https://www.statista.com/statistics/305021/national-rail-revenue-passenger-fares-in-the-united-kingdom/Annual Rail fare income back up to £10.3 billion last year. Heidi Alaexander looks forward to the £150 million that she expects to be saved by Nationalisation in the press this morning. That's around 1.4%. Whilst every penny counts, I can't help wondering if this is a lot of hype about a relatively small saving when fares have gone up - officially - by 4.6% this year and tweaks to things like advance fare allocations have, I would suspect, resulted in a somewhat greater increase.
On the other side, has anyone quantified the one off costs of Nationalisation and setting up
GBR▸ , and how do they compare to the £150 million which is - however - an annual figure? How much will the Nationalised GBR and
TOCs▸ be paying to private companies to hire rolling stock next year?
What is not seen by the public are the hundreds of thousands if not millions of "wooden dollars" that move internally within the National Rail system, every "wooden dollar" involves people and systems to move them around.
Over time the National rail system will operate more smoothly as it moves back to a vertically integrated management structure and away from a contractual one, an example will be engineering access outside of the timetable access agreed many years in advance, currently this shorter notice access can take weeks if not months to negotiate between
NR» and a TOC with the TOC being paid compensation for "loss of profit".
Also the fine tuning of the timetable will be simpler under GBR than the current contractual system
There are many benefits and savings to be gained with GBR, there will be some things that might
NOT be as good under GBR but at the moment I cannot think of any
***(corrected form typo) Wooden dollar - "An internal dispute over costs, margins, allocations etc. that make no difference whatsoever to the real profits and costs - it's just an internal dispute cost eg Schedule 8.
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