The Wheel/Rail Split in Europe

According to this book review on Transport Blog, the practice of dividing railway operation into separate organisations owning the track and running the trains has caused chaos in continental Europe as well as in Britain. The lesson appears to be that a wheel/rail split only works (as in not failing) when a network is running well below it's maximum capacity. When you have a crowded, busy network such as those The Netherlands, Switzerland and many parts of Britain, it's a recipe for chaos.

My experiences last weekend between Manchester and Slough bear this out. Friday's southbound journey by Virgin Trains lost something like 25 minutes on the busy commuter section south of Birmingham, stuck behind a late-running evening commuter train. Monday's return trip was exactly the same. Virgin Trains' early-morning Gatwick to Liverpool lost about ten minutes because of a track circuit failure at Clapham Junction. This meant we lost our path on the busy section through Birmingham, so we crawled from Leamington Spa to Tyseley behind an all-stations stopping train, then repeated the performance on the other side of Birmingham behind another local as far as Wolverhampton.

To add insult to injury, the slow crawl gave us a good view of the abandoned trackbed of the former slow lines south of Birmingham, ripped up during the Beeching cuts in the sixties. In a sane world those tracks would still be there, and our Virgin Voyager would have sailed past the Centro class 150 on those slow lines. How many frogs will need to be boiled to put them back?