DfT» - Government dept
NR» - State owned
ECML▸ - Sate run franchise..............
...............good advert for Jeremy's re-nationalised railways ............
Hitachi private sector. Lets not forget they are replacing the
HST▸ which was a far superior world class product in its day that was in the PUBLIC SECTOR. Thanks to years of neoliberal dogma we've gone from world leader in railway technology to little more than a wealth extraction system for foreign state owned companies.
Not a good advert for the privatised railway. You also forgot to mention the numerous expensive failures of private contractors on the ECML ! In fact if in anyway you think the privatise railways have delivered value for money perhaps you could explain 1) the huge subsidy they get 2) the failure to replace stock in decades in the west (most of which was built by
BR▸ 3) the huge fare increases for a worsening service 4) the rise in customer satisfaction when private contracts fail and they are temporarily renationalised. 5) The continuing inability of the competing private companies to have enough staff to actually run the trains. In BR days more staff could be rostered at shortish notice to take trains out that now sit in depots. 6) Railtrack wasn't exactly a glowing success, which was why it had to be renationalised ! After loosing many of their engineering staff they put retail managers in charge, reduced track maintenance to increase profits, and ended up with an unsafe railway.
Doesn't bode well for May/Mogg/Johnson or whoever is actually running the Tory party, does it !
Thank you for putting me right Jeremy..... "neoliberal dogma"- now I do like that one - is that the same as a "capitalist running dog" ?
Sorry to say, but I am afraid that your post, in response to my lighthearted jest, highlights what is wrong with so much with the
UK▸ rail system today. Everything is either black or white - Nationalisation will solve all the problems ..........no........privatisation will solve all the problems - and so on and so on.
The root cause of the problem is that the railways will never run at a profit. If you want a railway system then the tax payer will have to subsidize it - either directly, through a grossly inefficient State run bureaucracy, or though a privatised sub-contractor, run by a money grabbing neoliberal.
I suffered at the hands of a State owned/run railway system for many years, would I want to go back to that ? No thank you. There were some good points about it though, trains would be held to connect with a late running train and the staff (from top to bottom) were professional railwaymen. Perhaps above all, everything was "joined up". In general though, the state of the rolling stock was pretty dire. I still have nightmares about my weekend trips from Plymouth to the IoW and back, in the 1960s. (And the ECML in the 80s !! - thank God for the Boeing 757)
Privatisation - well, passenger traffic has doubled and the trains are much cleaner - so it can't be all bad. Umpteen different
TOCs▸ running trains, belonging to someone else, specified by yet someone else, on a network run by yet another company, with the whole thing overseen by the DfT - what a recipe for chaos ! Just how much time/effort/money is wasted in trying to "attribute" delays to the 1030 from Paddington !!!!
There has to be a better way using the best of both systems - perhaps we should lock (say) Richard Branson and Mick Cash in a room and tell them they 'aint coming out to they have come up with some sensible ideas. If only as much time and effort were spent trying to permanently resolve the actual problems as are wasted arguing about whether Jeremy Corbyn or Mark Hopwood should be running
GWR▸ or how many guards/drivers/
TMs‡ should be on a train.
Who suffers from all this stupidity ? The poor fare paying passenger (and tax paying non-passenger)..........................
