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[quote user="owlsroost"] Taking a cue from Simon Reed's contribution, my take on the privatisation/open access situation in the UK is:- 1. Open Access freight is probably the best thing to have happened to rail freight since BR was formed in 1948 - even allowing for economic growth and changing traffic patterns (e.g. power station coal traffic switching to imported coal with longer hauls) it's reversed the relentless decline in rail freight and made it a truly competitive (between operators) business for the first time since 1825. 2. To make open access work, I think you need to separate the infrastructure from the train operators and provide some sort of independant regulator to sort out disputes and keep the playing field fair and level - they got that bit basically right. One thing that seems to have 'matured' since privatisation is the attitudes of operators and Railtrack/Network Rail towards each other when problems happen on a day-to-day basis - they've realised (re-discovered ?) that the railway is a complex system and keeping it running smoothly needs co-operation, not laywers arguing with each other over the fine print in the contracts. 3. The big mistake was setting up Railtrack as a 'virtual' company as far as maintenance was concerned (it was all contracted out), and splintering the ex-BR maintenance function into so many small pieces. All this really achieved was increased costs and a crucial core activity which was far more difficult to control and monitor - and it's taken even more effort/money to put the  maintenance function back together under Network Rail. 4. I think open access passenger operations could work here on a larger scale, now that the industry has recovered from the initial 'nuclear explosion' and has (in some cases) re-learnt how to run a railway. The big problem I see is how do you handle socially necessary subsidised services, without the subsidies directly or indirectly contributing to the profits of an open-access operator on the route - the franchise model seems to be the best compromise anyone has come up with so far. One thing to keep in mind is that there is actual competition between operators on some routes e.g. GNER, Virgin and TPE between York and Newcastle (while operators are required to sell and accept operator-agnostic tickets, they are free to sell cheaper operator-specific tickets if they want to, and run more trains than their basic franchise commitment mandates). I think the recent round of franchising changes have been a retrograde step in some cases because they've reduced the competion possibilities e.g. all of the services from Paddington (First Great Western) and Liverpool Street ('one' Railway) are now in the hands of a single operator where before they had different commuter and long-distance operators. 5. I suspect one reason why the politicians didn't want to risk more open access passenger operations at the start is because of earlier experiences when bus operations in most parts of the UK were privatised and de-regulated. It basically went from regulated monopolies through a period of instability (in some cases schedules and routes changing every week, lots of buses on prime routes and very few on others etc - not very useful if that was the only way you had of getting to work etc), then slowly the bigger operators either bought out or forced off the road the smaller ones (by undercutting the fares and/or swamping the route with buses) until we ended up with a different set of regional monopolists - e.g. Stagecoach, First Group and Arriva (sometimes known collectively as the 'bus bandits'). If the bus services in my area are typical, overall they have improved compared to pre-regulation, but things took a long time to settle down and in some cases there is a clear separation between commercial services (basically morning to early evening, mon-sat) and subsidised (run under contract from the local council) services at other times e.g. a different operator. So, overall - I think it's been a successful experiment (but expensive), and I don't think I'd want to go back to BR - that had it's problems too. Comments ? Tony [/quote] An excellent synopsis.  But I still don't know your take on the whole "was it the privatization, or was it the quasi-open access" argument as it relates to the problems experienced.  Surely they overdid it with the break up into 100+ entities - do we put that one in the "privatization" catagory or the "open access" category?
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