High Speed Two

[orudge]

Back on topic, guess who's going to be taxed for the construction of this new network - oh yes, it's the already overtaxed motorist and air traveller again.

[Kevo00]

Here comes the road lobby. Roads will never replace air travel though, unless you build some sort of super-highway where everyone drives a Bugatti, Zonda or McLaren F1. Which would be wasteful. Seems Mr Glaister has missed the whole point of the argument.

As for road funding, perhaps the EU should stop building massive highways in areas like Skye and build them somewhere sensible instead?

[audigex]

Having thought about this, I've come to a strange conclusion...maybe they should just make the trains NICER, MORE FREQUENT and CHEAPER rather than concentrating on FASTER.

I take my car anywhere possible, even though I love trains, simply because it's cheaper. The fact that railways run at a small profit margin and roads are hugely taxed just proves how un-economical it is.

One problem is that the taxpayer subsidises the un-profitable lines and maintains the infrastructure, as opposed to the profitable lines paying for this and allowing the whole thing to be cheaper. We're shelling out for it anyway, why does some company get the profits?

Fact is that I like trains, but I just can't justify paying more. Any one person the train is cheaper, 2 or more and suddenly the train looks freaking expensive.

Example: Me going to my girlfriends for the night
Day single, £4.50
Day return, £5.00
Open returns aren't available on this route (wtf??)
Bus fair to train station = £1.20
So going up one day, and back any other day = £11.40
Petrol costs for the route: £3, regardless of whether I come back on the same day or not, taking 2/3 of the time of the train journey alone (not including the bus, waiting for the bus, waiting for the train and the short walking distances)

So I save £7.40, I travel in a 5 year old car with my own music, going door-to-door in 23 minutes, whenever I want - as opposed to paying that extra £7.40 to travel for nearly an hour on a bus and a train that's older than I am, which are timed 2 hours apart. listening to some chav's crappy phone.

Faster isn't the issue with the train - it's not competitive with a car anyway; the issues are the crap stations, noisy old trains and complete crappy atmosphere.

Trains I like, travelling on them - not so much.

[doktorhonig]

How often do you go to you gf? Maybe there's some kind of cheaper ticket if you take that train often.
But yes, if you need to go by bus after your train ride, it's probably not the best way to travel.

When I go to see my princess, I pay 29 Euros for about 500 or 700 km (her home/uni) taking the train over the night. Instead of driving hundreds of boring autobahn kms, I sit on a rather modern train with power outlets and play OpenTTD or UFO: Enemy Unkown all night.

But you're right - if there was a faster train that costs significantly more, I wouldn't take it. But probably because I don't consider time spent on a train as "lost", because I can use it.

[FHS]

Having thought about this, I've come to a strange conclusion...maybe they should just make the trains NICER, MORE FREQUENT and CHEAPER rather than concentrating on FASTER.

I take my car anywhere possible, even though I love trains, simply because it's cheaper. The fact that railways run at a small profit margin and roads are hugely taxed just proves how un-economical it is.

One problem is that the taxpayer subsidises the un-profitable lines and maintains the infrastructure, as opposed to the profitable lines paying for this and allowing the whole thing to be cheaper. We're shelling out for it anyway, why does some company get the profits?

Fact is that I like trains, but I just can't justify paying more. Any one person the train is cheaper, 2 or more and suddenly the train looks freaking expensive.

Example: Me going to my girlfriends for the night
Day single, £4.50
Day return, £5.00
Open returns aren't available on this route (wtf??)
Bus fair to train station = £1.20
So going up one day, and back any other day = £11.40
Petrol costs for the route: £3, regardless of whether I come back on the same day or not, taking 2/3 of the time of the train journey alone (not including the bus, waiting for the bus, waiting for the train and the short walking distances)

So I save £7.40, I travel in a 5 year old car with my own music, going door-to-door in 23 minutes, whenever I want - as opposed to paying that extra £7.40 to travel for nearly an hour on a bus and a train that's older than I am, which are timed 2 hours apart. listening to some chav's crappy phone.

Faster isn't the issue with the train - it's not competitive with a car anyway; the issues are the crap stations, noisy old trains and complete crappy atmosphere.

Trains I like, travelling on them - not so much.

Well, i guess thats something that privatisation brings with it. Ever been here in switzerland? A Train is never delayed more than 5 minutes but you cant say the trains are running highspeed, Also you have about 2 TP/H at every rural station.

Privatisation brings speed and nationalisation brings comfort, sofar i knoww.

[Kevo00]

Privatisation brings speed and nationalisation brings comfort, sofar i knoww.

I really don't get this obsession with nationalisation. Nationalisation is fine as long as the political will is there to make it work, but when it is not it usually becomes little better than managed decline. If you want to see what bad nationalised rail is like go to somewhere like New South Wales or Northern Ireland where the services on offer are occasional at best on many routes, very slow with frequent stops (in Northern Ireland the state bus company runs busses that are quicker than its own trains!), and infrastructure often hasn't been invested in for many years, probably because its anticipated just to be run into the ground then closed. In the NSW case Sydney-Canberra (just 287km/178 miles apart) could logically be made into an excellent rail corridor with hourly trains and high usage, say with 100mph top speed trains taking a car beating 2 hours. Instead they have two trains a day that hardly anyone uses, taking more than 4 hours to cover the route and the Canberra station is little more than a hut - hardly fitting for a service that connects a nation's capital and biggest city! It doesn't happen though because the political will is not there to improve it.

UK services meanwhile have improved considerably since privatisation - unfortunately so have people's expectations of the service, which is why you get so many complaints. When I was a kid using trains relatively infrequently they used to be quite dingy, often not cleaned much and frequently broke down or stopped in random places without any announcements being made (there wasn't even a p.a. system on a lot of trains). If you went out somewhere for the day by train you could guarantee that you would return to the station to find the trains delayed by an hour or more. Also many station buildings were neglected or torn down and replaced by dingy/unattractive buildings - anyone name a BR era station building that they like?

Now I'm an adult, I use trains frequently, and the last time I remember being delayed on a train by an hour or more was due to a fallen tree on the West Highland Line. We'll let them off on that one I think...

[Ameecher]

anyone name a BR era station building that they like?

I dunno, that New Street place ain't bad. In all seriousness, Sidcup is quite a snazzy station.

Nationalisation is not always better, as someone pointed out on another forum, as soon as you make the railway a part of the government it then becomes an easier target for spending cuts, nationalisation will only work when you have a pro-rail government and when you actually listen to a lot of staff who have worked with the before and after of privatisation, a lot of them say it ain't so bad. Admittedly there are areas that are lacking but isn't there always? And the areas that do lack in privatisation are fewer than those under BR.

[Fizzy Mash]

anyone name a BR era station building that they like?

I dunno, that New Street place ain't bad. In all seriousness, Sidcup is quite a snazzy station.

Nationalisation is not always better, as someone pointed out on another forum, as soon as you make the railway a part of the government it then becomes an easier target for spending cuts, nationalisation will only work when you have a pro-rail government and when you actually listen to a lot of staff who have worked with the before and after of privatisation, a lot of them say it ain't so bad. Admittedly there are areas that are lacking but isn't there always? And the areas that do lack in privatisation are fewer than those under BR.

The 'Privatisation brings improvements' argument is blown out of the water by the sh*thole that is Wakefield Kirkgate station...

[FHS]

Probably i shouldn´t compare England to Mainland Europe?

[JamieLei]

Probably i shouldn´t compare England to Mainland Europe?

Because England has more frequent services on every route? Because the trains are cleaner? Because Paris RER A is dingy/smelly/dangerous/stinks-of-pee (anyone who's riden it will agree with me on that one) and FCC's Thameslink is getting new trains/is clean/punctual (give-or-take)/safe? Because even some of the crappiest UK cities have hourly services to London, and the major ones 200 miles away have up to 3 trains per hour? Compare England with Mainland Europe but compare it fairly instead of the old "Oh it's so much cheaper and they have high speed lines". The frequencies are actually awful. I've posted this pic and i'll post it again to simply remind how frequent our trains are.

[FHS]

Srry. I am probably speaking for the Swiss railways anyway. I agree that Paris RER is pretty crap, but you cant assume its the same in every country on mainland europe.
We still have better service frequencies in rural areas anyways, eg. The Basel RER is a rather unprofitable operation outside of the rushhour but still weve got a 2 T/PH. Additionally (Dont know if that exists in britain) weve got a so called "Taktfahrplan", that means, all the trains run at regular intervals, for example, always 00:30 and 00:00.

[JGR]

Probably i shouldn´t compare England to Mainland Europe?

Because England has more frequent services on every route? Because the trains are cleaner? Because Paris RER A is dingy/smelly/dangerous/stinks-of-pee (anyone who's riden it will agree with me on that one) and FCC's Thameslink is getting new trains/is clean/punctual (give-or-take)/safe? Because even some of the crappiest UK cities have hourly services to London, and the major ones 200 miles away have up to 3 trains per hour? Compare England with Mainland Europe but compare it fairly instead of the old "Oh it's so much cheaper and they have high speed lines". The frequencies are actually awful. I've posted this pic and i'll post it again to simply remind how frequent our trains are.

There's an awful lot of generalisations there...

You're quite right that mainland Europe (nebulous thing that it is) is not perfection, and that it has it's issues. The more frequent services on every route bit I think is an exaggeration though. Trains are cleaner, could well be, I haven't been on any terribly dirty trains in the UK...
Many Paris RER and metro stations (not just A) smell of pee, this is because they are full of Parisians. The old A stock (which runs on the branch I used (St. Germain)), (excluding the newer, nicer express ones that don't stop at my local station) is s***, old and gratified up, but the SNCF-run branches and the other RERs run positively pleasant trains.
Don't see where you get more dangerous from though (unless you mean suicide hotspots like La Defense, but there's not much you can do about that).
I had to laugh at dingy, compared to the London Underground, pretty much every other underground rail network/station I've used has been positively cavernous.

I agree with you on the cheapness front (except for the London Underground, which is relatively expensive compared to other metro systems).

Frequencies on many mainland European rural lines are rather low, but then again, many of the analogous lines over here don't run at all any more.

[Ameecher]

Whilst some lines suffer appalling frequencies others receive very good ones. Rail travel in Britain is a very different beast to that on mainland europe. For a start we don't really do long distance trains. What do I mean by that? I mean the epic trains like Hamburg - Budapest via Berlin, Dresden, Prague (and more further beyond that). These are all massive cities yet the trains run a few times a day. Our main long distance train journeys run one way, north-south rather than being a whole load of trunk routes criss-crossing the country. Stripping the network of Britain down reveals that essentially there is one main hub which is London which everything else feeds into, it could be argued that there are others at Birmingham, Manchester and Birmingham but the importance of these secondary hubs can not be compared to that of London in the way that the main Swiss rail hubs of Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Luzern etc can be put on a parallel. Perhaps it is our geography that dictates that or the fact that we have one city that is so much larger than the others whereas the likes of Switzerland has cities that are of a similar size. I don't know, I can only really speculate.

Did that even make sense?

[JamieLei]

Indeed there's A LOT of generalisations but less generalisations than the average pro-European-nationalisation post. In addition, the Swiss railways are indeed better in many aspects.

Trains in Britain are on the whole what we call Clockface. I know that (or at least on the last timetable!) the express trains to Birmingham from Euston run at xx:03, xx:23 and xx:43 of which the last one calls at Milton Keynes at not at Rugby or Watford. The locals on XC-South leave New Street every 10 mins at xx:04, xx:14, xx:24 etc and calling patterns are usually similar even at rush hour when the odd extra train may be laid on (eg: an hourly service might become a half hourly service, but usually they just lengthen the trains).

But I have to agree most with Kevin's point that the train service in UK has drastically improved, but so has customer's expectations. I was talking to Andel one night over MSN, and we both agreed that Britain has never had it so good. There's still A LOT that could be improved, including lowering the price of fares, but for a system that's making the transition away from subsidy (2010 will mark the year quite a few subsidy-receiving franchises such as Virgin turn into premium-paying ones, and others such as NXEC already pay), it work remarkably well.

[Kevo00]

One area where UK trains do vary from the continent by and large is that ours are more comfortable to travel on, by and large. Moving to clockface timetables has been beneficial, of course many continental countries have clockface timetables too (not France of course). As for the character of the services - London is possibly the biggest city in Europe (I think so anyway?) and yet most of our other big towns are small on a European scale. A quick glance at the DfT's station useage statistics clearly shows that stations providing a direct service to London by and large have healthier passenger figures than those that do not. I can't think of another European country where one centre dominates so prominently, except perhaps in relatively small countries like the Czech Republic, Croatia or Serbia.

Unfortunately I think the price in the UK is the main downer. However pricing in other countries seems likely to rise. Most Continental countries are now moving towards privatisation, and indeed the UK industry structure is, I believe, based on that of Sweden. Many countries are even moving towards a full open access model, while funding for regional services is transferred to provincial governments. This has meant privatisation in some cases, or even the complete loss of funding for rail to cheaper bus services. Generally the cost of rail travel is being shifted from society in general, most of which never uses a train, to the train traveller themselves, and this is a continent wide phenomenon - it just happens that its more visible in the UK where we made the mistake of breaking up our national operator rather than turning it into a state owned profit centre, as Germany has done with DB.

[JamieLei]

A quick glance at the DfT's station useage statistics clearly shows that stations providing a direct service to London by and large have healthier passenger figures than those that do not. I can't think of another European country where one centre dominates so prominently, except perhaps in relatively small countries like the Czech Republic, Croatia or Serbia.

Indeed you're quite correct with that. As far as I know, Blackpool North is the most used station to _not_ have a direct link to London, and it ranks somewhere at 120th in the rankings. When services on the Uckfield Line received a direct link to London Bridge (previously they had to change somewhere for Victoria), the passenger numbers shot up by 30-60%.

London has always been the economic centre of Britain with regards to tertiary industry (the North has always been our heavy manufacturing centre) and theories such as Friedman's Theory of Core-Periphery explain how most of the investment has been redirected _back_ into the Core (London) rather than spent on improving the Periphery (Newcastle, etc). Other countries have actively tried to reduce the importance of the Core, such as France which designated many other cities such as Nice as growth areas and visibly forced portions of government departments to evacuate Paris.

[Kevo00]

Actually we have tried that policy too. And its failed miserably.

[audigex]

Probably i shouldn´t compare England to Mainland Europe?

Because England has more frequent services on every route? Because the trains are cleaner? Because Paris RER A is dingy/smelly/dangerous/stinks-of-pee (anyone who's riden it will agree with me on that one) and FCC's Thameslink is getting new trains/is clean/punctual (give-or-take)/safe? Because even some of the crappiest UK cities have hourly services to London, and the major ones 200 miles away have up to 3 trains per hour? Compare England with Mainland Europe but compare it fairly instead of the old "Oh it's so much cheaper and they have high speed lines". The frequencies are actually awful. I've posted this pic and i'll post it again to simply remind how frequent our trains are.

Very nice, if you happen to live next to Euston(?). It's all well and good for those in the bigger cities to talk about how good public transport can be - but for the rest of us, it's a pile of rusty tubes doing 2-miles-per-fortnight.

I was sat in preston the other week watching 3 voyagers, 2 pendolinos, 3 185's and a stack of sprinters going absolutely nowhere. Even without catastrophic failures, I can sit in Lancaster (a mainline station) knowing that both of the trains to the south of manchester in the next 3 hours are delayed, and will be packed.

And my favourite revelation of the week? Discovering that a standard Lancaster-Preston return is £7, or 34p/mile. Add in the bus fare to the station and it's well over 45p/mile I can drive it for under 20p/mile.

[Kevo00]

Its not worth the taxpayer subsidising public transport in the north much more than it is however, infact it would be more wasteful to have a higher frequency on routes that relatively few people are traveling on. I don't think it will ever be possible for provincial railways to compete with car transport equitably, as most people do not live very close to the station and will still always be able to do a faster, and often cheaper point to point journey.

Audigex, are you under 25? Do you have a young persons railcard? You were talking about the expense of short journeys above - in my experience, short rail journeys can be extremely cheap with a railcard.

[Dave]

And my favourite revelation of the week? Discovering that a standard Lancaster-Preston return is £7, or 34p/mile. Add in the bus fare to the station and it's well over 45p/mile I can drive it for under 20p/mile.

That's because there aren't any local services - you can get from Preston to Lancaster in 12 minutes by train.