Railway Industry

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Renationalisation is popular not because people wish, for ideological reasons, to control the commanding heights of the economy, but because they are sick of high prices, convoluted ticketing policies and serial failure. Make our rail services accountable to the people who use them, or might if they were better. Subsidise ticket prices so people are tempted away from motorways and airports. Invest capital not just on marquee stuff such as HS2, but on services lots of people use.

— Rod Liddle, The Times, May.20.2018

ToDo: link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/rail-transport link, See this page on the Rail Delivery Group's website, very helpful. Also see Alinda Capital Partners LLC investments re Kelling Group Ltd

Train Operating Companies

When the railways were privatised, the Department for Transport chopped the country up into franchise areas. The idea is for private sector companies to bid for each franchise, which usually lasts for ~7 years. The winning private sector company usually forms a Train Operating Company as the business to operate passenger trains on its particular franchise.

ToDo †link, Nb: lots of useful info in here re the history of the various companies.

Freight Operating Companies

ToDo: provide train services on the infrastructure that Network Rail owns and maintains. Pay access charges to Network Rail for the use of its infrastructure. link

Franchises

  • Sept.07.2018: How Great Western Railway shunted forward calls for an industry overhaul. Trouble on the FirstGroup line has fuelled demands for a review of the entire British rail system. GWR services are operated by the British bus and rail company FirstGroup while the maintenance and renewal of the infrastructure are overseen by govt-owned Network Rail. "All this comes about because the railway isn’t an entity but has been broken up into separate functions, when the management ought to be under one roof." The Department for Transport has long let FirstGroup run GWR without competition. Chris Grayling intends to extend First’s contract from 2018 to 2022, with an option to extend to 2024. That would mean that First will have been given short-term extensions on GWR totalling 11 years, having exited its original contract after 2013 to avoid £800m in payments due to the Treasury. A review of franchising in 2013 found the system was fundamentally sound. That conclusion looks increasingly hollow now. On all sides is a belief that the operations of train and track should be more united to improve the railway. Gwyn Topham, The Guardian.

Great Western

Route map

The Great Western franchise covers services across a wide area of the Thames Valley, the Cotswolds and Malverns, South Wales, Bristol and the South West. Greater Western franchiseWikipedia-W.svg

West Midlands

Website

ToDo: link, link, link
  • Jan.09.2020: Boris Johnson signals end of line for West Midlands Trains. Boris Johnson said that the “bell is tolling” for West Midlands Trains, which runs metro and intercity services. Andy Street, the Tory mayor of the West Midlands, said last week that he had lost all faith in the operator after delays, overcrowding and cancellations. West Midlands, which is run by the Dutch state-owned operator Abellio, has frozen fares this year to compensate passengers for poor performance. Graeme Paton, The Times.

Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern

South Eastern

South Western

South Central

Thameslink

Thameslink and Great Northern services were merged into one franchise in 2006 due to the upcoming Thameslink Programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govia_Thameslink_Railway

Great Northern

Thameslink and Great Northern services were merged into one franchise in 2006 due to the upcoming Thameslink Programme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govia_Thameslink_Railway

Privatisation vs. Nationalisation

  • Jul.30.2018: The railways are a mess. But it’s not all Chris Grayling’s fault. Fragmented rail privatisation has resulted in a fiasco for which no one person or company can justly be held responsible. Chris Grayling can no more run a train than run a mile. He has been in the post for 2 years of ceaseless controversy, but his job is merely to sit tight and fend off incoming fire, directed at his department and an industry that are both woefully unfit for purpose. For some 20 years since 1993, privatisation ran trains with a degree of success, but passengers are now dwindling and rail has hit the buffers. Last December’s timetable fiasco, chiefly in the north-west and south of the country, was the direct result of over-ambitious companies encouraged by govt to bid for new franchises with more trains. This depended on Network Rail upgrading track and signalling on time, and on drivers being retrained by a certain deadline. When both were running late last autumn, a coherent company would have backed off fast. Instead, each tier in the industry assumed someone else would catch up – and if not could be blamed or sued. It was precisely the outcome critics of fragmented privatisation feared. In the 1980s, the Treasury thought rail efficiency would flow from replacing a single corporate hierarchy with a mass of internal sub-contracts between govt, operators and an infrastructure company. The same principle was applied, by Labour and Tories alike, to the NHS, social benefits, prisons and probation. It went down great in management schools but it was wrong. The rail infrastructure company Railtrack went bankrupt, and its state-owned replacement, Network Rail, under-performed. Operating rail franchises have been vulnerable to fiasco. Whitehall is now more involved in running railways – and subsidising them – than ever under nationalisation. Privatisation has not worked, not because a private company cannot run a railway but because the structure was wrong. Internal contracting and transfer pricing, as the NHS has found, does not suit a fast-moving public service. It corrupts corporate morale, diminishes executive responsibility, and shifts blame on to contracts. Transport ministers, including Grayling, often muse that the railways would run better if each region were entirely in the charge of a single, vertically integrated company. They are right, but no one has the guts to bring it about. What should happen is plain. Network Rail should be broken up, and its assets put under regional operators, with long-term leases from the government. The boards of Virgin, Stagecoach, Arriva and the rest should run every aspect of their service. They could still be private, but “parastatal” – that is, regulated in the public interest. Then, and only then, would we really know who to blame when the trains are late. Simon Jenkins, The Guardian.
  • Mar.18.2018: The great British train robbery. Privatising British Railways was meant to bring innovation, efficiency, competition and therefore lower fares but the reality, well it’s been very different. The former British Prime Minister and devout neoliberal, Margaret Thatcher was in favour of mass privatisation but even she claimed that privatising the British Rail system was ‘a privatisation too far’, but this didn’t stop her successors. So on this program we ask: was the neoliberal dream of rail privatisation actually the great British train robbery? Here to discuss why the cost and quality of UK train travel is so poor is the director of We Own It, Cat Hobbs and transport policy researcher at the University College London, Nicole Badstuber. Renegade Inc.

Timeline

  • Do a timeline on this - see notes in Scrivener, especially wrt vested interests in road building + rise of car ownership. Do an overview in Privatisation, with in-depth here.
  • Jan.28.2020: £500m to reverse Beeching’s rail cuts. A £500 million fund to resurrect railway lines axed under the Beeching cuts will be unveiled today as part of a plan to rebalance the economy. Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, will launch the scheme by awarding cash for the development of two lines in the north of England. Some £1.5m will be given to the Ashington-Blyth-Tyne line in Northumberland, and £100,000 to the Fleetwood line in Lancashire. The money will fund two feasibility studies. Richard Beeching, the former chairman of British Railways, advocated the closure of huge swathes of the network deemed to be loss-making in 1963. This included more than 2,300 stations and up to 5,000 miles of tracks. Graeme Paton, The Times. Comment: "Richard Beeching - a crooked businessman paid to falsify the figures on a report commissioned by the venal, mendacious Ernest Marples in order to transfer traffic to roads built by his family firm".
  • 1996: the franchising process was implemented, with various private companies taking over the shadow franchises.
  • 1994: British Rail's passenger sectors were divided into 25 "shadow" (test) franchises,ref which were publicly-owned TOCs operating in the planned franchise areas.

British Railways

ToDo: link, link

British Railways Board

Jan.1963
Conservatives (Macmillan)
The British Railways Board was created as a statutory corporation to inherit the railway responsibilities of the British Transport Commission, which was dissolved at the same time.ref (Transport Act 1962)

British Transport Commission

Fares

  • Feb.12.2019: MPs and peers press Treasury to abandon 'absurd' inflation measure. Ministers urged to ditch RPI, which it is claimed penalises students and rail passengers. Nicky Morgan, chairwoman of the Treasury committee, said: “It appears grossly unfair that government formulae affecting people’s incomes, such as pensions and benefits, often use CPI (consumer prices index), whereas formulae affecting outgoings, including student loans, often use RPI, which typically gives a higher rate of inflation. The Office for National Statistics has officially accepted RPI is a “very poor measure of general inflation”, yet the govt continues to use it to set the interest rate on student loans and as the basis for raising rail fares every year. Lord Forsyth, head of the economic affairs committee, warned the UKSA could be in breach of its statutory duties unless it fixed RPI. The govt is cherry-picking the measure that suits their purpose. Patrick Collinson, The Guardian.
  • Feb.11.2019: Labour calls for contactless payment across rail network. Industry criticised for lack of reform as ministers demand overhaul of ticketing system. Fares reform is regarded by many as a crucial element of rail reform. Last week, former British Airways CEO Keith Williams, who is conducting a review of the rail industry’s structures, said the industry would “drive passengers away” if it continues to operate as it does. Transport Focus, the independent watchdog that conducts the survey, said he believed the use of ticketing should go much further than it does: “There is an absolute necessity to reform the whole system so people think they get better value.” Gwyn Topham, The Guardian.
  • Jan.02.2019: Rail users to mount 'national day of action' over 3.1% fare rise. Passengers will protest at stations across UK after year of strikes and falling punctuality. ...as fares rise by 3.1%. Costs will come down for 16- and 17-year-olds, who are to be given half-price travel on all trains from September – benefiting up to 1.2 million people – according to an announcement by the govt in Nov.2o18. The TUC said privatisation was “rewarding failure”. Transport Focus said: “Passengers now pour over £10bn a year into the railway alongside significant gov investment, so the rail industry cannot be short of funding. Some fares have risen by more than £2,850 since 2010. The govt has launched a review of the UK rail network, led by the former British Airways chief executive Keith Williams. Rob Davies, The Guardian.

2018

  • Dec.27.2018: Rail punctuality plunges to 13-year low. One in seven trains in Britain missed industry’s measure of reliability in the past year. The cost of many rail season tickets will increase by more than £100 next week as average fares go up 3.1%. Transport Focus said: “With rail fares set to rise yet again passengers will be looking to the rail industry to deliver a more reliable, better value for money service in 2019.” The Department for Transport has launched a review by the former British Airways chief executive Keith Williams to consider all parts of the industry. Press Association, The Guardian.
  • May.08.2018: Q&A: the problem with rail fares. What’s the problem? The existing rail fares system is hugely complex, with an estimated 55 million different fares on the National Rail database at any one time. How do I know if I’ve been overcharged? That’s the problem; most of the time you won’t. How much am I being overcharged? There are multiple ways in which the rail fares system leave passengers out of pockets. What’s being done about it? The Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies, is launching a consultation next month to identify the main problems and set out how a future fares system could look. Why hasn’t this been done sooner? Train companies have been reluctant to press for major reform as this could lead to a dramatic fall in the overall cost of travel – which would hit train companies in the pocket and a rise in state subsidy. Graeme Paton, The Times.
  • Jan.01.2018: Twitter As passengers today face the steepest rail fare hike in 5 years, Labour analysis reveals that the average commuter will now be paying £2,888 for their season ticket, £694 more than in 2010. @LabourPress, Twitter.
  • 2018.01.02: Rail fare rises: Season ticket prices have soared by up to 50% since Tories took power in 2010, Labour reveals The Independent, Rob Merrick, @Rob_Merrick
  • Jan.02.2018: Don’t fall for @UKLabour rail fare nonsense, as Labour @MayorofLondon hikes most fares by almost the same amount on publicly-owned @TfL today, despite @SadiqKhan promise to freeze fares. @HBaldwin, Harriet Baldwin
  • Fares from 2 January 2018. Many fares are frozen until 2020, although on 2 January 2018 some fares changed on parts of our network. On average, Travelcards and caps increased by 3.4%, Transport for London
  • 2018.01.02: This article explains that fares he had control over are frozen whilst the rest have been increased by the govt. Less than honest comments from you then Harriet or were you just told to tweet this by HQ? @ChrisRBurrows
    • 2018.01.02: Here's Why London Travelcards Just Got More Expensive - Despite Sadiq Khan Suggesting He's 'Frozen' Fares, Huffington Post, Jasmin Gray
  • 2018.01.02: UK Rail: Where does your money go, and why do train fares keep going up? The Telegraph, Bradley Gerrard
      • 2018.01.01: An annual London-Peterborough season ticket now costs £7,864. In Germany you can buy an annual BahnCard 100, providing travel on *every train in the country*, for less than half that (€4,270, or £3,797), @JeremyCliffe
  • 2018.01.02: 'It's more than half my mortgage repayments': Guardian readers on train fare rises, @Guardian
    • 2018.01.02: 'You know the cost will only increase': Guardian readers on train fare rises. Rail fare bosses claim increases will help improve services. We hear from people affected by the price increases, The Guardian
    • 2018.01.02: Another big fare rise for rail travellers: 3.6%, the highest in 5 years. On overcrowded, ageing stock, with less staff & lower safety standards. Privatisation is the problem, not the answer. @UKLabour will bring rail franchises back into public ownership as they expire, Twitter, Laura Pidcock MP, @LauraPidcockMP
  • 2018.01.02: Chris Grayling accused of being 'in hiding' over rail fare rises, @BBCNews, BBC News
  • 2018.01.02: Still no response from Dept of Transport on timing/rationale for Chris Grayling's Qatar trip. Hours after No10 passed buck to DoT. (Tho No.10 wdve had to sign it off, like all min trips), @PaulWaugh, Twitter, Paul Waugh
  • Jan.02.2018: Britain's biggest rail union accused of 'utter hypocrisy' after describing rail fare rises as competitive. The Telegraph, Steven Swinford
  • 2018.01.02: You're suffering from the rail fare rises - even if you've never caught a train (forces mor cars on the roads), Politics.co.uk, Natalie Bennett

Network Rail

  • Dec.22.2018: Pay rise for rail bosses despite timetable chaos. Two thirds of Network Rail’s highest-paid executives had pay rises last year despite the timetabling chaos that inflicted misery on thousands of commuters. 50 of the 71 staff who earn more than the PM had it increased. Execs at the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, the publicly-owned company responsible for designing and building HS2had pay rises of ~8%. Oliver Wright, The Times.
  • Mar.01.2018: Private equity firms among bidders for Network Rail property business. Private equity firms, including Guy Hands’ Terra Firma, have emerged as contenders to take over Network Rail’s commercial property business, fuelling further dismay over the forced sale of assets to fund the budget shortfall. US investment giant Blackstone is understood to be another bidder for the rail property arm, which includes about 5,500 premises across England and Wales and is estimated to be worth £1.2bn. About 20 parties are expected to table preliminary bids on Friday, including Telereal Trillium, owned by the billionaire Pears family, and also funds linked to the Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs. Much of the property is in urban areas under railway arches, and often let to small businesses such as bars, garages and hairdressers. The portfolio generated a large proportion of Network Rail’s total rental income of £293m in 2017. Network Rail has said existing tenants will retain their leases under the new landlords. The sale of Network Rail assets, including some depots but no stations, was agreed as a condition of George Osborne (then chancellor) releasing more funds in 2015 to continue promised infrastructure work. Network Rail hoped to raise £1.8bn towards a £2.5bn shortfall. Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald said: “I regret that the govt is forcing Network Rail to sell parts of its property portfolio. It would be much better for the public purse to benefit from the £hundreds of millions of rent from railway arches each year rather than passing this income into the hands of private property investors such as Guy Hands.” In announcing the decision to sell in Nov.2017, Mark Carne, Network Rail’s chief executive, said the move would bring more investment into the commercial estate to benefit communities, as well as funding the railway. Gwyn Topham, The Guardian.

West Coast Main Line

  • Feb.03.2018: Virgin Trains 'rewarded for failure' with lucrative west coast main line deal Virgin Trains will be handed a lucrative new contract to run services on the west coast main line between London and Scotland for another two years despite serious criticism of its owners' handling of the east coast franchise. The contract will take the form of a "direct award", when the incumbent is handed a short-term deal without other train operators being able to bid. Chris Graylinghas been criticised for his handling of Virgin's east coast franchise... The west coast deal could be seen as a "reward for failure" by critics of Britain's privatised railway. The west coast is the country's most profitable rail line, making £51m for Virgin and Stagecoach in 2016-17. The Times, Graeme Paton

East Coast Rail

  • May.18.2018: The bad bet at the heart of the East Coast rail franchise implosion. Virgin Trains bosses did not conceive that passenger numbers could fall after two decades of consistent growth. At the root of the collapse of the Virgin Trains East Coast franchise, confirmed this week, was the expectation that rail passenger numbers could go only one way: up. Two decades of consistent growth had fostered the assumption that demand would keep rising, the only question being how high. That assumption has been proved wrong. Instead, demand has dropped not only on mainline inter-city routes but on commuter rail franchises and London’s tube network, where annual numbers are down 1.5%. Bus journey numbers are also down, dipping under 5bn in 2017 for the first time in a decade. Even on London’s comparatively cheap and regulated network they declined by 0.7%. Passenger numbers usually shadow two broad indicators: population and economic activity. The only previous drop in rail journeys since privatisation came during the financial crisis in 2008/9. Transport policy expert David Begg blames one particular policy for increasing the number of car journeys and congestion: eight years of freezing fuel duty. “[That] has led to more people travelling by car. Motoring costs have been falling while bus and train fares have been going up and up. To get more people on to sustainable transport, the price signals are all wrong.” Gwyn Topham, The Guardian.
  • May.15.2018: East coast rail franchise to be scrapped for the third time. The govt is preparing to scrap the troubled east coast rail franchise for the third time in 11 years after the operator was hit by £multimillion losses. Chris Grayling, transport secretary, is expected to announce that the existing deal to run the line, held by Virgin Trains East Coast, will be ditched. Mr Grayling has the option of renationalising the network or handing the operator, which is 90% owned by Stagecoach and 10% by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Rail Group, a new non-profitmaking contract to run the service for a further 2 years, an option that could include a performance-related bonus, sparking claims that it represents a “reward for failure”. He has already announced that it will be replaced by a new public-private partnership in 2020. The move will be embarrassing for the govt, which has been criticised for its handling of the franchising system. Last month MPs on the Commons public accounts committee said that the franchising model was “broken and passengers are paying the price”. The consortium had been due to hand the govt £3.3bn in premium payments to run the east coast line between London and Edinburgh from 2015-2023. Mr Grayling admitted that the company had over-bid for the contract at the time and was losing a huge sum of money after expected passenger numbers failed to materialise. Mr Grayling is likely to favour the Stagecoach/Virgin non-profit option given his opposition to nationalisation and the boost that such a move would give to Labour. Graeme Paton, The Times.
  • Feb.07.2018: How Stagecoach’s 'best ever' east coast rail franchise failed. Martin Griffiths, chief executive of the group, said that he was told when the bid was accepted in 2014 that it was the best the Department for Transport had signed off. He also said that the offer, which has since been described as over-optimistic by Chris Grayling, the Transport secretary, was partly based on the govt’s own figures. Experts say that at least three other franchises handed to private companies are also in trouble because they were based on optimistic passenger forecasts. Grayling said yesterday that the Virgin Trains contract to operate services on the East Coast line between London and Scotland would be terminated in months after running out of money. He told MPs that the East Coast fiasco “should also act as a stark warning to any company tempted to over-bid in future”. Graeme Paton, The Times.
  • Oct.26.2013: East coast mainline: profitable and publicly owned – so why sell it? Public ownership has transformed the service and on the 17.30 to Newcastle, many regulars can't see the point of privatising it. Popular approval explains why the govt's decision to formally launch the privatisation of the east coast mainline by offering it to tender is causing such bewilderment, confusion and anger among many regular travellers on the London-to-Edinburgh route. In Nov.2009, the Labour govt took the line under public control because its private operator National Express Group plc could not afford to run it on the terms it had rashly promised back in 2007. The previous owner of the franchise, GNER, had been stripped of the route after its US parent firm was struck by financial troubles. National Express, a seemingly solid company, was saving the day, and promising to inject £7.4m into upgrading stations, including the creation of 2,000 car park spaces, while the number of weekday trains would rise from 136 to 161 and a new London-to-Lincoln service would be added. It was, according to Transport minister Tom HarrisWikipedia-W.svg, very good news. Within two years, National Express realised it was losing money hand over fist – but the govt was not willing to renegotiate. Lord Andrew AdonisWikipedia-W.svg, then Transport secretary, set up Directly Operated Railways, a not-for-dividend subsidiary of the Department for Transport, to manage the service. The last 4 years, according to DOR's own accounts, published this month, have been an extraordinary success. Virgin, on the West Coast, has received £179.6m in revenue support from the govt since 2009 and a £1.2bn network grant, DOR has had no revenue support and a lesser, £980m network grant. Current transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin, launching the privatisation on Friday, said that he wanted to see a "revitalised east coast railway, one that both rekindles the spirit of competition for customers on this great route to Scotland and competes with the west coast on speed, quality and customer service". (more...) (cute map of the line) Daniel Boffey, The Guardian.
  • Oct.24.2017: Ten scandals since 2010 that show Britain is ruled by the loony right. Look at the East Coast mainline railway line: handed back to the public sector by a failed franchisee, it made a tidy profit for the taxpayer. But that was too ideologically embarrassing, so the govt sold it. Now Stagecoach, its present franchisee, grumbles that it can’t make enough – upsetting the govt's conviction that private enterprise trumps public management. Polly Toynbee, ExecReview.
  • Jun.28.2017: Stagecoach takes £84m East Coast charge as it says franchise won't make a profit until 2019. Predicted losses on the East Coast mainline have forced rail company Stagecoach to take a major multi-million pound charge leading to an 83% drop in group profits. Discussions are ongoing with the Department for Transport (DfT) about changing the terms of the franchise, which alongside forthcoming infrastructure changes and newer trains have led the company to expect the franchise to be profitable in 2019. Liberum's transport analyst Gerald Khoo said that although the DfT appeared supportive, "an agreement does not seem likely to be finalised in the short term and is not certain at all". The company said when it initially bid for the franchise in 2014 it was told by govt what to expect the rail infrastructure and train fleet would look like during the life of the franchise. Stagecoach, along with its joint venture partner Virgin Trains, submitted its bid based on this but now hopes the contract terms can be redrawn because of when works will be completed by Network Rail and when trains, which are procured by govt, will be delivered. Bradley Gerrard, The Telegraph.

Virgin Trains East Coast

  • Feb.23.2018: Virgin Trains named worst rail service. Virgin Trains was ranked Britain’s worst-performing rail operator. The company’s east and west coast main line services had more cancellations and serious delays than any other. Figures from the Office of Rail and Road showed that almost 9% of trains on the West Coast line were delayed by at least 30 mins or cancelled in the last three months of 2017. Virgin East Coast was the second-worst, with almost 8% of trains cancelled or running significantly late. The East Coast operation, which is 90% owned by Stagecoach and 10% by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, faces collapse within weeks because of a cash shortfall. Virgin pointed out that many of the delays were caused by failures in the track infrastructure, which is the responsibility of Network Rail. The worst company for delays overall was Govia Thameslink Railway, the parent company of Southern Rail, which has been affected by a wave of strikes by guards. Some 76.8% of its services arrived within 10 minutes of the scheduled time. It was followed by Hull Trains (76.9%) and the Caledonian Sleeper (78.1%). The Times, Graeme Paton
  • Jan.22.2018: Andrew Adonis Gets Rogered. Since the DfT announced that the Inter City East Coast (ICEC) franchise, run by Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC), was going to end prematurely, politicians have been queuing up to claim that VTEC, or perhaps Richard Branson personally, have been "bailed out" to the tune of around £2bn. Andrew Adonis rather let himself go. Roger Ford of "Modern Railways" magazine sheds light. Zelo Street, Tim Fenton
  • Jan.02.2018: Virgin Trains East Coast responds with casual sexism – to a sexism complaint. "Would you prefer 'pet' or 'love' next time? New Statesman, Media Mole
    • 2018.01.02: Putting prices & backs up…Virgin Trains apologises for ‘sexist’ tweet, The London Economic, Joe Mellor
  • 2018.01.02: When the state ran East Coast Mainline trains the company paid £1bn back to taxpayers rather than taking money from them. State-owned rail companies from other countries profit from running trains in the UK so why can't we? @CliveEford

Fat Cat Pay Deals

  • Jan.01.2018: Rail bosses slammed for fat cat pay deals. Tim O’Toole (First Great Western) will receive a package of ~£2 million. Martin Griffiths, boss of Stagecoach (East Midlands + part-owns Virgin East Coast & West Coach franchise) gets a pay package of £2.5 million. Rupert Soames, chief executive of Serco (Caledonian Sleeper & part-controls Merseyrail) gets ~£5.4 million. Jane Clinton, iNews.

Articles

  • Dec.18.2018: Rail shake-up will let passengers choose between rival services. Passengers will be allowed to shun failing train operators in favour of better-performing rivals under plans to allow companies to run the same routes. More competition will be introduced to the rail network from Apr.2019, to cut fares, boost the overall number of trains at quiet times and drive innovation. The regulator will allow “open-access” operators to run services, provided that they pay a bigger share of costs for the upkeep of the railway. They will compete directly against established franchise operators that are handed government contracts — usually lasting about ten years — to provide services on a dedicated stretch of the line. The Office of Rail and Road said: “This should encourage more competition in the passenger rail market.” The Competition & Markets Authority has already backed plans for more competition, saying that open-access operators could have a similar impact on the rail network to that low-cost airlines have had on air travel. At present they account for less than 1% of rail journeys. Outside the big franchises, only a handful of passenger operators currently run open access services on the normal mainline network, including Hull Trains, Heathrow Express and Grand Central. Rail fares will rise by an average of 3.1% next month. Linkback: Rail Delivery Group. Graeme Paton, The Times.
  • Dec.07.2018: Williams railways review to look at 'all options'. Keith Williams, who is heading a year-long review of UK railways, has refused to rule out nationalisation as a possible recommendation to govt. His review was established to suggest the most appropriate organisational and commercial frameworks for the rail network. Mr Williams' findings and recommendations will be published in a government White Paper in autumn 2019, with "reform of the sector" to begin in 2020. BBC.
  • Nov.26.2018: New ombudsman gives rail commuters a fast track for complaints. A new Rail Ombudsman service comes into force today. It will have binding powers over train firms should it uphold a customer complaint. the service has been criticised by Labour as toothless and unable to tackle important issues facing passengers such as rocketing fares and complicated pricing tariffs that vary from one operator to another. The ombudsman will focus on providing a free service to passengers objecting to an operator’s response, or if a complaint has not been resolved within 40 days. Train companies both fund the ombudsman and have agreed to abide by its rulings. Labour said the ombudsman’s voluntary code and limited powers will do little to address problems. The service will be provided by a private company, Dispute Resolution Ombudsman Ltd, which has so far concentrated on consumer disputes in the furniture and removals sector. The new ombudsman is a member of the Ombudsman Association. Gwyn Topham, The Guardian.
  • Aug.16.2018: These rail fare rises are a step too far. Why don’t commuters rise up? Any prime minister who puts Chris Grayling in charge, an ideological obsessive who destroys all he touches, is tone deaf to the national pulse. This week’s train fare rise announcement was political folly on a grand scale, after June’s train timetable fiasco left tens of thousands of trains cancelled. Fares have risen at twice the pace of wages, up 42%, pay up just 18% since 2008, with driver shortages, short trains and customers short-changed by the some of the most expensive fares in the world. A Peterborough to Kings Cross season ticket costs £6,540 a year while in Germany a BahnCard 100 buys a year’s travel anywhere for £3,840. Meanwhile, fuel tax has been frozen for 7 years. Dishonestly, the government uses the higher retail prices index to raise regulated fares and student loans, an index the Treasury and Bank of England declare “flawed” and “useless”, yet conveniently choose the lower consumer price index to keep pension and benefit rises low. Two-thirds of voters want the railways to be renationalised, as Labour proposes, with only 19% opposed. The nonsense of rail privatisation is well-understood: the taxpayer pumps in £3.5bn subsidy, the many companies take out millions in profit; each has their own well-oiled board and chief executive, these rolling stock companies rolling in profits. Companies can spend £60m a year just to bid for franchises. That’s an administrative madness that far outstrips the old rightwing complaint against British Rail that it was a bureaucratic monolith synonymous with state-owned, shabby, producer-captured sluggishness. it was John Major's personal ideological fixation that dreamed up dashing liveries for different companies, which he imagined steaming away in hot competition embodying the free market. But there’s precious little competition – instead passengers are stuck with empty choices. When profits are less than hoped, companies simply bail out, the east coast franchise has collapsed three times and been rescued by the state. Under public ownership, satisfaction rose to 91% and it yielded £225m a year profit to the state. That’s the embarrassment that had George Osborne dashing to reprivatise it in 2015, only for it to collapse again. Meanwhile Network Rail scavenges for cash with a £1.5bn sell-off of railway arches harbouring 4,455 age-old businesses alongside new start-ups, going against every ethos of a state-owned company. Is nationalisation a magic bullet train? There are risks... Polly toynbee, The Guardian.
  • Apr.22.2018: Rail pain piles up as five operators totter. Two of Britain’s busiest rail operators, South Western and Greater Anglia, are set to break promises to provide new train services to ease overcrowding and cut journey times, following a row between train company bosses and Network Rail. Critics say four franchises could collapse by the end of the year in addition to Virgin East Coast, which is set to end in weeks after running out of cash. Train companies are pulling out of franchise competitions. FirstGroup and Italy’s Trenitalia confirmed this weekend they have withdrawn their joint bid from the contest to land the East Midlands franchise, leaving just two bidders. South Western, which serves London, Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset, ran into problems when Network Rail raised concerns over its proposed new timetable. First/MTR, Mark Hookham, John Collingridge, Louis Goddard, Katherine Forster, The Times.
  • Feb.27.2018: Taxpayers’ £250m bill as passengers put off trains. The Department for Transport (DfT) admitted that income from rail franchises would be lower in 2017-18 than originally forecast. A report setting out changes in govt spending plans said that net income would be £248.7m lower than previous estimates. It partly blamed the biggest rail franchise, Govia Thameslink Railway, which runs Southern Rail and the Thameslink service through London. According to the Office of Rail and Road, the number of journeys taken fell by 0.4% between July – September last year compared with the same period in 2016. Journeys made using season tickets fell by 9.4% to its lowest level since 2010-11. The Times, Graeme Paton
  • 2018.01.02: The German equivalent of the RMT has several seats on the Supervisory Board of Germany's rail company. Germany has publicly owned rail *and* stronger unions - and it has both higher living standards and more equality than Britain. What does that tell you? @OwenJones84
    • 2018.01.01: What is the German equivalent of the RMT and do they enjoy the same degree of power, control and influence as the RMT do here in the U.K.? @NadineDorries
    • 75% of UK Rail now wholly or partly owned by foreign states (pic), @JohnOHopkins
    • 2017.01.03: Our European friends say thank you to British rail privatisation for all their rail savings (video), @Stop1984 > YouTube, TSSA Union
  • 2018.01.02: The Tory govt shamefully presents: The Great Train Robbery – the greatest swindle of rail passengers this country has ever seen, @UKLabour
  • 2018.01.02: It is untrue that rail safety has declined, it is incredibly good. The reason it is so good is because fares were raised to pay for it. There is no such thing as a free lunch, Twitter, SpinningHugo, @SpinningHugo
    • 2017.11.09: Train drivers agree 28% pay rise to end Southern Rail strikes, The Times
  • Jan.10.2017: Dutch electric trains become 100% powered by wind energy. All Dutch electric trains are now powered by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting Jan.2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy. “So we in fact reached our goal a year earlier than planned,” said Boon, adding that an increase in the number of wind farms across the country and off the coast of the Netherlands had helped NS achieve its aim. NS operates about 5,500 train trips a day. One windmill running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles, the companies said. They hope to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35% by 2020 compared with 2005. Agence France-Presse in the Hague, The Guardian.
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