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British rail investments face substantial delays
The UK, which is economically in the doldrums according to reports, plans on $10B a year for five years while our congress gives Amtrak how much for the next few years? About $1.6B a year for four years. What’s wrong with this picture? What does the UK know that our leaders don’t?
@COL JAMES VAITKUNAS - One difference is that Britain still takes train travel very, very, very, seriously and has an extensive passenger rail network covering almost all of England and Wales, and much of Scotland. Politicians have tried to destroy the system, the worst case being in 1963 when a trucking tycoon who was Minister of Transportation, Ernest Marples, manipulated things until a report essentially calling for the closure of 1/3 of the network was made BR policy.
The man who wrote that report, and was temporarily head of British Rail, was Dr Richard Beeching. Within Britain, most lists of worst people ever put him at #4, just behind Hitler and the serial killers Brady and Hindley.
While the Beeching cuts went ahead, since then most politicians have been terrified of cutting British Rail further, even the ideologically car supporting Margaret Thatcher left the network alone.
A second difference related to the first: there’s now an active “Rail lobby”.
In the 1990s, Prime Minister John Major, himself a rail supporter, figured British Rail’s problems had to do with the fact that, as a government entity, it couldn’t lobby for itself while private rivals could. His solution was a somewhat convoluted privatization scheme that split British Rail into infrastructure providers and train operators. While opinions differ on whether this was the best way to spend tax money, it was a resounding success in terms of changing the political dynamic.
Rivals such as bus companies Stagecoach and National Express, and airlines like Virgin, jumped in with both feet to run franchises. And as they did, they stopped demanding more road/air subsidies and less rail, and started lobbying for more spending on rail, better infrastructure, more electrification, etc.
At a stroke, Major created “Big Rail”, an unholy group of special interests who’d do to rail what “Big Oil” has done to roads. And, you know, that’s not a b