especially via another country! If nothing else, it's not exactly in keeping with reducing greenhouse emissions, is it?
British Rail is, sort of, already nationalised. Network Rail is public, and the remaining franchises (TOCs) operate under strict rules about how much they can charge, lines run, frequency, etc. In effect, they're no more than outsourced service providers. This isn't nationalisation, it's just bringing outsourced service providers inhouse. Labour are NOT about improving services though. Yesterday they cancelled the £500m scheme to re-open to passengers freight-only, moth-balled, and closed lines. This will stupidity by Labour will deny rail services to many communities.
One thing that I don't think has been mentioned anywhere yet is that Sir Keir Starmer 🤴 (pause to salute) has appointed Sir Peter Hendy as Rail Minister. That's someone with plenty of real-world experience of running transport networks, which has got to be encouraging
@@whyyoulidl I mean like the video says. The government needs to put money into the system if they want it to start working. I'm happy to temporarily pay more if in the long term it yields improvements
Hey, cool, very well said! I come from an island with no railways - Guernsey - and was always fascinated when I flew to London. Anyway, where I ended up, in Austria, the railways are sort of nationalised. And I think they have done rather well (the ÖBB). Good luck!
Oh yes, btw ... in Guernsey we have the "States of Guernsey". All crucial infrastructure (water, energy, airline, ferries...) is nationalsed. And Guernsey is far from socialism.
That was caused by a rush to switch to an immature technology - from the inefficient but well understood steam to something new (diesel). A similar situation exists today. Governments all over the world are keen to move away from fossil fuels & switch to something new. So it will not be dodgy diesels, but GBR could buy 118 hydrogen or battery powered trains then find the implementation of them is unsuitable for its intended purpose or just engineered badly.
@@TheRip72 Luckily those German chaps have already had a go with hydrogen and had their initial enthusiasm replaced by rejection, so hopefully we can learn from them. Hopefully....
@@TheRip72 well be fair started dieselising in the mid 50s till late 60s but diesels had been successfully produced world wide BR just broke the golden rule of manufacturing dont bulk before you test
Intersting how some successes are related to local rail service being run locally. I think this is where we have a problem. Inter-city should be a distinct type of service (prebooked seats availible, advance fares, off peak and anytime fares). Clearly branded.. Local and regional trains turn up and go, no pre-booking. No advance tickets just one price.
I think that the Tories' rail privatisation failed, but not necessarily for the reasons you state. My view is that the political aims were: 1. To distance any failings from the government ("it's not the governments fault your train is always late, it's the private operators"). That failed. 2. To gradually let the less economic lines shut. Failed: there have been no significant closures in the last 30 years, probably the longest period that's ever happened since 1920. 3. To manage a long term decline in the railways. Failed: GB passenger numbers were already increasing, but pretty much as soon as they were privatised the long established link between numbers and GDP broke and passenger numbers started increasing a lot faster. 4. To save money. Failed: the complexity and duplication has added costs 5. To loosen regulation. Failed: regulation and safety have increased and the UK railways are one the safest in the world 6. To get new blood into the industry to show railwaymen how things should be done. Failed (mostly) a lot of the companies came in and regretted getting rid of the BR managers. There was some good innovative thinking, but generally the industry is once again run by people (men and women now, thankfully) who've come up through the ranks. And justifiably so. The main problem in those regard is that there less mixing between operators and network rail While there are certainly problems at the moment, passenger growth has been extraordinary for much of the time, safety has dramatically improved (after Railtrack was nationalised). Although peak fares are very high by international standards, the relatively moderate off peak fares and the often very cheap advance purchase fares have kept overall fares to within what's paid elsewhere. And has helped grow demand off peak and make the system more efficient and peaks slightly less crowded. My main concern is that a national railway will go back to having to go to the Treasury every year begging for money and not being able to plan ahead as happened in BR days. The current system did at least guarantee promised investment at every franchise letting. But the chance to have a more integrated transport network, especially at a local level is promising.
When the Docklands Light Railway was built, it was built on the cheap. It became a "victim of it's own success" and lot of money has had to be spent on increasing the size of the trains, adding new branch lines and so on. If we do the new British Rail right, and are able to do a bit of rejigging so that cities outside London can have at least London Overground levels of service (i.e. four trains per hour) I would expect trust in the railway to push up passenger numbers to the extent that many parts of the UK would get so busy that the capacity of those systems is strained and further investment in lengthening trains and operating higher train frequencies is needed.
@@DavidShepheard a lot of lines are like that already. Unfortunately the government has been generally unwilling to provide for it. While franchising does secure funding for a good few years, it does mean that it can be difficult to get extra funding when needed. The Northern franchise was originally let based on zero growth, but had seen huge demand.
@@telhudson863 Indeed. But the TOCs were still privatised and do have a huge impact on safety. The rail infrastructure should definitely be nationalised, the freight operators should definitely be private. It's the passenger operators where there's more debate.
I think the fast charge project is a really excellent idea. Down here in Weymouth, there are still diesel electric services for the local services. Fast charge could be used for those services.
People malign BR but into the late 80s and at the years before privatisation. BR was getting a handle on things however politicians and the DFT sticking their fingers in the pie and dictating rather than letting the people that know how to run things, actually run things caused more and more issues.
My memories of BR include; filthy stations, cold waiting rooms, late or cancelled trains, filthy trains, incredibly rude staff, high ticket prices. There is nothing and there has never been anything run well by the government.
@@archiebald4717 My last trip to London included cancelled trains, a train that stank of chemical toilets (having had to drive to another station to get it), no air con, and a ticket price of over 100 quid return for a journey of 1 hour where I had to stand in a corridor. And then I had to do the same thing all the way back again because they still hadn't got their sh*t together. Although we did have aircon on the way back to be fair.
I feel like it's worth noting that some TOCs have genuinely innovated and created real meaningful differences for the users of the railway, especially in the New Labour era. C2C, Chiltern and SWT spring to mind, and Virgin Trains was widely popular too. I suppose you can see GWRs innovations in line with that too. On the other hand you had the horrors of Connex and Railtrack who's actions literally caused loss of life, and while GoVia did successfully turn around South Central into Southern in its early years and introduce the Javelin on Southeastern, it ofc was stripped of Southeastern for cooking the books and saw years of strikes under Southern in the late 2010s. That said, the worst strikes on the railway network have happened when the government had guaranteed the railways profits, like Southern during the implementation of the Thameslink Programme and the railways in general Post-Covid. One thing about the railways being nationalised is that they will once again be subject to greater political influence... For better, or for worse.
It better be back. I work for Network Rail and I see jobs going on the GBR Transition Team. Bloody hell they get paid a huge wedge, for jobs that seem frivolous. Let's hope it is not just a waste of taxpayer money. However, seeing how much we spend on expensive contractor staff rather than permanent staff, I do not hold my breath.
Something the big-four understood, that the British Government didn't, was that those small money losing lines were feeders for the large express lines, which did make money. Those small lines were a reason to not get into a car, and thus remain a captive audience for the railway. These days, I get into a car to drive 20miles to the mainline station, and then ask myself, why use a train for the remainder of my journey? - the only time I see that as a positive, is when I go to London and can abandon the car at an out of town tube station, and use the tube from there (less stress all around).
Plus from the view of society they serve a vital role in giving children, young people, the elderly and anyone else who can't drive mobility freedom if they live in a small community.
@@hedgehog3180 They also give those who *can* drive additional freedom of choice. Which in turn frees up road capacity for those who *must* drive (or refuse not to.)
How to disimprove a branch line (or, indeed a bus service): cut back on trains at times when people need to use them (morning and evening peaks), and then measure passenger numbers at the quietest possible time of day.... no demand for *this* line, let's close it!
Buses do exist
That was Beeching's idea that people would drive from their home in a village to a junction station where a branch line joined the mainline. But once in their cars people didn't want to get out of them and so they drove all the way to work and home again. It was great when there wasn't the volume of traffic on the roads that there is today for it worked a treat. But now it's grid lock traffic everyday because people have become so used to driving from A to B that they don't want to change back and rail fares are not the cheap alternate they once were in peak traffic periods.
"We should abandon the idea that railways have to make a profit." ABSOLUTELY! Why railways are held to a standard that roads don't have to is baffling. Roads don't make a profit, save for a miniscule number of toll roads, in fact they cost MASSIVE amounts of money each year.
I agree with this. The railway is a means of getting a massive amount of cars and lorries off the road each year. The rail freight industry cannot compete cost for cost with road haulage which is absurd. Look at royal mail taking all their 300+ wagons out of service to use road instead this october. It is all going the wrong way. Why can I travel france right across for like 20 Euro for the whole day yet here I would be lucky to get 5 stations up the line for double that. They do not want us using rail in this country at all.
@@mightynosebleed7476because you obviously don't understand that France is in the Process of complying with the Final process of destroying the national state railway, the eu fourth railway package, and has already tendered a couple of routes to the private sector, with many more tenders at the bidding stage. France has some of the highest track access charges in europe (a charge invented by Brussles in their eec directive 440/1991 back in 1991, and applicable to all eu railways, france has very high charges). It also has some of the highest railway debts in europe.
All our trains could be free to use, just like the NHS is. If that's how you want it to be. But being free at the point of use, or cheap, does not mean that the industry itself is cheap to operate. And it is a fact, that the eu railway packages have made the railways way more expensive to the taxpayers, and transfered lots of taxpayers money to private companies profits via subsidy. Look at Germany, and the recent news articles about how poor its railways were during euro 2024... Germany is very close to being fully compliant with the eu fourth railway package. And all the damage it has done. Fortunately, brexit returned the democratic, legal and political ability to us, to reintegrate and renationalise our railway. So even if fares aren't going to be cheaper, the system as a whole will be, and will therefore be cheaper to the taxpayer and country overall.
@@mightynosebleed7476plus there's less mechanics available to fix the 300+ trucks too
Hmm! Fair point.
The Cons caused a lot of grief trying to force London to run TfL at a profit.
all power to The Fat Controller
Hopefully the Fat Controller can stop Northern from cancelling trains due to "Issue with the Train Crew"..otherwise known as Action Short of Strike!
Nah, I'm joining the Thin Controller Liberation Front.
Please no, can you name a railway with more accidents per mile travelled than the one on Sodor?
@@onodera3964Gner
@@onodera3964 We should think less about idealistic safety targets, and think more of the opportunities for the private heath sector! [tongue-in-cheek mode]
A few years after privatisation, I was working in a legal office, and I saw a Crown Court indictment for the theft of a Midland Mainline sandwich between Kettering and Leicester. My first thought was that theft of a British Rail sandwich might have led to a plea of insanity.
That was a really big sandwich.
I am a Canadian from Vancouver, British Columbia. I visited the UK a couple of times in the 1980's. I quickly learned that a British Rail Traveller's Fare sandwich was pretty dire & understood why my English friends slagged BR catering!
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
We often do not do things because they were”not invented here”. I found this very much during my professional career in the industry. That’s one of the reasons that we still struggle with leaves , rain,, snow and every other excuse to use bustitution.
Hmm...how old was said sandwich I ask myself 😂😂
'Bernard, I have served eleven governments in the past thirty years. If I had believed in all their policies, I would have been passionately committed to keeping out of the Common Market, and passionately committed to going into it. I would have been utterly convinced of the rightness of nationalising steel. And of denationalising it and renationalising it. On capital punishment, I'd have been a fervent retentionist and an ardent abolishionist. I would've been a Keynesian and a Friedmanite, a grammar school preserver and destroyer, a nationalisation freak and a privatisation maniac; but above all, I would have been a stark, staring, raving schizophrenic.' - Sir Humphrey Appleby, Yes Minister.
😂
I have the complete series as an audiobook - its terrifying how with a few tweaks for modernity it is still so relevant today!
"It is clear that Cabinet Committee is agreed that the new policy is an excellent plan, in principle, but in view of the doubts being expressed, it was decided to record that, after careful consideration, the considered view of the committee was that while they considered the proposal met with broad approval in principle, it was felt that some of the principles were sufficiently fundamental in principle, and some of the considerations so complex and finely balanced in practice that in principle it was proposed that the sensible and prudent practice would be to subject the proposal to more detailed consideration with and across the relevant departments with a view to preparing and proposing a more thorough and wide-ranging proposal, laying stress on the less controversial elements and giving consideration to the essential continuity of the new proposal with existing principles, to be presented for parliamentary consideration and public discussion on some more propitious occasion when the climate of opinion is deemed to be more amenable for consideration of the approach and the principle of the principal arguments which the proposal proposes and propounds for approval."
And all in one sentence! Sir Humphrey once again.
Loved that tv show 😆☺️👍🇬🇧
I work in a national government department (not in GB). As I come to the end of my tenure, I understand the truth and the brilliance of this series, and recommend it to my new hire colleagues (at least the ones I feel are astute enough to pickup the numerous subtexts in each episode and the overarching storyline) as an introduction to working in a parliamentary government.
The railways have, as you rightly point out, always paid their way. They got people to work and this generated prosperity for all, not just The Chaps. Arguing otherwise is like saying "Damn it all, Tristram, I just can't get round the feeling that my circulatory system isn't, you know, pulling its weight."
"I choose to be optimistic"
Hear, hear!
ORDER, ORDER! Will the Honourable Gentleman refrain from using that term!
There is no need for that sort of language.
Don't forget during the first 21 years of nationalisation 2500 stations were closed
Or as they say in Parliament: MMYYEEHHHHHHHRRR
@@meerkat5818 EEEEEEAAAAHHHHHHERRR!
In Slovakia, there were talks about selling the state-owned railway company and most people were saying: ''just look at how that went in Britain''. Pricing was the main issue. You can get pretty much anywhere in Slovakia by train, but Slovaks also love their cars (they make lots of them). Most families own 2 - 3 cars + you often get a company car for work. This created a huge problem with parking in Slovakia and the only way to keep people off the road is to keep train travel cheap. They did not increase the prices since 2012, train travel is free for kids under 6, free for students (6 - 26), elderly (62+) and disabled people, most trains are new, and very safe. You can go on a school trip to another city or you can go hiking in the mountains or explore a different town for the day with your friends and it won't cost you anything. I think that's great because it keeps young people entertained and out of ''trouble''. I don't want to get political, but I think British youth is getting wild (I live in the UK). You start coming up with stupid ideas when you are bored and stuck in your bubble, because traveling around your own country is too expensive.
What I love about train travel in Slovakia is that prices are set and don't go up just because you are buying a last minute ticket, only IC and International trains need a bit of planning because of seat reservations, but they are still cheap. An InterCity train from Bratislava to Košice (2nd largest city) costs 19€ (27€ in First Class) for a 440km journey. I believe that affordable train travel is never a bad idea for the society. May I just add that the free train tickets cost 15 million euros per year, which is just under 3€ per person per year. For all the stupid things some governments spend the tax money on, this is actually a useful thing and it's definitely worth it.
we privatized some of the railways here in Estonia at about the same time as the UK did it, one of the companies is even named in a similar manner: southeastern railways.
So as a result we're paying them out of the state budget to keep operating and they get to make money off it. Instead of just keeping it state-owned. There was another company, but they sold the tracks for scrap not long after.
I'm not even sure why we're building Rail Baltica, because here we too have to make profit off railroads and moving goods on our railways costs 3x as much as it usually does in Europe and moving cargo on our roads is roughly 10% of that cost.
edit: I mean, moving cargo on railroads has pretty much disappeared here
I envy Slovaks.
Slovakia is tiny
@@artem-hnko Slovakia is "tiny" with a tiny budget. UK is larger, with a lot more resources and money, this excuse it lame. Also, Slovakia is 80% mountainous and still managed to provide reliable, affordable service for everyone.
Very important video. The focus on hypothetical problems is holding us back from actually correcting the serious existing ones. We can’t keep holding ourselves back out of fear that fixing a horrendously broken system might lead to a new problem or two.
The UKs privately owned railways do not work well.
If they don't work in public hands then nothing has been lost. Franchises are not being bought out, they are simply not being renewed.
HS2 north of Brum, please.
That is a sensible fear. Why not try a new idea instead of just repeating past failures? Government with new ideas, what am I saying?
Never let the best be the enemy of the good enough.
@@TheRip72the problem is they arnt privatised at all, the government still owns all the track and tells them what to do, if it went back to proper privatisation like before there would be real competition and real risk so then some of the companies could actually understand the concept of running a business, what they need to do is get something running for cheap, people may hate the likes of pacers but the things that replaced them are not necessarily for the routes, even heritage railways can make a profit, if 100 year old technology is doing a better job is modern technology really better?
My grandfather was head accountant for British Railways under Dr. Beeching in the 1960s at Euston House in London his name was William Brown , and he told me that he told Beeching that a lot of the branch lines could have been saved. Unfortunately Beeching didn't agree with him and had to retire in 1970. He died in 1986.
we need a serious reverse Beeching, and it should have happened in the 90s/ 2000s, even 2010s was not too late as long as the money is used efficiently. Unless labour manages to complete a HS2 sized project in 3-5 years, then we I highly doubt there will be sinificant progress until 2040
I know we all blame 'Beeching's Axe' but it was the government that made the final decision, however there does seem to have been decisions made with minimal research and indecent haste!
@@jcmgt He was just the hatchet man ,the real crook was Marples.
AND IT WAS WILSON, BARBARA CASTLE AND LABOUR who implemented the Beeching Report.....never forget that.
@@bermudarailwayIndeed. His corruption did catch up with him, eventually, but the railway and the country never saw recompense.
'Ferries are better handled by outside companies.' - thems is trigger words! I live on the Isle of Wight. The ferries - which are a key piece of transport infrastructure, creating a bridge for railways and roads across the Solent - are monstrously expensive. They are used as a cash-cow by investment companies because ever since privatisation they have formed an unavoidable ransom strip for the people of the Isle of Wight. You would think, considering the eye-watering ticket prices, that they would at least link up with the timetables of the trains, but you would be so wrong. You might also imagine that they run at times of the day or night when trains are running. Again, wrong. National ferries are part of the national infrastructure and should be nationalised.
Hear hear
Basically the exact same problem there as for NR.
I think it depends if there's a realistic alternative option. That's why CalMac is state run whereas the cross channel ferries are not.
@@Croz89 Yes, there is theoretically an alternative. Is it realistic? No. To press the point home, A car plus a driver often costs over £180 for the 3 mile return trip and can potentially cost much more.
Bring back sealink! And ideally the livery too
Well presented. I was a signaller at Kings Cross in the 90's. When Railtrack took over, the first thing it did was get rid of all the staff that maintained the track and signals. (All given to Jarvis, Balfour Beatty et al.) Having been on 18 years at that point, this action rang my alarm bells. Being a new broom, Railtrack asked for volunteers for redundancy and I jumped ship. Within ten years, I was proved right, with the disasters of Hatfield and Potters Bar. Both of these locations were on the 5 panel NX sytem of the time. As you said, BR was not perfect, however, the local Pway and S&T gangs knew their patch and actually looked after it. And finally, it has been good to see that the Double Arrow symbol has survived all of this. 🙂👍
Network rail isn't good either, is it?
If something is not profitable, but still crucial and needed, the public sector has to take responsibility for it anyway. Only very few and very central lines can be profitable if you consider all costs. Private sector just can't provide a nation with trains if profit is needed. The government taking over must mean that government is prepared to spend money to get good service. I hope ...
Who could have thought that the private sector would prefer roads, a piece of infrastructure wholly paid for by the government, over rails, a piece of infrastructure they had to maintain themselves.
privatize the profits, nationalize the costs ;) just like the banks, eh
@@Bronimin No. Invest profit back into it of course.
As a passenger what I would value most is if a ticket from A to B is exactly just that. Not a ticket from A to B valid only via C at time D on train type E run by company F.
So is Swindon to Cheltenham valid via Bristol Temple Meads? What happens to the break of journey rights?
LNER have done exactly what you have asked, at the cost of £400 London to Edinburgh standard class return.
You would love Switzerland, where it's possible to just buy a ticket for an express train from Zürich to Bern and take any of the trains on that corridor (like the half-hourly IC8; there's just some restrictions like via where it goes if that affects the cost) in the next 24 hours or so
In fairness, I believe that the ferries SHOULD be under the same umbrella (at least somewhat) as the rail network. They can effectively act as extensions of the rail system, after all. At the very least, things should be coordinated to a high degree.
Quite the state of calmac in Scotland for example is atrocious problem is tho calmac is national (i think don’t quote)
The phrase "Shipping Line" came from them being an extension of railway lines I believe.
In a similar vain, I think Hotels, were profitable and could add value.
Note I'm not suggesting getting back into that market but it did make sense.
Buses too. More importantly than ferries imo. The thing I dislike the most about public transport in the UK is the separate tickets for bus and rail. In other countries, a single is valid for 90 minutes - 2 hours in a particular area, regardless of mode as long as you don't go back on yourself and most people have a monthly ticket for their region. In Germany, it's €49/month for the whole country. Buses and trains have screens on board, showing which bus and train lines you can change to from which platforms at the next stop and bus platforms out front of the train station are numbered consistently with train platforms. Trains also have route numbers because it's easier for a passenger to remember. We already have this with our buses, e.g. we don't call the 38 bus line "the Arriva service to Hackney, calling at Millfields Road, Clapton Girls Academy, Hackney Baths, Clapton Square, Pembury Circus...etc." On some bus networks in the UK, a single is only valid on the first bus you get on, not an entire single journey and they don't even sell monthly tickets for all local and regional bus and rail modes so you can't go exploring at the weekend and just see where you end up. The destination has to be decided beforehand so you can't just change direction on a whim. They expect us to ration our use of public transport and this sadly makes the car more attractive.
With ferries it makes more sense for them to remain private, because it's not a "natural monopoly"
5:29 I wasn't ready for the Croydon Tramlink jumpscare 😭
Many of the problems with the current rail system are due to the way it was privatized; the structure prioritized making the sell-off difficult to reverse rather than providing a decent service. For another example of what happens when you privatize infrastructure, look at Thames Water; they're apparently unable to afford the necessary updates to their systems and may go bust in a few months, but they've still somehow managed to pay out 10s of millions in dividends etc.
You do realise that the main infrastructure (ie Network Rail) has been in public ownership for over 20 years?
I remember in the 1970s that every comedian had a BR joke in their armoury. 10 years after privatisation we realised how lucky we'd been. OK, sometimes the environment was a bit jaded & scruffy & the food was a good reason to take a packed lunch but it was cheap. & What we thought was unreliable service actually seemed pretty good compared to what followed. I travelled all over the country back in the late 70s / early 80s for gigs & football matches, almost always by train. & that was as a low paid teenager. No way would that be possible now. One time in Preston, after missing the last train to Brum, the bloke sweeping up let me sleep in the guards office & even provided me with tea bags, milk, a blanket & a kettle ! I had a nice kip & caught the first train in the morning. Imagine that now ! Different times indeed. How much of the disastrous mess they can actually put right & how long it will take is open to question but good god it's worth a try.
Most abysmal privatisation of all time, closely followed by water.
On a serious note; the 1948 Nationalisation of the railways was vital to the very survival of our railways. They were worn out and dropping to bits after 6 years of hammering during WW2.
The railways were owed a huge amount of money by the government for the work done during the war. Nationalisation was a handy way for the government to dodge that.
The Big Four railway companies would have been OK if they'd been paid properly.
@@andrewhotston983 I'm not disputing your comment, and it's quite possibly true, but can you provide sources of corroboration please? Given that it was wartime, and railway workers in the main were a protected occupation, I see no reason why coal would not have been 'on tap' to The Big Four given their logistic important.
I recall an interview with William Whitelaw (one of Thatcher’s ministers so hardly a union rabble rouser) who stated that his grandfather’s shares in one of the big four hadn’t returned a dividend in 25 years at point of nationalisation. They were nationalised because they were about to go bankrupt and leave the county without a rail network at all which would have caused massive economic harm to any developed nation, but to a war ravaged Britain desperately trying to rebuild itself it would have been catastrophic.
Railways are one of those pieces of infrastructure that are necessary for the economic wellbeing of a nation but simply don’t return a profit and so cannot be left to the market to provide.
@@vinh7251 Was the Big Four company in question the LNER? I remember reading that this was not a financially successful entity.
@@vinh7251Railways are NOT necessary for the economic wellbeing of a country. There are plenty of countries that have no railways, and there are plenty of places in the UK that have managed without a railway for the last sixty years.
As a regular traveller on the rail network (particularly in the South) I 100% agree with everything you said in this video. Nationalisation might bring risks, but we can't be frozen in inaction because of "what ifs" while our infrastructure continues to crumble for the sake of shareholder returns.
Also a single national network could open up a lot of opportunities that would otherwise be much harder for several private companies to accomplish. For example, it would be easier to set up a universal payment system for the whole country (like TFL's tap in/tap out system), it could help establish infrastructure standardisation (which, hopefully, brings the end of third rail power once and for all), it could grant higher bargaining power for sourcing equipment/services (like rolling stock), etc.
We can’t afford to electrify diesel lines such as Chiltern, Oxford or the new East West Rail.
There is no hope of converting the huge southern 3rd rail network to Overhead.
When faced with a service that has to be monopolistic (due to e.g. infrastructure limitations), it's pretty much always better to have a state monopoly than a private one: at least the state monopoly won't have, as it's primary reason for existing, siphoning off cash to shareholders.
In theory yes, but looking at the previous 14 yrs in the UK, I'm not sure that actually works.
@@stuinNorway The previous 14 yrs in the UK have been terrible primarily _because_ of said siphoning! It's literally the opposite of what you're saying.
@@caramelldansen2204 Except they've been terribly good at siphoning off state funds to their mates... which is the exact opposite of being the exact opposite of what he was saying.
I'm not sure if you can say that they've been siphoning off a lot of cash. In fact, profits have always been very marginal for TOCs. And they've also brought in a lot of investments that would have been hard for a government, where railways are the last priority, to achieve.
@@91Durktheturk But at the same time, with the infrastructe being nationalised (officially since 2011; de-facto since 2005) and operations being private, there's very little incentive to improve the infrastructure in ways that benefit operations (e.g. electrification). With both operations and infrastructure under "one roof" (whether public or private really, but privatisation of the infrastructure was an unmitigated failure) this is less of an issue.
Pity our politicians can't 'throw things together' as neatly as you have in this video. Well done JH
As someone working for a(n as yet unnationalised) TOC I have to say, this video is pretty much spot-on with everything I've seen and learned
Very good video and well articulated. Here's hoping that we can have some long term thinking and planning on the railways in the UK in the future.
The thumbnail 😂
They never should have took the railways away from the Fat Controller. 👀
They were causing confusion and delay 🤣
@@EonityLuna taken
The current "privatised" system consumes more public subsidy than British Rail cost (adjusted for inflation). That was the same even before the state took back control of the worst run services. It is also less punctual and less reliable when you look at the actual statistics.
So despite the reputation BR had back in the day, it was a far better service than what we have now. It's biggest issue was underfunding, first due to post war austerity and towards the end because of that woman and her rabidly ideological hatred of public services.
Biggest issue was rail unions striking and forcing traffic onto the roads, and a disastrous 1955 Modernisation Plan that wasted millions on outdated steam trains and poorly designed and built diesels, in order to buy the votes of the workers in the rail industry.
It also transports more than double the amount of passengers than BR..... And runs a lot more trains....
@@andrewhotston983 Unions do not strike, if you treat the workers with respect and pay them decent amounts of money.
The most recent strikes were intentionally caused by the post-Covid Conservative government announcing that thousands of jobs would be axed and railway maintenance would be postponed. In Scotland, the devolved government went against the Westminster parliament policies and strikes there ended.
Essentially, people who work on the railway are people who want to work. They are public servants who want to make the railways safe and they want to make sure that passengers who get onto a train are alive at the other end of their journey. When the country has a Westminster Parliament that decides to run down services the workers in those services get unhappy and you get strikes.
While I am wary of nationalisation, the amount of subsidy that the private firms are given is not a good look for privatisation.
‘Underfunding’ is always the problem of nationalised industries, they have to compete with all the other demands for taxpayers cash, like the NHS. The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.
Excellent balanced and insightful video. You make a number of very good points. It will be very interesting to see how things go from here.
great rational clearly-presented summary of where we are with rail & how things might be moved forward
I think your greatest points here are 1) the railways don't need to make a profit as they contribute to the economy, and 2) investing into a railway can make it more attractive.
The worst part of having public transport is politicians that insist that it should "pay for itself". That attitude results in bad service and cost cutting. Public transport is a SERVICE that is provided by the government. Yes, it would be lovely if it could be free to passengers but we all know that isn't going to happen. By the same token, politicians are living in a fantasyland if they think it will make a profit. Provide a good service, charge a reasonable fare and you will have a ton of knock-on effects that will improve life for everyone. Just live with the fact that it will never, EVER turn a profit and stop trying to pretend that it will. Suck it up and do what you're supposed to do: protect and support the citizens that are in your charge. Newsflash! That is going to COST money. If that makes your head hurt, then find something other to do than politics.
So how do privatised railways work if they don't make a profit?...
@@mikethebloodthirsty They don't seem to work very well as a public service, but as long as they get government subsidies, shareholders will get their dividends.
I like the idea of a standing organisation for infrastructure improvements. I’d hope this would be beyond just the railways. There are a lot of common skills, and any one form of improvement usually works better when planned together with others (e.g. planning the new towns together with roads, rail, water and power).
"Ministry of Works"
@@GreenJimll Exactly what I was thinking.
I was thinking National Infrastructure Board, but Ministry of Works works too 😊
@@GreenJimll New Zealand used to have one... yeah, it got thrown out basically because 'on time, under budget, fully featured, pick two (at most)' almost universally resulted in things being over budget But it Did result in such fun things as a (no longer a) station built out of brick that stood up to a major earthquake with minimal damage.
As is the usual pattern, it was deemed that hiring private contractors when needed would be cheaper... and it was... for a bit... until it turned out that the beurocracy needed to keep a lid on their shenanigans and nonsense ended up costing basically as much as the ministry had, and constant issues cropped up with equipment not existing, not existing in sufficient quantity, or currently being at the wrong end of the country because that's where the most recent job that needed it was... the Ministry solution to this was simply to have more equipment, or buy it in if they didn't. Most contractors don't have the budget to be doing that if they can possibly avoid it. Not if they're honest, anyway. And then there's the usual shenanigans with the 'lowest bid' deliberately being just enough to lock the project in, but not enough to actually finish it, forcing the government to pay more to get it done, where one of the mildly more expensive bids was only expensive because it had accounted for that sort of thing Properly...
I am British and just over 50, so I remember British Rail, and I would agree with what you have said
I appreciate this insight into renationalisation. The biggest single smoking gun I can find for it is that it seems many private operators are in fact other countries nationalised operators. If they are the only ones who have the expertise to run the railway anyways, why not just run things ourselves, especially with subsidies needed in the current system just to keep certain services going.
Even worse is when other countries (Norway, I'm looking at you), decide to go the UK way and split up what was until recently a nationalised railway, and in the latest round of allocations of operator licences for the trains in our part of the country they awarded it to a company that has shown itself to be very good and running railway services extremely badly. Yep, they appoiinted "Go Ahead" the contract..... NOOOOO !!!!
And most importantly, those subsidies are higher than what British Rail received before privatisation.
@@stuinNorway They were the company that ran South Eastern before it was nationalised due to fraud.
But if you call those _subsidies_ *investment* and use them to move profit from the tourist supported services to local services that would benefit the rest of the population not in London or adjacent to the three mainline routes. Then it sounds more like a service for the country and the people, rather than a burden that we all must suffer. Because there is profit to be made, otherwise the private investment companies would not be grabbing slices of the pie to divvy up amongst their shareholders. It's only the regional services that struggle due to the lack of infrastructure modernisation and expansion.
If Labour use nationalisation to expand and modernise public transport and not to fill the government purse, then it might be viable given decent management. Somehow I envision a period of conflict rather than construction. I hope I'm wrong.
This isn't true. Most companies that own are railways are British and also run services in Europe. It goes both ways.
I am a strong advocate in that we should not privatize essential services......rail, electricity, water and the like. When they are their costs become prohibitive due to a requirement to make ever increasing profits for shareholders.
Nationalisation was a disaster for railways. Half the network and 2500 stations were closed during the first 21 years
It's actually kind of shocking that basic necessities are making rich people a profit
I find it surprising that water would even be privatized. I just looked it up and 3/4 of Americans get water from fully public sources. I don’t think I’ve lived anywhere in the US where we didn’t get water from the county.
Yes the shocking (or not so) revelation is that many of the privatised utilities and infrastructure are now partly or fully own3d by the national utilities or transportation companies owned by other countries!!!!
Hmmmmm, the short term gain dissolves into the ether and long term foreign nations profit from the UK. A certain political party should readjust its target ......
I'm glad I'm not the only one whose ears perked up when I heard them mentioning renationalising the rail network.
Watching this from Canada 🇨🇦 being from London back in a nationalised day.
Very interesting, first video of yours that I have viewed.
Not for profit is in the strategic national interest! Totally agree!
Thank you!
So glad to hear this. As a regular visitor to the UK, I remember when you could take the train to the Cathedral City of Wells. The last time I visited Wells it took two busses and a train to get there. This is a lesson that we in the USA need to learn. Some things are just better for society when run as a service to the nation.
When I was a small boy, 70+ years ago, I remember boarding a train with my parents in the small village I grew up in at 0745 and arriving in Edinburgh Waverley at about 1030. Totally impossible to do now by any means of public transport. Dr. Beeching in his infinite wisdom closed these lines. There is a section rebuilt but not enough.
Even from where I live in north east Somerset, it takes two buses to get to Wells. The railways go round the edges of the county but nothing goes through the middle, across the Mendips and connecting Radstock, Midsomer Norton, Wells, Cheddar, Glastonbury, Street and Shepton Mallet with Bristol, Bath, Yeovil and Taunton.
“Stupid name sounds Victorian” as an outsider to the UK. I would think that would be good. Victorian England is so cool and it was probably the height of the empire.
Great video! I’m a Brit living in Australia 🇦🇺 where in Victoria there are private metro trains and State government regional trains which works well .
Just found your channel as it came up on the UA-cam suggestions. Found this video interesting. Thanks.
As a Scotsman, I will say that during the past year of commuting with public transport from one Scottish city to another, the “off-peak all day” scheme that emerged from nationalisation provided just enough incentive to justify getting the train over the bus. It went from being an extra £10 for a journey that was 30 mins shorter to just 4 or 5. I have high hopes for this.
Was hoping to hear your take on this, not disappointed. And the delivery on “… that number being three.” just got me somehow 😂
In the U.S., there have been debates over whether Amtrak should be privatized or not. The pro-privatization side always cited the privatization of Britain's railways as a good example. The problem is that Amtrak's business model was always different from BR, mainly that Amtrak mostly runs on private track owned by the freight railroads (which were never nationalized for the most part).
The US should operate a two-tier railway nationalisation model:
* For railways that run between states, Amtrak should be tasked to get as many Americans to switch from Interstate highways and domestic flights as possible. And they should be judged on modal-shift from road to rail and flights to rail.
* Within individual states, there should be smaller commuter rail networks based around individual cities owned by the states themselves. Each state railway company should be tasked with reducing traffic on highways into it's cities. These state owned transport companies should also operate fleets of good quality buses and should be judged on modal-shift from car to public transport.
You have cities in the US, with abandoned subway systems. With funding these could be put into operation and used to reduce car traffic. The people who continue to drive would then have less traffic to compete with, in the rush hour and the cost of maintaining roads would be reduced.
Half of Amtrak's problem is those very freight railways actively sabotaging it's operations by contriving to not meet their obligations regarding the state of the track and giving Amtrak trains priority so they're not constantly waiting on sidings.
@@DavidShepheard Among other issues, the fact that freight runs on the same rails limits expansion. In Seattle there is a public run passenger commuter rail, and everyone wants to see it run more often, but its expansion is limited to contention with freight traffic and increased cost since it's borrowed rails. The only place passenger rails are owned by the public passenger carrier is in the Northeast Corridor with the Acela -- which, surprise surprise, has been a smashing success and a serious outlier among Amtrak line cost effectiveness. But if you want to run new rails, you've got to buy often overpriced land, do EISes, and not to mention contend with neighborhood interest groups (NIMBYs) who don't want train noise encroaching on their suburban micro-manors. In fact, much of the length of the Acela that runs through populated parts of Rhode Island has to run at a conventional non-express speed to minimize noise levels for exactly this reason....
Hmmm, think they'd be better off just having companies like brightline run alongside amtrak.
Like the open access model is on the ECML right now.
@@DavidShepheard But then there's also the fact that the auto industry would fight this tooth and nail, too
at least three times while watching this I thought something to myself only for you to bring up the same point later in the video!
I use the term ‘iconic’ very loosely and I will still use it to describe the thumbnail. You’re brilliant 😂
Since I learned the details of the scheme, I've always called it "BR's half-assed privatization". The government wanted to give the appearance of privatization while still retaining ultimate control of the whole system.
Nice video of our blue unit!
Can't wait to work for 'GRB'
I am now retired but, in my career, I have commuted into London since 1971 and so have experienced rush hour train travel both before and after privatisation. For the most part, my experience of privatisation has been favourable, primarily because of the roll out of new rolling stock and the introduction of new routes such as Thameslink. Prior to privatisation, most of the rolling stock was older than me and very basic - no air conditioning or power sockets for laptops etc. Everybody likes to moan about Thameslink because it's often overcrowded, but that's because it's a route that people want to use. Prior to 1988, it didn't exist and anybody wishing to travel through London had to change stations and use the Underground. The main problems with privatisation are caused by the train operators, as you said in the video. A good example of that was that Thameslink did not operate a driver training programme, preferring instead to poach drivers from other operators with the result that trains were often cancelled because of "driver shortage". All entirely self inflicted.
Keep up the good work.
"caused by the operators" but aren't the operators just playing the game as laid out by the government? If cost is tangible and the risk of reduced maintenance is intangible, and they are called to account every year on the tangible, then it's the game, not the player, that is to blame.
@@stevecarter8810 You are, of course, correct that the operators are just playing the game as set up by the government, so the government is equally culpable. However, I don't think it's valid to say that the risk of reduced maintenance is intangible. The Hatfield disaster being a case in point.
@@allangriffiths9555 maintenance, like safety, security, or a drummer in a band, share the property that while they are working fine they look like waste. Once they mess up you realise you should have invested more, but until that point you just have the feeling you're investing too much.
Allan, what you are describing I think is mainly the replacement of commuter stock dating mainly from the early 1950s to the mid 1960s with modern stock when those trains reached the end of their economic life. It so happened this was mainly post-privatisation, but it wasn't primarily as a result of privatisation - indeed there was an initial reluctance by the privateers to ditch the cheap and reliable electric slam-door stock until forced to by H&S legislation. Also Thameslink as a concept dated from the early 1980s under BR and was introduced 8 or 9 years before privatisation. Indeed BR championed the concept of 'Thameslink 2000' and the privatised railway took over two decades to finally get BR's vision done. Air conditioning was introduced on NSE trains from 1988 (electric class 442) and diesel (class 159 and 166) from 1991/92 - all under BR. Prior to this Gatwick Express used air con vehicles, from 1984. A limited number of Inter-City trains bypassed London heading to Brighton and Dover since the late 1970s. Finally you can't blame BR for not putting in USB chargers, as they were not in general use in the 20th century!
@@chris8405 I'm not blaming BR for anything and I didn't even mention USB ports. I was referring to three pin socket mains power outlets.
Regarding the insanely complicated fare structure - just have Peak and Off peak and a decent discount for season tickets. A couple of weeks ago I paid £180 for two return tickets for a 70 mile journey to London. and only then for a nine-day city break staying in a Premier Inn. It's only around 45 minutes into London on a fast train, If the fare (for a cheap day return) was significantly lower I'd have many day trips to Lonon for shows and museum visits.
In a perfect world tickets would be sold from lat-long to lat-long with the price based on the distance and the average speed, without regard for route. The burden of optimisation (including the last mile) should be on the network designers, not the users!
And was your train full? I can trains to London regularly and the costly trains are always completely full!
Having to pay huge prices for tickets if you book on the day you need to travel is a tax on tragedy.
12 years ago I travelled from Warsaw to Kielce in Poland, a distance of 120 miles for £13.75 on their new express train. Towards the end of the journey there was a heavy downpour that dislodged the overhead cable connector and we were rescued by a local train in 40 minutes.
The same scenario in the UK would have charged an astronomical amount for the fare and left passengers stranded for hours in the event of a similar mishap. Something is very wrong in this country and Jago's suggestion of a Ministry of Infrastructure Works sounds like a step in the right direction. I hope someone in government takes it up.
@@stephenspackman5573 I can't compare national level railways (because thanks to the disaster of privatisation, intercity passenger trains to/from the city I live in consist entirely of tourist excursion trains that make one trip each way a day and don't even operate five days a week most of the year, priced accordingly), but the busses in my city these days have abandoned even that. Every trip costs the same flat fee.
Kind of.
I think the ferry might cost more than a bus trip, and there's the whole '1 free transfer (which may actually be free return depending on how far you're going and what you're doing when you get there due to how it's set up) per paid trip' thing, and then the 'after two trips you actually paid for, all subsequent trips that day cost nothing' and 'after eight trips you actually paid for in a week, all subsequent trips that week cost nothing' thing, but they gave up on fare zones entirely.
Very nicely done short video. Biased here but I firmly believe vital utilities/infrastructure/resources should be publicly owned/majority government stake in them. Railways are one of them.
A very interesting video with some great points, if only a person like you was at the controls Jago. Unfortunately polictics like the privatised rail network doesnt reward longer term planning and sense, but as you said we can choose to be optimistic.
Nationalised institutions like the railways shouldn't make a profit but rather be an investment for the future generations, exactly what you're saying.
My father was the company secretary of Travellers Fayre/British Transport Hotels, then deputy company secretary of British Rail. He steered both through privatisation as there was a lot of legislation to do. His view was that the public sector shareholder (Dept of Transport) was dreadful - they interfered and took the profits for roads. He did not expect any improvement from privitisation.
Another brilliant and thoughtful video. You said a lot that i had already thought - and a good deal more that made me think “oh , what a good idea,”
Thanks Jago
As a small SME trying to get a technology which would massively reduce the cost of structural surveying and maintenance planning, I can tell you that it's basically impossible to get NR to agree to sit down and talk. The dangled carrot of "we can make your staff more productive and improve the management of your line" doesn't overcome the hurdles of getting an SME in to work outside the context of their Framework agreements. For the uninitiated, framework agreements are a way that big companies don't have to competitively tender for work. If you think that sounds like a cartel of big engineering companies who could, if they chose, rip off the client.... then you wouldn't be alone. Frameworks should be illegal - they do a disservice to infrastructure in general.
Some excellent talking points and I agree with you on nearly all of them. Also, thanks for lots of shots of York Station (my home town!). If you're ever back in town give me a shout!
You forgot the mention the other region with publicly owned railways - Translink in Northern Ireland.
An excellent summary of the railways in the past, present, and possible future.
I used the trains a lot as a student in the 80s and use them a lot now and for the area around Leeds and the ECML they are WAY BETTER. The train I need out of York used to even hour during the day then, and stopped at 9. Now they are every 15 minutes and stop for just a couple of hours in the middle of the night. My local station has a service between 06:30 and 23:30 and they are every 30 minutes with a service 4 times a day to London.
Here in SW I can stand on multiple Station Roads and still fail to find the vaguest hint of a railway and the limited services that exist are geared to tourism, not transportation. I'd take the bus, but that stopped running years ago too.
I am loving the multiple shots of York station, given I was there literally just yesterday. Lovely roof.
I travelled by train from Essex to Suffolk today to attend a family funeral. Started the journey on the Elizabeth line, only one stop though to it's terminus at Shenfield. Whilst waiting for my connecting train I noticed the London bound trains where absolutely packed when they stopped at Shenfield, and people had trouble getting on, but this was just after 08:00, glad that I don't do that journey anymore.
My connecting Greater Anglia train pulled in on time, and it was pick a seat, any seat, there was oodles of room. Arrived at my destination bang on time. The journey took 1hr 12mins, and return fare was 22 quid, because I booked 2 weeks ago. The return journey was also hassle free and on time. I haven't had any issues with Greater Anglia services.
That's one of the most successful franchises - try again in 3 years once Sir Keir's union friends have had their grubby hands all over it and it certainly won't be the same. And then try holding someone to account for the failing service and well..there won't be anyone as it will be run by the government. Anyone who thinks pure nationalisation is the panacea should look at ScotRail and their current problems.
I think its worth pointing out that the main reason rail transport isn’t profitable is because the companies have to pay to use the railroads, whereas normal roads are paid for by the government and free to use.
If trucking companies had to pay the costs for the damage to the roads caused by trucks then rail freight would suddenly become a lot more viable.
governments don't have money they spend other people's - yours and mine
Nothing to do with the syphoning off of billions to shareholders in dividend payments then? Hint: divis are not paid from profit.
Trucking companies do pay for the damage to the road, as each lorry pays much more road tax than your average car.
@@50upss to be clear the road tax on trucks would have to be literally thousands of times higher than the road tax for cars because that is how much more damage they do to roads than cars thanks to the four power law of road damage(Ax the weight over axle of vehicle = A to the power of 4, so 2x the weight=16x the road damage, for trucks that can be easily 10x the weight of a car over each axle this means they are doing 10,000x the road damage), it is to the extent that when planning the lifetime of stuff like bridges, roads, etc designers only look at expected heavy goods vehicle traffic because they cause the vast majority of road wear.
So you’d get individual trucks having road taxes in the millions.
Taxing the heck out of trucking wouldn't make trains cheaper. It would just make absolutely everything else more expensive.
Out of everywhere I went by rail last week, the west coast mainline was the main problem so far as timings went. Delays primarily. As an American the ticket costs were somewhat better or comparable to our own costs.
@@d.lam.8178 From my limited experience of US rail infrastructure, trains in the US tend to be absurdly cheap (typically city subsidised metro or regional rail) or absurdly expensive, not much in the middle.
@@Croz89 Even absurdly cheap, say a commuter service is still expensive for what it is. Honestly some of the cheapest fares were south of London, and those were comparable to a round trip on the MBTA near me
@@d.lam.8178 I think some of the flat fares in US cities are very cheap if you're going for a long trip, like less than $3 for what might be an hour long journey. And some of the weekly caps are insanely low, like $34 on the MTA in NYC. The weekly caps on TfL in London *starts* at nearly $54, and that's only for zone 1! If you wanted one for all zones it's quite a lot more.
@@d.lam.8178 A lot of US cities have flat fares for metro systems and some commuter rail, so it can cost as little as $3 for a single trip from one end to the other. Weekly caps can also be very low, like $34 for the MTA in NYC. For TfL in London, caps *start* at around $54, and that's only for zone 1! If you want to use more zones the price can increase to over $100. For my 20 minute commute by rail, for example, it's about $9 for a return trip off peak, and $10.50 peak. For a weekly fare for just that trip, it's about $45.
Jago should be the Fat Controller of new British Rail😊
Great video JAGO....GREAT POINTS
Excellent comments! In Australia parts of our network was privatised and where the track and above rail were privatised it was a disaster! Various state government had to buy it back. Now interstate track is owned by the federal government except Adelaide to Darwin freight is privatised, below rail state assets are owned by the state except in SA and most passenger services are back in government hands or are about to be!
All privatisation did was run our networks into the ground!
Cheers
Water should be next
It already is government owned/run in Scotland, Wales, and NI. England should follow.
I watch a couple of Japanese transport-nerd yt channels. We originally taught them how to railway, and now I think we should try to emulate what they do. I've no idea how it's subsidised, but their transport system looks like a joy to use, and I'm jealous. That have a lot of ferries that must operate at a loss. I'm not saying we need the ferries, but they seem to look after their remote communities. They've prioritised easy transport for all.
It's privately run, but clearly in a much better way.
@@lamudri The private companies still make a loss on rail, but a big profit on property around the stations.
@@kjh23gk This was my impression, yeah, but I didn't want to say it without being sure. I guess the idea is that the rail companies are still incentivised to make the trains good so that people go to the retail outlets in and around the station. I don't know how it works to keep rural lines open, unless they own a lot of land in the towns and villages they serve.
Actually, the rolling stock companies element of the privatization makes a lot of sense. If the railway operators are to be flexible companies, they should not be burdened with the issues resulting from being tied to rolling stock. By the same token, much of the world's airline fleet is leased, with a further component of short-term "wet" leases (or subcontracting), which allows airlines to respond to market demand and other conditions reasonably quickly.
What does NOT make a lot of sense is taking the word from a company that they will operate at a lower cost than their similarly-equipped competition and not default on any of the KPIs (or default in general). This is not free-market competition, but make-believe. The franchise tendering system effectively did away with competition and offered virtual monopolies to operators.
Competition would have been letting at least two operators compete offering equivalent services and letting passengers choose the one who provides better value-for-money. It is really hard to organize on the local level, where services pretty much need to be subsidized, and there is very little opportunity to make a significant difference in quality or cost. It does work in long-distance travel, as examples of Italy or Sweden show, along with Flixtrain and national railway companies encroaching on each other's territories more and more often.
I didn't even know other countries had a dedicated infrastructure department the way you describe. It really underlines how insular the UK (and especially its press) can be - nationalisation, lower fares, etc are routinely described as "unicorns", even though there are working examples just across the channel.
Thank you for a very clear-headed overview with a measured opinion from someone who knows the field. You're a bloody good one, Jago.
The lesson from Wales is that improvements take time, passengers need to be patient, but after years of poor service they're not always ready to be. The Welsh Government has put money into railways, but the changes come slowly. The previous Arriva franchise was terrible, mainly because it was too good at attracting passengers but couldn't afford to improve trains and services - a paradox. TfW Rail is trying hard but it's a very slow process as lines need electrification, trains need replacing etc etc .
I’m voting Jago Hazzard as national infrastructure minister. I’ve never heard such common sense for a long time.
Wonder if we could get something like the Deutschland-Ticket for trains, unlimited travel on trains for a fixed price a month (probably excluding some train)
We could easily have something like that.
We just have to get rid of the stupid idea that "ticket prices need to be high to control the number of passengers" and tell the people running British Rail to come up with plans to increase capacity.
In Thw Netherlands, we do have for the psst ca 15 years, a separation between Rail Network and rail operators. To be honest, for the core network lines, the latter is just 1 compsny (NS, the former Dutch Railways), but for the more rural lines the other companies are competitative, generally.
Privatisation can be dione in a sensinle way ...
I worked for British Rail for the Area Civil Engineers dept, for what is now the South Western Railways region (Waterloo to Exeter, Portsmouth Harbour, Weymouth, Reading, Guildford & Dorking) under its inevitable decline in the 80s. The Clapham disaster was the nadir. People began to wake up regarding its safety and just how parlous the state of the network was actually in. The sectored model, that gave us NSE and Inter City, was a bold step, but we could see it was a way to show private equity which parts of BR were going to become viable private enterprises. The trajectory on which BR was headed was a huge mistake, but I had departed before the restructuring and eventual privatisation began to take its effect.
I would love to see a nationalised rail network that serves society and the economy as Jago suggested, but that needs commitment not just from this govt, but subsequent ones, no matter their political persuasion.
Agree, but the commitment is on _us…!_ We could (can) obviously not demand anything from private corporations - without (stock) ownership, we’re not legally entitled to do so. Neither are government ministers, by corporate law.
However terrible a public entity may become in running the railway, we can _at least_ legally and democratically influence said entity. Without being rich, and joining a think tank to do so… 🤓
"inevitable decline" is one way of putting it
I would describe it as "slow strangulation"
Only a people's govt can organise society for the people. I hope this isn't too controversial!
...We don't have that.
@@caramelldansen2204 Well, maybe controversial a handful of years back - But no longer? That’s actually a good sign, me thinks…! 😅👍
It seems the biggest problem with nationalization is that private industry still exists concurrently
@@romulusnr Well, state communism has its grave issues - As “normal humans” we get greedy party members instead of greedy private shareholders.
What I DO think - and have experienced (I’m 58) - is that whatever we define (need) as public service or welfare, must remain in public ownership. Add democratic and worker influence, and just accept that such services will never "make money".
Leave "the market" to everything else - what we "want" or feel an urge to "achieve". Whatever we can never democratically influence anyway…
Competition is OK if you really wish to participate - a free choice. Now, everything is competitive - and ir seems to wear us out. Even the so called winners…?
From my bed of pain....a new Jago video does a lot for the soul...says LeviNZ
"Fat Controller" is only a couple of syllable more than the term I use now for the bosses.
Lol. I'm guessing the "roller" part isn't used
Great video Jago, i really liked your reasons as to why rail is and should always be a public service.
Seeing The Fat Controller in a Jago video must mean you love your Thomas The Tank Engine stuff.
I live in the middle of nowhere. However the village over has an old unused station. I'd be able to get into a major city with a 10 minute bike ride and a 20 minute train ride.
As it stands I can't do that and so my job pool is limited to the nearby town. Which is not bad but not great.
I agree with you. Public passenger service has been greatly hobbled in the US. Privatization has failed in Germany. Can't think of any place it has succeeded, other than freight hauling. I will be looking forward to future success in Britain. Love, love, love your channel, Mr. Hazard.
it's something of a failed experiment in freight hauling in the USA too, most of the freight companies are in self inflicted death spirals only held at bay by government intervention, having substantially damaged the preexisting infrastructure along the way (and actively engaging in shenanigans to avoid meeting their obligations to Amtrack, making that entity worse than it otherwise would be).
It’s seemingly succeeded in Japan, but many (including branches of JR) argue that’s due to their real estate interests rather than direct income from trains. Just like the Metropolitan Railway did. Which is also something BR tried to do in the 80s before they were told “you run trains, not offices and hotels” 🙄
Except public passenger service in the US is technically nationalized. Although not very well, mostly thanks to anti-tax hawks, and a fair bit of cronyism to boot
@@kaitlyn__L NotJustBikes recently made a video about Japanese trains. Apparently the rail companies make a loss on the rail side, but a huge profit on the property side. The property around the stations is made profitable because it's on the rail network.
There is a worry that the rail companies might try to offload the rail side of things onto the government, thus socializing the losses. The rail network is so important for the company the government couldn't abandon it (the same way England can't allow the water companies to be abandoned).
@@kaitlyn__L In addition to what @kjh23kg said, there is also the factor that the efficiency of Japanese private rail also comes with the same conditions that private business brings everywhere else: inhuman expectations from workers (crashes unions often blame on insane requirements on timeliness), overwork, etc.
This is actually a great explainer and fairly put.
Fun fact: These videos put a smile on my face.
Jago. I totally agree with your comment about long term commitment to new works. I suggest it should include not only the building of whole new railways but a continuous rolling program of electrification etc. The set-up costs for each successive project would be much reduced.
"railways don't make money".... but they do, as you point out! They bring in so much value to the communities they serve, and that value *does* make money; and it makes a lot more than the trains cost to run.
That's what he means - the railway in and of itself does not make money, but it helps make money elsewhere, leading to an overall profit to society (financial and otherwise).
The railway should be accessible to all financially - at the moment ticket prices are ridiculous, and it is much cheaper for me, on my own, with my disabled Railcard, to drive somewhere and pay for parking than it is to take the train. Forget travelling with anyone else. How does that make any sense? And that's on a line that is already nationalised.
@@CharityAngelSpectrum
I've literally found it cheaper to get a return flight from London -> Berlin -> Edinburgh, than it was to book a return ticket London -> Edinburgh on the train.
@@BigShrimpin_ That's just absurd. In no world should it be cheaper to fly. Especially via another country!
If nothing else, it's not exactly in keeping with reducing greenhouse emissions, is it?
British Rail is, sort of, already nationalised. Network Rail is public, and the remaining franchises (TOCs) operate under strict rules about how much they can charge, lines run, frequency, etc. In effect, they're no more than outsourced service providers. This isn't nationalisation, it's just bringing outsourced service providers inhouse.
Labour are NOT about improving services though. Yesterday they cancelled the £500m scheme to re-open to passengers freight-only, moth-balled, and closed lines. This will stupidity by Labour will deny rail services to many communities.
One thing that I don't think has been mentioned anywhere yet is that Sir Keir Starmer 🤴 (pause to salute) has appointed Sir Peter Hendy as Rail Minister. That's someone with plenty of real-world experience of running transport networks, which has got to be encouraging
Looks like he might need to put on a few pounds, as fat controller.
...hoping you meant the lbs (not £) version 🤞
@@whyyoulidl I mean like the video says. The government needs to put money into the system if they want it to start working. I'm happy to temporarily pay more if in the long term it yields improvements
Why in the world would I want to salute Kier Stalin for?
@@holydiver73 government bad until i like it
Hey, cool, very well said! I come from an island with no railways - Guernsey - and was always fascinated when I flew to London. Anyway, where I ended up, in Austria, the railways are sort of nationalised. And I think they have done rather well (the ÖBB). Good luck!
Oh yes, btw ... in Guernsey we have the "States of Guernsey". All crucial infrastructure (water, energy, airline, ferries...) is nationalsed. And Guernsey is far from socialism.
Quote of the Day: “Good idea. Stupid name. It sounds Victorian.”
Whilst a LNER liveried train was in shot
For once youtubes recomendation algorithm has provided me with a great channel. Im subbing.
Let's hope they don't buy 118 diesels from looking at a single drawing and complain when it doesn't work again. (Cough Cough BR Class 17 Cough Cough)
Not just the 17 BR done it with a few classes of diesel tho the 17 was the biggest cock up
That was caused by a rush to switch to an immature technology - from the inefficient but well understood steam to something new (diesel).
A similar situation exists today. Governments all over the world are keen to move away from fossil fuels & switch to something new.
So it will not be dodgy diesels, but GBR could buy 118 hydrogen or battery powered trains then find the implementation of them is unsuitable for its intended purpose or just engineered badly.
@@TheRip72 Luckily those German chaps have already had a go with hydrogen and had their initial enthusiasm replaced by rejection, so hopefully we can learn from them.
Hopefully....
@@GreenJimll For a moment there I thought you were talking about the Hindenburg.
@@TheRip72 well be fair started dieselising in the mid 50s till late 60s but diesels had been successfully produced world wide BR just broke the golden rule of manufacturing dont bulk before you test
Intersting how some successes are related to local rail service being run locally. I think this is where we have a problem. Inter-city should be a distinct type of service (prebooked seats availible, advance fares, off peak and anytime fares). Clearly branded..
Local and regional trains turn up and go, no pre-booking. No advance tickets just one price.
I think that the Tories' rail privatisation failed, but not necessarily for the reasons you state. My view is that the political aims were:
1. To distance any failings from the government ("it's not the governments fault your train is always late, it's the private operators"). That failed.
2. To gradually let the less economic lines shut. Failed: there have been no significant closures in the last 30 years, probably the longest period that's ever happened since 1920.
3. To manage a long term decline in the railways. Failed: GB passenger numbers were already increasing, but pretty much as soon as they were privatised the long established link between numbers and GDP broke and passenger numbers started increasing a lot faster.
4. To save money. Failed: the complexity and duplication has added costs
5. To loosen regulation. Failed: regulation and safety have increased and the UK railways are one the safest in the world
6. To get new blood into the industry to show railwaymen how things should be done. Failed (mostly) a lot of the companies came in and regretted getting rid of the BR managers. There was some good innovative thinking, but generally the industry is once again run by people (men and women now, thankfully) who've come up through the ranks. And justifiably so. The main problem in those regard is that there less mixing between operators and network rail
While there are certainly problems at the moment, passenger growth has been extraordinary for much of the time, safety has dramatically improved (after Railtrack was nationalised). Although peak fares are very high by international standards, the relatively moderate off peak fares and the often very cheap advance purchase fares have kept overall fares to within what's paid elsewhere. And has helped grow demand off peak and make the system more efficient and peaks slightly less crowded.
My main concern is that a national railway will go back to having to go to the Treasury every year begging for money and not being able to plan ahead as happened in BR days. The current system did at least guarantee promised investment at every franchise letting.
But the chance to have a more integrated transport network, especially at a local level is promising.
When the Docklands Light Railway was built, it was built on the cheap. It became a "victim of it's own success" and lot of money has had to be spent on increasing the size of the trains, adding new branch lines and so on.
If we do the new British Rail right, and are able to do a bit of rejigging so that cities outside London can have at least London Overground levels of service (i.e. four trains per hour) I would expect trust in the railway to push up passenger numbers to the extent that many parts of the UK would get so busy that the capacity of those systems is strained and further investment in lengthening trains and operating higher train frequencies is needed.
@@DavidShepheard a lot of lines are like that already. Unfortunately the government has been generally unwilling to provide for it. While franchising does secure funding for a good few years, it does mean that it can be difficult to get extra funding when needed. The Northern franchise was originally let based on zero growth, but had seen huge demand.
Point 5. Safety increased only after Railtrack was nationalised.
@@telhudson863 Indeed. But the TOCs were still privatised and do have a huge impact on safety. The rail infrastructure should definitely be nationalised, the freight operators should definitely be private. It's the passenger operators where there's more debate.
I think the fast charge project is a really excellent idea. Down here in Weymouth, there are still diesel electric services for the local services. Fast charge could be used for those services.
People malign BR but into the late 80s and at the years before privatisation. BR was getting a handle on things however politicians and the DFT sticking their fingers in the pie and dictating rather than letting the people that know how to run things, actually run things caused more and more issues.
I certainly remember being able to afford to use the train frequently. And the biggest complaint was about the sandwiches. Happy days.
My memories of BR include; filthy stations, cold waiting rooms, late or cancelled trains, filthy trains, incredibly rude staff, high ticket prices. There is nothing and there has never been anything run well by the government.
@@archiebald4717 My last trip to London included cancelled trains, a train that stank of chemical toilets (having had to drive to another station to get it), no air con, and a ticket price of over 100 quid return for a journey of 1 hour where I had to stand in a corridor. And then I had to do the same thing all the way back again because they still hadn't got their sh*t together. Although we did have aircon on the way back to be fair.
@@archiebald4717 Funny, that's been my experience of the current system
@@86pp73great so no change just a whole lot of taxpayer money will be flushed nationalising the railways.
I hope this isn’t going to cause problems for the heritage services, always love seeing a steam loco in the mainline.
9 mins 22 secs of outrageously sensible thinking. Have a gold star ⭐️
It was Red Star under BR, surely? 😂
I feel like it's worth noting that some TOCs have genuinely innovated and created real meaningful differences for the users of the railway, especially in the New Labour era. C2C, Chiltern and SWT spring to mind, and Virgin Trains was widely popular too. I suppose you can see GWRs innovations in line with that too.
On the other hand you had the horrors of Connex and Railtrack who's actions literally caused loss of life, and while GoVia did successfully turn around South Central into Southern in its early years and introduce the Javelin on Southeastern, it ofc was stripped of Southeastern for cooking the books and saw years of strikes under Southern in the late 2010s.
That said, the worst strikes on the railway network have happened when the government had guaranteed the railways profits, like Southern during the implementation of the Thameslink Programme and the railways in general Post-Covid. One thing about the railways being nationalised is that they will once again be subject to greater political influence... For better, or for worse.
It better be back. I work for Network Rail and I see jobs going on the GBR Transition Team. Bloody hell they get paid a huge wedge, for jobs that seem frivolous. Let's hope it is not just a waste of taxpayer money. However, seeing how much we spend on expensive contractor staff rather than permanent staff, I do not hold my breath.
you can bet on it being that
Very enjoyable watch, well put together and informative. I look forward to your next rendering!