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Good. This is wildly overdue. The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.o

by mvzvm 5y ago

Good. This is wildly overdue. The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail) was a crime of the highest corruption. Edit: Link broke? Edit 2: Thank you @bogdan https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57176858

carnagecity786 5y ago
Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the issues that we've had with privatised rail going away - those issues being incredibly high fees, understaffed and underpaid workers, under maintained infrastructure, and a lack of real investment in areas with little to no infrastructure at all (the north). Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”. It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.
    - mytailorisrich 5y ago
      There are nice, fast trains from Paddington to the West, including Oxford.
    - chalst 5y ago
      My experience of road travel in the south was that delays were too frequent for journeys crossing the M25 for me to depend on it. That's from before good consumer traffic analysis apps; maybe those improve things enough.
    - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
      Cheap, certainly. Also slow, and comfortable's in the eye of the beholder (I can't read in a road vehicle, so not for me). The Paddington services are much better these days, and there's also the excellent (new) Marylebone service. I live just outside Oxford and wouldn't dream of getting the bus.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Actually the Oxford to London bus services have been shutting down because of falling passenger numbers and traffic congestion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888
      - yrro 5y ago
        A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.
  - petepete 5y ago
    Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up with only two carriages. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)
    - madaxe_again 5y ago
      £100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.
      - rich_sasha 5y ago
        There’s also “leaves on the track”, my personal favourite. Sometimes I struggle to believe trains were invented in the UK!
        cosmodisk 5y ago
        This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries. My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Most systems with wet leaf problems use sand dispensers for added traction.
  - chalst 5y ago
    Indeed. At the time of privatisation, I commuted to Oxford from a small village that was 20 min train ride away. Privatisation encouraged me to make the switch to the 45 minute cycle ride, which I suppose was good for me. I do remember seeing the automated departures table being 80% filled with notices of cancelled services or trains that were over an hour late.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    > It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried. Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.
  - AdmiralGinge 5y ago
    It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over. Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!
- Sosh101 5y ago
  "Great British Railways" -eyeroll-
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Well they can't call it the United Kingdom Railways now the UK is falling apart.
    - isthisnametaken 5y ago
      Also, more precisely, it doesn't cover Northern Ireland, which is separate and has its own system linked to the Irish rail network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Railways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Railways
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    You'd think they could go with the existing British Rail branding. The double-arrow logo is iconic and still in plenty of places. And given that many of the private franchises took the names of prenationalization companies, it's hardly unprecedented.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Also this is less nationalised than ScotRail, which will actually be state run: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56432919 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-564...
  - Gaelan 5y ago
    Can they still do that, now that the ScotRail franchise is (presumably) no more?
    - grlass 5y ago
      The ScotRail brand was operated by the private company Abellio, who lost the contract due to long term failure to meet its requirements of reliability etc - was in trouble before the impact of the pandemic.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Transport is a devolved matter, so that shouldn't be affected. Although this is often confusing and badly reported.
- flukus 5y ago
  > this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department Sounds like it's designed to further distance government and it's ministers from any sort of accountability. Just like any government owned corporation.
- scatters 5y ago
  High fares (and they aren't that high) aren't a result of privatization; they're because of a lack of subsidy. In the UK, despite the obvious environmental benefits, subsidizing rail is politically awkward because it's regressive.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    If privatisation of essential services is a crime (it’s not, but it should be), privatising the subsidies and directing them to private companies is much worse. If one has a basic right to healthcare, education, and freedom of movement, then all those things should be provided by the state.
  - chanc3e 5y ago
    They are high. I had to get from the West, to London, and then to the north last week. Wiltshire to London: ~100miles, £24 London to Derbyshire: ~120miles, £158 I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt about peak times, but I started my journey at 10:30am. The prices make no sense; unless viewed through the private entities ability to gouge. Whenever I'm in Europe and buy a ticket I spend an extra 20secs at the ticket machine thinking I've made a currency conversion badly before realising, no, European trains are great value and UK trains are an exercise in exploiting a captive market.
    - scatters 5y ago
      You're lying or deluded. STP-DBY, 10:32 on Monday 24 May: £53 Advance, £67 Off Peak. The most expensive ticket is the First Class Anytime, at £145.50.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Yes, it's hard to argue I should be putting my hand in my pocket to pay for the train fare for my neighbour so they can earn a London wage. People do complain about the fares but the trains are full so it's questionable whether they are too high. If I'm looking at it from an environmental perspective I'd argue the other options (cars, planes) are too cheap.
- IndySun 5y ago
  >doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda Spot on. Only I venture it is worse. More public money to business friends. The point of public transport is to allay the burden of cost to the public, having no choice but to travel for work. I'll say that again - no choice (zero work where they live) and physically travel to work. Despite the pandemic, an extreme example of people forced to stay home to work, the number of people that had to continue to travel to work was surprisingly high. And, as ever, the people with the least suffer the most. This is a PR exercise by any other name. The devil is in the details, as is being pointed out.
chalst 5y ago
Don't expect the people who lined their pockets during privatisation to lose any money. Do expect Tory party donors to do well in whatever actually happens.
gadders 5y ago
Where on that wikipedia link you cited does it say it was a crime and corrupt?
- chalst 5y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't make such claims in so-called 'in-wiki voice', since they are contested. Rail privatisation was enormously complex. If you want to see a clear example of Tories using economic liberalisation to achieve political ends in immoral, a much better example is demutualisation of the building societies. https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-cooperatives-to-capitalist-corporations-contributed-to-the-2008-crisis https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-co...
  - gadders 5y ago
    I think you could describe that as contested as well.
    - chalst 5y ago
      "that"? The account given of the effect of demutualisation in the article I linked to is not controversial. Obviously my claim that the policy of a political party was immoral is, but I know Tories who agree with me about this.
zelos 5y ago
Following the link from that page, the impact of privatisation is debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... Reduced subsidies (per journey), massively increased passenger numbers, improved satisfaction and (apparently) a slower rate of season ticket price increase than under British Rail would appear to be some of the positives.
sampo 5y ago
> The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail) was a crime From that same Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_ye... So, during the 1948-1995 nationalized period, train ridership was in almost constant decline, and from the 1995 privatization, train ridership started a steady and steep increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
ant6n 5y ago
The infrastructure had been renationalized for quite a while. Its the Operators that have still been private, which in general can be made to work. In Britain it didn’t work well.
hermitcrab 5y ago
Given the currently UK leadership, I can't imagine this going to be anything other than a nightmare of bungling and corruption that I will be reading about in Private Eye in years to come.

by mvzvm 5y ago

carnagecity786 5y ago

Unfortunately this isn't actual nationalisation. The railway will still be operated by private firms, this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department; which is a new franchising model. It's supposed to allow them to set unified fees, and have greater control over branding and speak with a unified voice, but apart from that I don't see any of the issues that we've had with privatised rail going away - those issues being incredibly high fees, understaffed and underpaid workers, under maintained infrastructure, and a lack of real investment in areas with little to no infrastructure at all (the north). Also, you can really tell who the government are targeting this campaign at, and that's what it is, a media campaign. "Great British Railways"? Appealing to nationalist sentiments whilst doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda.

rich_sasha 5y ago
Re infrastructure, my worst memories involve commuting between Oxford and London (a major rail route in the grand scheme of things) and it breaking down a few times a month, especially in winter, due to “signalling failures”. It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working. And yes, this was 21st century, not steam trains.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  Alas this seems to be best served by bus nowadays. The buses are comfortable and cheap, and connect several places in Oxford to Victoria coach station.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    There are nice, fast trains from Paddington to the West, including Oxford.
  - chalst 5y ago
    My experience of road travel in the south was that delays were too frequent for journeys crossing the M25 for me to depend on it. That's from before good consumer traffic analysis apps; maybe those improve things enough.
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    Cheap, certainly. Also slow, and comfortable's in the eye of the beholder (I can't read in a road vehicle, so not for me). The Paddington services are much better these days, and there's also the excellent (new) Marylebone service. I live just outside Oxford and wouldn't dream of getting the bus.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Actually the Oxford to London bus services have been shutting down because of falling passenger numbers and traffic congestion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-50992888
    - yrro 5y ago
      A lot of those passengers went over to Stagecoach's competing Oxford Tube service, which served a couple of different stops within London, but (in my experience) offered a much more frequent service.
- petepete 5y ago
  Until lockdown I commuted to Manchester on the Rochdale line in Leyland-branded Pacers[0]. Trains with an intended lifespan of "no more than twenty years", that are now 35-40 years old. The tickets cost £100 per month and in the years I did it, only managed to find a seat on a handful of occasions. I had to wait at the station because the train was too full more frequently than finding a seat - often they'd show up with only two carriages. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    £100 a month? It’s £200 return for a day for Bristol to London - and that’s if the train gets you there, and doesn’t dump you somewhere outside of Chippenham because it’s the wrong kind of sunny today and the rails have buckled, or it’s cold and the rails have frozen, or it’s raining and the train is poorly with diesel cholera. All of these are acts of god, of course, so aren’t compensatable events.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      There’s also “leaves on the track”, my personal favourite. Sometimes I struggle to believe trains were invented in the UK!
      - cosmodisk 5y ago
        This one,albeit sounding funny,is a pretty serious issue: leaves get crushed under the weight of a train and eventually form a teflon like film on the tracks, which makes it very slippery. Not an expert in this area,so no idea how it's dealt with in various countries. My favourite is: the carriage is deflated. People couldn't stop laughing when told so, but what it meant in reality is that the support cushions deflated and the carriage can't have passengers on board.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Most systems with wet leaf problems use sand dispensers for added traction.
- chalst 5y ago
  Indeed. At the time of privatisation, I commuted to Oxford from a small village that was 20 min train ride away. Privatisation encouraged me to make the switch to the 45 minute cycle ride, which I suppose was good for me. I do remember seeing the automated departures table being 80% filled with notices of cancelled services or trains that were over an hour late.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  > It turns out rail signals were controlled by buried cables without adequate insulation, so when it was wet they literally stopped working More than that: buried cables without adequate insulation and nobody knew where they were buried. Railtrack (the unlamented privatised company that originally took on the railway infrastructure) threw out the engineering diagrams. So when the time came to dig up the Great Western Main Line out of London for electrification, signalling failures were a routine occurrence because someone had put an excavator through a signalling cable... again.
- AdmiralGinge 5y ago
  It's even worse in the other direction; I used to go from Oxford to Aberystwyth quite often and Arriva Wales were truly appalling. They only ever ran two carriages for part of the route despite Aberystwyth being a university town so even when the Biblical unreliability of the trains wasn't a factor you were inevitably crammed in like cattle for the slaughterhouse. I've heard things are a bit better now Transport for Wales has taken over. Beeching's axe really did a number on Wales, the country is effectively cut in half by rail and travel between North Wales and Cardiff takes a massive 3+ hour detour across the border to Shrewsbury. Reversing some of his cuts and reopening the Aberystwyth to Carmarthen line has been seriously talked about in recent years and I think it would be a very good idea. Beeching's cuts were extraordinarily myopic and allegedly the government of the day was in bed with road haulage companies who had an interest in hurting the railways. At any rate I hope his route to the afterlife involved a tediously indirect detour via limbo and purgatory!
Sosh101 5y ago
"Great British Railways" -eyeroll-
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Well they can't call it the United Kingdom Railways now the UK is falling apart.
  - isthisnametaken 5y ago
    Also, more precisely, it doesn't cover Northern Ireland, which is separate and has its own system linked to the Irish rail network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Railways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI_Railways
- hakfoo 5y ago
  You'd think they could go with the existing British Rail branding. The double-arrow logo is iconic and still in plenty of places. And given that many of the private franchises took the names of prenationalization companies, it's hardly unprecedented.
pjc50 5y ago
Also this is less nationalised than ScotRail, which will actually be state run: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56432919 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-564...
- Gaelan 5y ago
  Can they still do that, now that the ScotRail franchise is (presumably) no more?
  - grlass 5y ago
    The ScotRail brand was operated by the private company Abellio, who lost the contract due to long term failure to meet its requirements of reliability etc - was in trouble before the impact of the pandemic.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Transport is a devolved matter, so that shouldn't be affected. Although this is often confusing and badly reported.
flukus 5y ago
> this is only a transfer of franchising from the department of transport to this new "Great British Railways" department Sounds like it's designed to further distance government and it's ministers from any sort of accountability. Just like any government owned corporation.
scatters 5y ago
High fares (and they aren't that high) aren't a result of privatization; they're because of a lack of subsidy. In the UK, despite the obvious environmental benefits, subsidizing rail is politically awkward because it's regressive.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  If privatisation of essential services is a crime (it’s not, but it should be), privatising the subsidies and directing them to private companies is much worse. If one has a basic right to healthcare, education, and freedom of movement, then all those things should be provided by the state.
- chanc3e 5y ago
  They are high. I had to get from the West, to London, and then to the north last week. Wiltshire to London: ~100miles, £24 London to Derbyshire: ~120miles, £158 I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt about peak times, but I started my journey at 10:30am. The prices make no sense; unless viewed through the private entities ability to gouge. Whenever I'm in Europe and buy a ticket I spend an extra 20secs at the ticket machine thinking I've made a currency conversion badly before realising, no, European trains are great value and UK trains are an exercise in exploiting a captive market.
  - scatters 5y ago
    You're lying or deluded. STP-DBY, 10:32 on Monday 24 May: £53 Advance, £67 Off Peak. The most expensive ticket is the First Class Anytime, at £145.50.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Yes, it's hard to argue I should be putting my hand in my pocket to pay for the train fare for my neighbour so they can earn a London wage. People do complain about the fares but the trains are full so it's questionable whether they are too high. If I'm looking at it from an environmental perspective I'd argue the other options (cars, planes) are too cheap.
IndySun 5y ago
>doing little to nothing is the entire modern tory agenda Spot on. Only I venture it is worse. More public money to business friends. The point of public transport is to allay the burden of cost to the public, having no choice but to travel for work. I'll say that again - no choice (zero work where they live) and physically travel to work. Despite the pandemic, an extreme example of people forced to stay home to work, the number of people that had to continue to travel to work was surprisingly high. And, as ever, the people with the least suffer the most. This is a PR exercise by any other name. The devil is in the details, as is being pointed out.

chalst 5y ago

Don't expect the people who lined their pockets during privatisation to lose any money. Do expect Tory party donors to do well in whatever actually happens.

gadders 5y ago

Where on that wikipedia link you cited does it say it was a crime and corrupt?

chalst 5y ago
Wikipedia doesn't make such claims in so-called 'in-wiki voice', since they are contested. Rail privatisation was enormously complex. If you want to see a clear example of Tories using economic liberalisation to achieve political ends in immoral, a much better example is demutualisation of the building societies. https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-cooperatives-to-capitalist-corporations-contributed-to-the-2008-crisis https://www.mutualinterest.coop/2020/02/how-conversion-of-co...
- gadders 5y ago
  I think you could describe that as contested as well.
  - chalst 5y ago
    "that"? The account given of the effect of demutualisation in the article I linked to is not controversial. Obviously my claim that the policy of a political party was immoral is, but I know Tories who agree with me about this.

zelos 5y ago

Following the link from that page, the impact of privatisation is debatable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of... Reduced subsidies (per journey), massively increased passenger numbers, improved satisfaction and (apparently) a slower rate of season ticket price increase than under British Rail would appear to be some of the positives.

sampo 5y ago

> The privatization of public infrastructure (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail) was a crime From that same Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_ye... So, during the 1948-1995 nationalized period, train ridership was in almost constant decline, and from the 1995 privatization, train ridership started a steady and steep increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of_British_Rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

ant6n 5y ago

The infrastructure had been renationalized for quite a while. Its the Operators that have still been private, which in general can be made to work. In Britain it didn’t work well.

hermitcrab 5y ago

Given the currently UK leadership, I can't imagine this going to be anything other than a nightmare of bungling and corruption that I will be reading about in Private Eye in years to come.