What would you do if you were minister for transport?

[voila1]

but you have to think of safety if your talking about 3rd rail as knowing young child => teenages like to play on railway lines then even with fencing they will touch the 3rd rail which is gunna be lethal

[Ameecher]

but you have to think of safety if your talking about 3rd rail as knowing young child => teenages like to play on railway lines then even with fencing they will touch the 3rd rail which is gunna be lethal

That's their problem really. How many times do you hear of a person being fried on the Southern region? There is a heck of a lot of 3rd rail in the south of the country and people cope fine with it. If some numpty* touches it, well it's Darwinism in action.

*Numpty is refering to trespassers.

[Kevo00]

Yep. If your going to take that attitude, why bother having railways at all? Someone might get knocked over by a train.

I'm sure the electrification wasn't abandoned for safety reasons!

[MjD]

... 1tph I would suspect is about the right level to attract the right passenger numbers - if a line cannot even sustain this, it should be shut....
!

So that would be a good-bye to the West Highland Line in Scotland then? Since that is roughly 1 every 3 hours if my memory is correct.

MD

[andel]

And heart of wales - 4 tpDAY!

[Kevo00]

... 1tph I would suspect is about the right level to attract the right passenger numbers - if a line cannot even sustain this, it should be shut....
!

So that would be a good-bye to the West Highland Line in Scotland then? Since that is roughly 1 every 3 hours if my memory is correct.

MD

Yes I'm afraid so - infact it would probably be cheaper to fly everyone by helicopter up there than keep the WHL open. Unless it makes a profit running its 4 trains or so per day, which I doubt, although there is some freight use that may help. However consider the relative remoteness of a lot of the line and the fact that it has a lot of heavy engineering which probably costs a lot to maintain. Others to consider would the the Kyle line, Far North Line, Middlesborough - Whitby, and indeed the Heart of Wales, and probably a few others in peripheral locations. The problem is that for most of these its simpler to drive to the locations, even in the Highlands - and I'd be interested to know what percentage of those using the trains in those areas are actually local. Not that they attract visitors either, being so occasional and often with ridiculously long journey times - for instance the train timings make it almost impossible to enjoy a full day out on the NYMR traveling there by Northern Rail...

[andel]

Heart of Wales provides a must needed service as well as supporting the tourism in Wales and as such has managed to avoid closure for many years... it also produces profit in the summer from tourism around Sugar Loaf mountain and in the winter between Knighton and Llandrindod.

[Parkey]

I think the lesson is that the "profits" of a railway go well beyond the farebox revenue. If only it were easier to quantify exactly what benefits a railway brings to the local economy having some nice round numbers would make it much easier to argue the case for them.

As for Wales I know that parts of Snowdonia do suffer from terrible congestion and car parking problems, so better public transport for the tourism industry is always a plus. Not that I would agree with anything crazy like building a railway up a mountain. That would be mad!

[Kevo00]

I think the lesson is that the "profits" of a railway go well beyond the farebox revenue. If only it were easier to quantify exactly what benefits a railway brings to the local economy having some nice round numbers would make it much easier to argue the case for them.

Thats my point entirely. If no one is using a railway then it does not benefit the local economy - infact it costs the local economy. Note that UK economic growth did not end with the Beeching cuts! I agree that farebox revenue does not represent economic profit, but the benefits from railways are often overstated - I'd be interested to see the figures for the Heart of Wales line to see if four full sprinters a day worth of revenue are enough to pay for keeping the track open.

[Washu]

If and only if I was in charge of the DfT, I wouldn't proceed with De-Beeching everything on the train network, but actually review areas that did have a rail connection and determine restoring a service to that village/town/city/small duck pond, would actually be a good idea. It's all well and good saying "bring back every station" but the moment these stations start loosing money, the tax payer would have to start paying more out of his pocket and speaking as a tax payer, that can feck right off.

There are several local towns in my area that did once have a train line, but now sadly do not. Gosport is the biggest town in Europe that has no train service what so ever. Restoring Gosports rail link, in either a tram/bus/train format would not only reduce the horrific traffic conditions of the two A roads leaving it but also bring more revenue/jobs into a rather jobless area.

I know a lot of MP's talk about "reviews" "investigations" "research", but in all honestly its a good idea to first look at the idea because blindly throwing money at it and hoping it'll all go away after drowning in a sea of five pound notes.

Another good example of a line that could be restored is the Luton Bute Street station line, that connection Dunstable, Harpeden and a few other places (my minds foggy after being attacked by an air con unit v.v). Restoring this line, which is still in place today would again bring a better reduction on road usage, and in turn bring jobs back to the lines.

I'm all for restoring lines that need to be there, but bringing back silly small lines that perhaps only a few people a week used (I've read one nice article on Disused Railway Stations where the 7 passengers a day knew each other for one station) is just silly.

So lots of reviews, investigations AND then action for me!

[dasy2k1]

sort out the mess of privitisation by repeating the 1921 grouping

split the country into about 5 companies (slightly more than the original 4 i know)

southern,
east coast (LNER)
west coast (LMS)
Great western
Scotland


give the track, trains and everything to do with the running of the railway to them.
if they want to cut delays caused by track faults then they can just go ahead and spend more money on track maintaniance.

if they want to run 140MPH services thats fine if they can afford to upgrade the route.

if they want to run into another's patch thats also fine... the 2 companies can sort it out like adults between them and come to a mutually accepatble soultion.

the problem with the current system is that there are so many middlemen with their respective profit margins that running a profitable railway is virtually impossable.
also there is so little franchise securaity that there is no point spending money now as you will not still have the franchise to get the benifits of it....
(eg, midland mainline (national express) buying these shiny new 222s for them to be operated by stagecoach

[JamieLei]

National Express did not buy the 222s, they simply leased them from a RoSCo (Rolling Stock Company). However, Virgin are up in arms as they provided exact specifications (right down to number of seats and how many disabled toilets), and the DfT originally did not let them expand to 11 cars. Now that the DfT have nicked their idea (in return for no franchise extension), they're in outrage. The DfT are killing entrepreneurship and R+D. Virgin should be rewarded for thinking ahead and coming up with new ideas : instead they're being penalised.

I don't think Nationalisation or Grouping is the right way forward to take the situation - however, the DfT should REALLY reduce its grip on the TOCs - it's getting ridiculous. Look at LOROL - they can't do anything literally. They can't set prices, they can't adjust timetables. All they can do is set the drivers' wage and pick up litter.

Competition helps to keep fares low. Between Birmingham and London, you can travel by Chiltern (Walk-Up £18 Super-Off Peak), London Midland (Walk-Up £23 CDR) and Virgin (Advance £20). A monopolistic situation would really force prices up, as companies can then charge what the hell they want, with little concern for the passengers.

Network Rail is a not-for-profit company and therefore does not have profit margins. ATOC is also not-for-profit. So where are these "middlemen profit margins"?

Upgrading the route is _extremely_ expensive, and to 140mph is feasible only with very high ticket prices. It cost 12.6bn to get the WCML to 125mph sadly. It would be easier on the ECML (due to lack of curves) but would involve building paralell lines as capacity is a problem.

What we need is high speed lines. There's the speed. The capacity can come from extra carriages - ie: Pendos to 11-cars. Some of the passengers will move to High Speed Lines, thus freeing up loadings.

[Ameecher]

The trouble with upgrading to 140mph is that you need to introduce cab signalling or lengthen signal blocks so that trains can stop within the current signal blocks (ie, if a driver sees a double amber they have to be able to stop their train with in two signal blocks from full speed). BR trialled 140mph running on the ECML by introducing a flashing green signal indicating that the next signal was green only then were drivers allowed to run at 140mph.

A similar problem dogged the APT that was designed to run at high speed but was unable to due to signal block lengths so to basically, if you are going to speed lots of money on resignalling for 140mph, you may as well speed the extra bit and go for 155 or something similar. 15mph isn't really all that much faster, you need a far larger increase to make the change worthwhile.

As for Re-grouping, who would run these groups? Would they be tendered for like current franchises? Also you will have the problem of routes like the TranspennineExpress network, who will operate that? LNE or LNW? Grouping was fine when you were going from literally hundreds of small private railways towards a nationalised railway, going from an essentially national railway (yeah sure, it's a privatised one but it's still a national network that is under one governing body) backwards to grouping would cause all manner of issues.

[Kevo00]

National Express did not buy the 222s, they simply leased them from a RoSCo (Rolling Stock Company). However, Virgin are up in arms as they provided exact specifications (right down to number of seats and how many disabled toilets), and the DfT originally did not let them expand to 11 cars. Now that the DfT have nicked their idea (in return for no franchise extension), they're in outrage. The DfT are killing entrepreneurship and R+D. Virgin should be rewarded for thinking ahead and coming up with new ideas : instead they're being penalised.

I don't think Nationalisation or Grouping is the right way forward to take the situation - however, the DfT should REALLY reduce its grip on the TOCs - it's getting ridiculous. Look at LOROL - they can't do anything literally. They can't set prices, they can't adjust timetables. All they can do is set the drivers' wage and pick up litter.

Competition helps to keep fares low. Between Birmingham and London, you can travel by Chiltern (Walk-Up £18 Super-Off Peak), London Midland (Walk-Up £23 CDR) and Virgin (Advance £20). A monopolistic situation would really force prices up, as companies can then charge what the hell they want, with little concern for the passengers.

Network Rail is a not-for-profit company and therefore does not have profit margins. ATOC is also not-for-profit. So where are these "middlemen profit margins"?

The low amount of entrepreneurial freedom allowed to TOCs is a severe handicap for the system. TOCs are even told in their franchise agreements where specific vending machines should be located and so on. Not sure what LOROL is though, have to admit my ignorance there. But the problem here comes down to ensuring that TOCs do not just go for the money - that they do provide certain services, and don't just cut everything in sight, which they would definitely do if they had the entrepreneurial freedom to do so. However, companies should have reasonable entrepreneurial freedom of action IMO as long as safety is not put at risk, and obviously as long as any passengers do not suffer hardship. Its interesting however that the fares that are rising steepest are the regulated ones, while the average passenger is paying less through non-regulated advance purchase tickets, which also allow the passenger to make triangular journeys easily, because you no longer have to pay the return price for a single (which you did under nationalization, incidentally). So evidence out there already suggests more entrepenurialism is making fares cheaper, not more expensive.

As far as competition goes however, we should remember that Rail is only one player in a wider transport market. As such rail's real competitors are the private car, the bus and the plane (although yes, some bus firms own trains that they 'compete' against). Therefore I don't see why one firm owning each corridor is such a bad thing - infact the evidence that I can see on the ECML has been that unregulated competition is negative for passengers, at least where open-access operators are concerned. Just ask my friend who was on a Hull Trains service last week which broke down, was then turfed off at Doncaster and required to pay another fare to get to Hull. The advance purchase tickets noted above however are surely a response to other forms of transport such as Megabus and the cheap airlines which thrive on advance purchase - I suspect that if Chiltern, London Midland and Virgin were the same company, they would probably still have the same pricing structure on the different routes offered, because few people asses the different rail routes in comparison to each other, but they do assess different modes of transport - and they probably buy via thetrainline.com anyway.

As for profit margins, well to run a train you need to pay rent to Network Rail (not for profit was never more true in their case) and to a ROSCO. Network Rail might not have profit margins in the traditional sense, but they haven't given the margins back to TOCs either. They are supposed to be investing it in the network, but of course costs involved in this have been inflated out of reality. Don't forget that fines to NR still exist incase of late running, unless the late running is the fault of NR, in which case a fine is paid the other way. Lawyers are needed to look after these transactions. ROSCOs are owned by banks. That says enough about them I think...

[dasy2k1]

NR dont make a profit as such, but the RoSCos definatly do
as do the sub contractors used to maintain the trains,
as do the million and one consultants who have to be engaged for somthing as simple as replacing a footbridge!