franklin1777 said:
So much to reply to on this thread, it is proving to be a most interesting discussion.
I would like to see a nationalised rail network again but don't really see how that could happened and don't really see how privatisation could have been stopped. It is like saying Dr Beeching could have been stopped.
You know, the interesting thing about Beeching is that what he proposed was a lot different from what we got, but it has been interesting how willing successive governments have been to allow the misconception that Beeching was responsible for emasculating the rail network to persist.
Beeching was quite a fan of railways, and his review was premised on his shock at discovering that British Rail made no attempt to record figures for financial of any part of the network. When he started to try and find out what the economies of running the branch lines were, it was not to close them, but to provide an economic basis on which they could be justified as "feeders" to the rest of the network.
Beeching's vision was of a significantly pared-down network - the amount of duplication and pointlessness was quite legendary - but one where local routes fed into the more profitable and higher-profile major routes. There was a contrary view going around at the time that the entire rail network, barring the trunk routes between major cities, should just be slashed, leaving us with, effectively, no more than an "Inter City" service.
But his report was only partially implemented by Government - they did all the bits that saved money, like closing branches and lines, but failed to make the investments in other parts of the network to compensate (I think Beeching had been an advocate of some fairly major upgrading of what was left). What they effectively left us with was a fragmented and badly hacked around system that had all the worst aspects of the cuts (ie, less feeder routes, poor resources at railheads to allow multimodal transport), and no benefits to the rest of the network (viz investment and improvement). Some improvements did filter through - the West Coast electrification being one, and the use of "block trains", continuously-braked freight trains that ran point-to-point, rather than the much slower unfitted freights, which stopped everywhere to detach wagons, being another.
Another major flaw in Beeching's reasoning was the idea that the "missing" rail services would just be made up by buses. What tended to actually happen was that people would forego the comparatively slow and unreliable bus services in favour of doing that leg of the journey in their new cars - and, once on the road in the car, there was little point in not doing the entire journey in the car. Thus, that miscalculation led to the railways losing even more traffic to other forms of transport, not gaining it as a result of the modernisation.
franklin1777 said:
A lot of government decisions have been poor and naturally against the railway network with the road lobby and their plan to tarmac the nation. It is in these political decisions which includes not just the infrastructure but also the passenger and freight service that I still maintain can only come from a stronger strategic direction and a strong regulation regime provided by a government body hopefully incorporating industry and customer interests. As someone else has suggested a modern day British Railways Board.
Yes. The trouble is that railways look, superficially, extremely expensive: the fixed infrastructure costs are very high, and pay back over a very long term, while unit vehicle-mile costs are comparatively low, in contrast to roads, where the infrastructure costs are considerably lower, and the unit costs greatly higher. The comparison is further skewed by the fact that for road transport the vehicle-mile costs are borne privately and are also to some extent lost in the fixed costs of purchasing and servicing a vehicle, which, having been paid out, then makes the per-mile costs look even cheaper.
franklin1777 said:
I even agree with vertical integration but you would need to remove the franchise periods. What is the point of having a 15 year railway. I would also demand protection for open access operators, either national or local companies that operated trains across the network. Mainly to stop the monopolistic players such as stage coach and first being able to operate a virtual monopoly. After all if another operator can come in and run competitive services then there should be enough competition to be in the customer's interest.
I think that something had to be done. The idea that we had a railway system which operated as if it were immune from the normal economic realities was ludicrous and unsustainable, but the way in which the system was privatised, creating THREE separate vertical profit centres - the infrastructure provider, the ROSCOs, and the train operators - all with their own shareholders and bottom line, not to mention the manipulation verging on fraud of the subsidies around the time of privatisation, was utterly wrong and served only to perpetuate a lot of what was already wrong, leaving us with the worst of all possible worlds.
franklin1777 said:
So all in all I guess you would be looking at 4/5/6 main operators with a number of open access operators such as freight, long distance cross country passenger services, Local specials, charter companies etc.
Another thing I would want to see is a destruction of the power wielded by the leasing companies.
It all seems a bit of a pipe dream, but that would be my railway.
*nods* At the very least, I think I'd want to see the ROSCOs and the infrastructure merged - after all, from a safety point of view, the distinction between vehicles and track/signalling is pretty much non-existent. So it would then be possible for any organisation then to "charter" a train and a path in order to run a service (though I still think that the pricing and ticketing implications for this are horrendous).
"My" railway would probably be a monolithic company again. It would be run by a board, on commercial lines, as a non-profit-making trust, with Government subsidy as required. It would be financially accountable to us, by publishing proper accounts, would be able to invest in infrastructure (which would necessitate the appropriate financial instruments being available to it, much as the SNCF infrastructure does in France), could run unprofitable "public service" services with appropriate subsidies, etc.
In other words, a nationalised British Rail again, but one that would have to justify itself in broadly commercial terms, but without the cold dead hand of State control, yet without being at the mercy of shareholders and the vagaries of private ownership.
but assume its the right place for 
