The Farce Continues.
Christian Wolmar isn't impressed with the government's latest rail review.
Like the original privatisation Bill, the draft of the rail review has all the hallmarks of a document cobbled together in a rush by bright civil servants with little knowledge of the workings of the rail industry. The imperative this time round is to cut the soaring costs to the taxpayer rather than collect a lot of money and watch the industry slide into decline, although like all of the reviews since privatisation it tinkers at the edges rather than addressing the real issues.The document highlights the extent to which the Labour government has been unable to get a grip on an industry whose privatisation ministers now accept was "botched" but which they steadfastly refuse to reverse in its entirety. Instead, the review will result in yet another attempt to impose new rules on a system that was, is and will remain unworkable.
I hope somebody's going to nail the myth that all the problems of the railways will end if you just close a few unprofitable branch lines. To make a significant dent in the subsidy it's not just a few remote rural lines that will go,. It would have to be wholesale closures cutting entire regions off the railway map.
The money lost by rural branch lines is peanuts compared with the money wasted by the cumbersome and unworkable fragmentation of the core parts of the network. Can someone explain why rail users in Cornwall should lose their rail services to pay for mismanagement of the West Coast Main Line modernisation?
Update: Patrick Crozier isn't impressed either.
Posted by TimHall at June 13, 2004 03:24 PM | TrackBackNot just that when you close down branch lines if has a knock on effect to main lines as there might be a few people at branch line station say 50 branch line stations and 20 ppl at peak times. But 50 times 20 is 1,000 ppl. That is 4 loads worth of trains. It just does not make sense and proves that the government has still got the short sighted rail policy inherited from Beeching. Lets be hypothetical and mask Beeching’s findings onto the road network. My cul de sac i live in only has about 50 car journeys a day. On my main road there are 7,000 cars roaring every day. On my main orad the A22 there are tens if not hundreds of thousands. Pn the M25 well I'll let you guess. So lets close down all the closes and cul de sac and all the little used roads in the countryside lets close them down as if they were never built in the first place. What do you think this would do to car usage? In fact this is a good idea. I'm fed up with one method being applied to one form of transport with another for another form of transport.
This is nothing more than tinkering so the government can have more control still blame private companies and put its cronies in charge to rip-off the taxpayer. It will never change so get used to it.
It’s obvious vertical integration works for the rail industry because historically that’s how are railways were ran for over a hundred years. The SR, LNER, GWR etc… In Japan when they privatised their industry which was also nationalised like ours in the 40’s or whenever. The only difference is Japan has proper companies not franchises. It doesn’t have a separate infrastructure company that that of TOC’s
What is totally unacceptable is nopt the fact that our system was wrong but the complete inability of the government to do anything about it. This truly leads me to believe the government wants it like this so its cronies are in charge and can then pay themselves telephone number bonuses because they’ve improved performance by 1% or something.