Just a few bugs to work out. From the UTU Website "Tories switch track on rail policy |
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| The Conservatives will today (July 17) admit that the privatization of the railways under John Major in the 1990s was a mistake that inflicted costs on both passengers and the taxpayer as well as hindering expansion, according to this report published by The Guardian. Launching a Conservative Rail Review today the shadow transport secretary Chris Grayling will say that privatization pushed up the cost of running the railway system – and hence fares – and the party will not seek to re-privatize the system if it returns to power. Speaking to a meeting of rail industry figures Mr. Grayling will say: "We think, with hindsight, that the complete separation of track and train into separate businesses at the time of privatization was not right for our railways. "We think that the separation has helped push up the cost of running the railways – and hence fares – and is now slowing decisions about capacity improvements. “Too many people and organizations are now involved in getting things done – so nothing happens. As a result, the industry lacks clarity about who is in charge and accountable for decisions.” A review, leading to a strategy paper next year, will be carried out “with a view to securing a much greater degree of integration between track and train.” Mr. Grayling will also warn that passengers are facing higher fares and greater overcrowding in the next few years because no increase in capacity is planned before 2014 despite a projected 30% growth in passenger numbers. "All of this adds up to more and more passengers, on more and more overcrowded t |
Yep, another unbiased report from the UTU (insert sarcastic smiley here).
However, if you read between the lines, you will see that this is more a criticism of privatization of the British rail system than of having separate infrastructure and operating entities. In fact, the very first paragraph states that privatization was the “mistake”.
What the quotee does is to blur the lines of distinction between the act of privatization and the act of separating track from train. He makes the allegation that separation is the cause of higher fares, when in fact privatization is the real cause of higher fares. When the railroads were run by the government, they were not expected to make a profit, rather they were effectively subsidized. The fares charged for using the passenger trains under British Rail did not cover the cost of providing the service by a long shot. (Hmmmm, sounds like Amtrak to me!)
Now that fares are expected to cover costs and provide a profit, of course they are gonna go up! Put that one in the “duh” file, will you Jay?
Funny, but there is no mention here of comparative freight rates pre-privatization vs post-privatization. The whole idea of open access is to allow natural market forces to drive decision making, which means moving the stuff that makes money, e.g. freight, not passengers. However, in Europe it is considered a natural right that citizens will have rail passenger services. It is hard wired into the socialist tapestry of the Continent, and is the number one reason that growth in rail freight is stymied. Doesn’t really matter if it is private separated track and train operations, or private integrated track and train operations, freight will always play second fiddle to passenger trains in Europe. The big difference between private OA operations and private integrated operations is that under OA, rail freight at least has a chance of growth
Well I am sure glad you set me straight on the whole situation.
A couple things I don’t quite understand. If ridership has gone up to the point that capacity is being used up and fares have increased so much, why isn’t money being spent to increase capacity? Wouldn’t the private companies make even more money if they had the capacity to increase their business? Further, if the companies could make even more money hauling freight, why are they ignoring that business?
By the way, the Tories are the political conservatives of the country. The people and politicians of your state are considered very conservative. Fascists?
Speaking of mistakes…oh, hi FM…
FOFLMAO…
LC
Don’t confuse the situation in the UK as complete “Open Access” its not. For passenger services they are franchised out, once the franchise is let there is not direct competion. There is one single Open Access passenger service from one small city, Hull to London, The City receives minimal service from the franchised operator so there was minimal objection to the entry of the competion. There is another niche Open Access operator that may start up soon. The British press tends to ignore freight operations as though they don’t exist. For freight there is strong competition and the market is growing. The market is constrained by the small size of the UK which means that haul distances are very short compared to the US. The Channel Tunnel provides the potential to lengthen hauls in a big way, but until the last couple of months France has been totally closed to Open Access. SNCF Fret the National Railway has been losing traffic at a terrible rate due to continual strikes, and poor service. Down last year, and down better than 10 percent for the first six months of this year. EWS, the largest UK operator has just begun operating in France last month, but it will take time to grow the business.
The Railroad Companies for Passenger Services in the UK are just franchise Operators who provide a serv
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Actually Dave,
It is Mr. Grayling, not Sir or Lord.
As of yet, he carries no Crown Title.
I find it funny that you call an MP in the House of Commons of one of the biggest industrialized nations in the world, who publicly expressed the need to review his country’s policy, an economic moron, when you, technically, don’t exist at all.
And most of us can read the words written and draw a sensible conclusion from them, we don’t need to “read between the lines”, which contains nothing but empty space, something I am sure your very familiar with.
Thank goodness this forum is returning to it’s glory days. I am tired of ____thread for everyone. Lets muck it up with open access, Milwaukee PCE, captive shippers, and 180% VR discussions.
ed
You forgot evil monopolistic pricing practices and greedy retrenchment![:o)]
Glad to help the cause of the cognitively challenged.[;)]
Because passengers don’t make money for any railroad, even in passenger train paradise. Passenger trains can use up capacity to the hilt and not make a dime for the operator or the infrastructure owner.
They’re not. Read bl’s post regarding the freight situation. If not for the French closed access [}:)] blockade, more long haul freight companies would be banging down the doors to get a piece of that potentially humoungous pie.
The Tories aren’t any more conservative than the old pre-Reagan wing of the Republican party, which by today’s standards would be considered very liberal. That was back in the days of the Nixon/Rockefeller corporate liberalism, not the grass roots Christian/Conservative/Small Business aspects of today’s Republican Party. That Rockefeller wing was more in tune with propping up large monopolistic corporations in distain of small business and individualism, and thus at the expense of economic innovation. So yes, I consider the Rockefeller conservatism as nothing more than corporate fascism, certainly not in the best interests of most US citizens. And the Tories don’t engender anything that would have widespr
I might add to my previous post that the former government didn’t stop at separating the infrastructure from the operators, they then divided up the trackage into a significant number of sections and let bids for maintenance contracts, with the lowest bidder getting the contract. The Engineering Dept. was sold off and Railtrack had to contract back in their services. Indeed Railtrack was only allowed to retain a small number of track inspectors who were to function as auditors only. That proved to be way too few as at Hatfield a fast moving DMU derailed at a switch and slammed into the station platform. The cause was discovered to be missing bolts on an adjustment rod for the facing point lock at a switch. In other words the DMU picked the switch at nearly 90 mph. due to improper maintenance. Note that the contractor holding the contract for that section had reported excellent financial results for the previous year. The company was investigated and then fined heavily for serious failings in record keeping and employee qualifications, and all their contracts were cancelled. Since then Railtrack has been replaced by Network Rail who has taken all Maintenance and Engineering functions back in House where they belong.
Context, FM - Context. (new forum, same pedantic snob act; you remain clueless…)
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Grow up.
It seems then that the original separation went to far, making things more complex than it had to be. OA should consist of two basic funtioning units - track owner and train operator(s). It is fine if either basic unit wants to contract out certain services from time to time, but it should not be a requirement nor a standard practice.
I also think the franchising rights aspect does not allow the OA model to function optimally. Franchising sole rights to use certain sections of track may invoke the unintentional lazy bug for the franchisee, and thus repress the need for competitive innovation. Come to think of it, the only advantage of franchising over US-style integrated operations is that if the franchisee does not ple
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It seems then that the original separation went to far, making things more complex than it had to be. OA should consist of two basic funtioning units - track owner and train operator(s). It is fine if either basic unit wants to contract out certain services from time to time, but it should not be a requirement nor a standard practice.
I also think the franchising rights aspect does not allow the OA model to function optimally. Franchising sole rights to use certain sections of track may invoke the unintentional lazy bug for the franchisee, and thus repress the need for competitive innovation. Come to think of it, the only advantage of franchising over US-style integrated operations is that if
(1) What part of “Get Real” do you refuse to understand? Do you not understand the word context? (or are you afraid of it?..It kinda makes a mess of most of your warped arguments when the rest of the world fails to walk off in lockstep with you…)
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WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
FM, crying like his ol’ self, eh MC…
But we can’t expect an uneducated non-railroader like FM to understand much, can we???
LC
However, if you read between the lines, you will see that this is more a criticism of privatization of the British rail system than of having separate infrastructure and operating entities. In fact, the very first paragraph states that privatization was the “mistake”.
No, Chris Grayling was actually admitting that having separate operating/ infrastructure entities was a mistake.
What the quotee does is to blur the lines of distinction between the act of privatization and the act of separating track from train. He makes the allegation that separation is the cause of higher fares, when in fact privatization is the real cause of higher fares. When the railroads were run by the government, they were not expected to make a profit, rather they were effectively subsidized. The fares charged for using the passenger trains under British Rail did not cover the cost of providing the service by a long shot. (Hmmmm, sounds like Amtrak to me!)
Utter codswallop. The 1968 Railways Act recognised the social railway and that a subsidy would be paid for that. the socail railway was one that was percieved to be losing money but vital to the local community. Believe it or not, there are bits of Britains railway network whoch are very difficult to cover by using bus. During the 1980’s, BR was sectorized; InterCity, Provincial, Network SoputhEast (the social bit) and Freight. Of those, both Intercity and Freight were expected to run without subsidy and to a set return (5-7%). Thus they cut their cloth accordingly. The Freight business therefore concentrated on bulk haul and nothing else, whilst the Intercity Business concentrated on the major routes out of London and charging what the market could pay. And lo, British Rail actually turned a profit, but as we know when Investment Plans are in full swing and when the passenger business follows the economy a nasty recession can produce a sea of red ink. Thus Major Major decided to
I might add to my previous post that the former government didn’t stop at separating the infrastructure from the operators, they then divided up the trackage into a significant number of sections and let bids for maintenance contracts, with the lowest bidder getting the contract. The Engineering Dept. was sold off and Railtrack had to contract back in their services. Indeed Railtrack was only allowed to retain a small number of track inspectors who were to function as auditors only. That proved to be way too few as at Hatfield a fast moving DMU derailed at a switch and slammed into the station platform. The cause was discovered to be missing bolts on an adjustment rod for the facing point lock at a switch. In other words the DMU picked the switch at nearly 90 mph. due to improper maintenance. Note that the contractor holding the contract for that section had reported excellent financial results for the previous year. The company was investigated and then fined heavily for serious failings in record keeping and employee qualifications, and all their contracts were cancelled. Since then Railtrack has been replaced by Network Rail who has taken all Maintenance and Engineering functions back in House where they belong.
Yes and no. It was railtracks decision when flogged to downgrade the enginerring function and concentrate on generating cash from property. They were sold a pup when the Infrastructure/ Renewal contracts were signed and then handed to them; as basically these were based on a RPI-3% basis over 5 years on system where the number of trains was increasing. Therefore there was no incentive to actually inspect; add in a perofrmace regime which was suspect and chaos ensued. Hatfied was caused by a railbreak on a curve through RCF, nothing to do with crossings; I believe that you are mxing that up with Potters Bar. However Hatfield was the straw whoch broke the camels back as Failtrack found out to its horror that it didn’t know the actual state of its asset; therefore panicked an
For OA to work as intended, it would be better for Britain and the rest of the EU if they reject the franchise model and instead go with the slot bidding model. This allows multiple entities to compete head to head, and allows the free market aspects of competition to spark the fight for innovation and better customer service. Of course, under free market oversight, the freight entities would be able to outbid the passenger entities, and that might be the one area where Europeans may feel enmity for OA. Taking freight off the roads is probably less important for the average European voter than keeping the public passenger trains running as expected. They consider the passenger train a God-given right the way Americans consider the automobile a God-given right, right?
Slot bidding. This was proposed in the UK and then thrown out as a) unworkable, b) inefficient and c) stupid.
Still, it did take them some time for that particular penny to drop. I suggest FM that you brush up on your Britsh Politics and read the 1993 Railways Act. Then look at the current situation before spouting forth.