Are the railways fixable?

It’s reached the point where a super off-peak return is more than the cost of taking a taxi to Newcastle airport and flying to Heathrow. It’s more than doubled in the last year, for a 200 mile journey.

Government could have stuck 10p/litre on fuel duty and used it to bring rail travel down to a merely eye-watering price, but nope.

It’s cheaper for me to lease a bloody Tesla and pay for the electricity and insurance than to take the train three times a month. That is a sorry indictment of the state of our public transport.

Edit: also, is STW fixable? Super super super slow.

Rail gets 58% of transport spending for 1% of the trips, or 7% by distance.  Hard to see the justification for even more subsidy.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rail-factsheet-2022/rail-factsheet-2022

Rail gets 58% of transport spending for 1% of the trips, or 7% by distance. Hard to see the justification for even more subsidy.

On the other hand if it was run properly and had a decent ticket system, reliable infrastructure and services etc, it would have more passengers and would require less subsidy.

If you run a public service into the ground, you can’t then act all surprised when passenger numbers drop and the funds to run it need to come from the public purse.

See also, buses and trail centres such as CyB…

Train this morning was cancelled because of a fault before I left the station, it was already running a shortened service because TfW don’t have enough trains available. You’d think that is a fundamental part of the business model but there you go.

Train was 3.5 hours each way to get from Shrewsbury to Reading, so slower than driving, more expensive than driving for work, even with them paying me 45p/mile if I’d have driven and as I’m on a full green electric tariff higher carbon. But in theory I can work on the train, but not a chance as it was too busy to be able to actually do anything.

I use it because I should not because I want to.

I’m not sure if it’s fixable but what concerns me more than the cost is the 50/50 risk my train will be cancelled. I rarely use the trains. When I do my train either gets cancelled or a I get lucky and all the others but mine get cancelled. Ultimately it’s stress I don’t want

If you run a public service into the ground, you can’t then act all surprised when passenger numbers drop and the funds to run it need to come from the public purse.

Yet so many of the trains I’m on are packed – particularly the Scotland – London trains on east and west coast.

That said, our local electric bus from Dunblane to Glasgow is packed every time I use it, half the price of the train, and 10 mins quicker…

I’m in an FB group for interraillers – it appears that railways all over Europe are a bit of a mess. It seems bizarre, but it looks like we can’t afford to run rail services any more.

Costs me £7 a day return to go to the office, so about the same as parking if I drive,  and saves me at least half an hour a day. Was 5 minutes late this morning, which is the worst I’ve had for a while.

But yes, long distance travel is harder. Though my sons other half can apparently now get from Rugby to Glasgow for work in the same time by train as she can flying.

Yes, but none of us are willing to pay the amount required to catch up with decades of mismanagement, underinvestment, and bodges.

Same as with sewage in the rivers.

It’s reached the point where a super off-peak return is more than the cost of taking a taxi to Newcastle airport and flying to Heathrow.

On the subject of weird pricing incentives, it’s cheaper to park your car on a double yellow line in central Cambridge (and pay the fine within 14 days) than use a car park if you’re working a full day.

Same as with sewage in the rivers.

Not quite the same, the water companies were allowed / encouraged to invest nothing in infracstructure for decades and award massive dividends to share holders. We paid the right amount in bills to fix everything, they just pocketed the cash with full approval from the regulator.

It would be great if they were better, but I have got a nice little earner in the delay repay payments I claim about once a month, for journeys that were paid for by work 🙂

Not quite the same

I was answering the question about whether it’s fixable.

as driverless, electric cars become the norm for longer distance travel, long distance train starts to look pretty inefficient, both in terms of space and cost. Planes are cheap because every seat (of which there are far more per sqft of cabin) is full up – trains are far more spread out and generally half-full (ignoring rush hour) – they’re just not a very attractive proposition to most ordinary people.

Rail gets 58% of transport spending for 1% of the trips, or 7% by distance. Hard to see the justification for even more subsidy.
On the other hand if it was run properly and had a decent ticket system, reliable infrastructure and services etc, it would have more passengers and would require less subsidy.

I’d love to use the train to go to gigs in London, but the shitty timetables just won’t let me. Gigs finish at 11pm, with an average 25min run to Paddington. That doesn’t include leaving the venue and walking to the tube station.

The last train to Bristol is 11.28.
The last gig in London I went to I tried parking at Reading and catching the Elizabeth Line in. Going went ok, coming back me and my mate got to Paddington in plenty of time, we sat waiting for the train, it seemed to be a bit late, an inquiry of one of the staff revealed that the last train had been cancelled without any notification! We had to rush back to the mainline station and buy tickets which cost an extra £23 to get back to Reading!
Bloody ridiculous and infuriating.
Same with trains back from Bristol – all of the venues in the city centre are around a 30 minute walk back to Temple Meads. Which is irrelevant because the last train back to Chippenham leaves at 10.32, while bands are still playing. There’s no bus service to Bristol from Chippenham, you have to catch a bus to Bath, change to a bus to Bristol, a journey of roughly two hours.
And people say we should stop using our cars and use public transport. Yeah, right!

Railways have almost never been profitable for passenger services, freight is where they have always made their money. Since road haulage is so much more flexible freight has largely moved away from the railways, especially since 44 tonne HGVs became a thing in the late 90s.

Yeah they can with a better investment and less privately owned companies. Cheaper for me to take the train to Newcastle than it is to drive, even 2 of us is especially with a rail card. Means we can also have a few drinks too.

I’m in an FB group for interraillers – it appears that railways all over Europe are a bit of a mess. It seems bizarre, but it looks like we can’t afford to run rail services any more.

Anecdotal, but we did a fortnight interailling at Easter (UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Norway) and the only problem we had with trains was in the UK. Also had to work in Belgium for a couple of weeks, every train was spot-on, the exception being Mrs Pondo’s Eurostar delayed leaving London on the middle weekend.

Of course it’s fixable – at a cost. Like many other issues it’s a case of “is there the political will?”