He also went onto say that local trains dont make money (4.5 million passengers on this line and you dont make money, hmmmm!?!?!)
Of course not! Just look at how much it costs to lease the 158 fleet. Then think maintenance, track access, crew, plus other bits and bobs and your onto a looser.
You are right Timmer. Local trains generally don't make money, but I fail to see how lengthening trains on the Portsmouth-Cardiff route would achieve anything other than better value for the taxpayer. If you increased all of the two car trains to 3 car and did a bit of promotion of the fact, I predict that you would be able to fill all 3 cars on most trips within the year. Capacity up 50%, fares income up 50% but costs up by less than 50%. Even if the train still required subsidy, the amount of subsidy per passenger mile would be less.
The problem with local trains not being profitable in general is due to the fact that they are generally not long enough to carry enough passengers to cover their fixed costs. From the point of view of the tax-payer, the situation could be improved by going in either one of two directions 1) withdraw the train completely or 2) lengthen the train and carry more passengers. Option 1) might be applicable on very lightly used lines but on the Cardiff-Pompy line where there is latent demand for travel option 2) makes much more sense. As a tax payer I'd rather ^500,000 was spent on getting 50,000 people to work (who will in turn earn money and pay taxes) than ^400,000 was spent getting 25,000 people to work.
Railways have hugh fixed costs so the only way to get good value for the tax payer out of the rail network is to spread those fixed costs between as many passengers as possible. The worst value services are those operated by one and two car trains and the worst value lines are those that only have a couple of trains a day (even if such low service level is cheap it is still very poor value).
The problem is that the
DfT» is fixated by absolute cost rather than by value for money. The best example I can think of at the monent is the DfT decision to build London crossrail at a cost of ^15 BILLION pounds. The costs are high because of the cost of tunnelling though the middle of the city, but if they spent another ^3billion to link Reading, Southend, Amersham etc to the system the number of passengers through the expensive tunnel would double and the cost of the tunnel per passenger would fall.
