I'm assuming there's some British friends of ours following this thread. If so I've got a question, not rail related.
I've heard it's now illegal for British citizens to fly the Union Flag, what's popularly called the "Union Jack", hence the proliferation of flags with the "Cross of Saint George." Is this true? It's hard, if not downright impossible to believe. Flags are a hobby of mine so I am curious.
I do know the use of the Union Flag at sea is restricted to the Royal Navy, but it was my understanding that on land it's the flag of the UK and can be flown by anyone.
Seems that Great Britain went through a massive abandonemt process just like the US. I see pics of a former double track mainlines abandoned in the UK.
The complaint is not with the service, although I see I cannot visit the Ravensglass and Ecksdale narrow gauge on Sunday except by bus, with no Sunday rail service on the vacation-ideal Cambrian Coast, something I could do in BR days.
The complaint is that with the permanent way company not able to recover costs of maintencance and control and requiring subsidy, and most operators subsidized for specific socially important money-loosing services, the total bill to the British taxpayer is lots lots greater than it was when BR ran the whole show, of course even after adjustments for inflation.
ontheBNSF schlimm If British operational privatization failed, then Amtrak and the US public should be so lucky. You missed the point entirely. The point is that it wasn't really privatized and that more market reform should have been done. Freight railroads were deregulated and CN plus Conrail were privatized with great success. The point is that BR wasn't really privatized. Like wise free trade and deregulation often isn't really deregulating an industry.
schlimm If British operational privatization failed, then Amtrak and the US public should be so lucky.
If British operational privatization failed, then Amtrak and the US public should be so lucky.
You missed the point entirely. The point is that it wasn't really privatized and that more market reform should have been done. Freight railroads were deregulated and CN plus Conrail were privatized with great success. The point is that BR wasn't really privatized. Like wise free trade and deregulation often isn't really deregulating an industry.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Railroad to Freedom
I am astounded anyone could write this article without even mentioning the rail passengers at privatization totaled 800 million plus (and had been flat for decades) compared to over 1.5 billion today.
Since 2005, goverment subsidies have rapidly declined as passenger revenues have skyrocketed.
See https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/142668/rail-trends-factsheet-2011-12.pdf
Before laughing too much at this idea, you may want to consider that 10 of 17 private railways in the UK are actually paying the Treasury a profit on above the rail operations. The ones that cannot are saddled with long track miles in sparsely populated territory. For example, ScotRail has 42% of the track miles serving 5% of the population. Doesn't come out too well on the railroad financial calculator. (I will resist making any US analogies). A more robust franchise, Virgin Trains (London-Glasgow on the West Coast) actually returns 4.5 pence per passenger mile but it costs the government 8.1 pppm to maintain and improve the infrastructure resulting in a net subsidy of 3.6 pppm.
A system that has the goverment maintain the infrastructure but expects the private operators to make a go of it on operations is not over the moon in my view. This article is primarily made up of anecdotes. BTW, since it was written last year Virgin did NOT lose the franchise to First Group. The bidding process was flawed and Virgin will be there another 4 years. I have experienced their service and if they represent failure, we need some in the US.
I will admit the jury is still out but the trends are very positive.
Well, "Stupid" might be overstating it, but to some extent chopping up and reorganizing the rail enterprise is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you aren't providing any incentive for anything different to happen, you will have the same outcome, just parsed out differently.
The trick is to get the most efficient production of the desired outcome. In this case, we want passenger train service. The question to ask, then, is "are all the providers rewarded for providing passenger train service?" Or, is there some other thing they do that gets them rewarded?
If it's the latter, then the ship hits the ice berg and sinks.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
As I've pointed out elsewhere, Lord Beeching was responsible for cutting a lot of deadwood out of BR's network. He forced the public to realize that BR could not maintain every last mile of track without increasing payouts from the Treasury.
Thanks for the article. It should be a must read for anyone who wants to privatize Amtrak.
It didn't fail. It did entirely what it was designed to do, protect the rail system from special interests and politics.
Yes, it's more expensive to run at the moment, it's inefficient, and a single unified company would do a better job. However, the problems are:
1. That unified company would not make a profit anyway. So it would be dependent on the Treasury. So it would still need to lobby for funds.
2. Its ability to lobby would be greatly compromised.
Want to know what the worst thing to happen to BR was? Beeching. And Beeching happened only in part because the owner of a large trucking concern was made minister of transportation, who for entirely selfish and corrupt reasons wanted BR disemboweled. It also happened because BR was a state concern. It couldn't influence the newspapers, or MPs, or any other major groups. The oil companies could. The car companies could. The airlines could. They were all able to manipulate the "Very Serious People" (the high profile opinion formers) into supporting the idea that rail was obsolete, that Britain would turn into a car owning nation with everyone owning cars, and wanting to drive them all the time, and so on, and so forth.
And so when Beeching happened, there was outrage, but not enough to stop the cuts. The government changed to one that had opposed the cuts, and it too carried on with them. British Rail never recovered.
Margaret Thatcher was BR hostile and BR was in a very bad place when John Major took over. If it was anyone to the right of Major, the chances were relatively high that either BR would have been shut down by the end of the decade, or again suffered drastic, terrible, cuts.
Saying franchising is not ideal is stating the obvious. But it does change the political landscape. Suddenly the "airlines" and "bus companies" are lobbying for more, not less, cash to be spent on rail. Why? Because they're now train companies too. National Express, Stagecoach, Virgin, all BR's erstwhile rivals, are now running trains and making a mint doing it.
The result is that the British railway network is growing again, and there is absolutely no chance it'll be shut down in the next 50 years.
Taxpayers may not be overly happy about getting value for money. I can see their point. But describing it as a failure on that basis is ignoring political realities. Would taxpayers be happier seeing the road budget balloon as Britain's overcrowded highways clog up with traffic that has nowhere else to go? Because that really is the alternative.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/09/why-britains-railway-privatization-failed/3378/
The whole idea of separating operations and infrastructure is stupid. People often suggest the idea even though it empirically doesn't work. the service wasn't privatized but rather franchised. Rail is an integrated model and needs to be integrated. Like other "privatizations" it wasn't really privatization. In terms of examples of successful privatization Conrail was broken up and sold to CSX and NS, Canadian national was privatized, and finally JR was privatized to the extent that anything can be private in Japan. Brtiain is also an example of a failure of "privatization with public schemes" that are a form of looting. British Rail needed to exist to begin with because early railroads were tightly regulated making it difficult to make a profit.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.