UK now = 16,000km

UK pre-beeching = 30,000km (but I think was much higher years before that?)

France now = 30,000km (population almost same as UK)

Germany now = 43,000km (population about 25% higher?)

If you’re going to compare route KMs then surely you need to look at area, not population? Ie France is roughly 2.5 times the size of us, with less than double the route mileage, plus they have significant amounts of high speed line duplicated by ‘classic’ routes running in parallel, which is overstating their coverage.

Germany is about 50% bigger than us, so their coverage is vastly better.

That’s only really half the story as well I guess. If Beeching hadn’t closed all of those routes would we really have had a markedly better service? The pinch points would still be just as bad, you’re not getting any more trains into the big termini, indeed it would likely effectively be fewer because they’d have come from all the tiny loss-making subsidiary lines.

ECRO in training

Wassthat? Electrical Control Room Operator (from Google!)? Pretty sure the DM’s never heard of them, let alone hated them!

I don’t claim to be an expert, but a friend of mine who could be fairly described as a train nut basically summed it up to me as ‘the best railways are Swiss and Japanese- one is publicly owned and one is privately owned. What makes the difference is that they spend a lot more money on them than us’. I don’t know how true it is (I had a look at the time and it seemed to fit with what I could find, but Wikipedia caveat and all that) but it seems to make sense.

The question to me is always ‘how much do we want to improve the railways and how much are we prepared to pay for it’. HS2 gets a lot of bad press, but arguably it’s a large investment in railway infrastructure to increase capacity, at modern speeds. Out of curiosity how do the people in this thread criticising this large government run bit of spending on railway infrastructure square that criticism with their view that everything else on the railways would be better if the government was running it?

I can’t pick a side- railways seem like a place where you can’t get proper competition between train companies. It doesn’t seem practical to have a system where you could buy a ticket for a particular train company operating on the same line as others, so it makes sense to have it run as a monopoly by the government. On the other hand then you end up with very little motivation to improve things beyond the individual ‘pride in your job’ level.

Tricky one I haven’t figured out.

If it’s not privatised then it doesn’t have to be a huge state monstrosity / monopoly.

Make it be several transport regions where “state owned” is actually a union of the local authorities. Like having several TFLs. That way trains, buses, trams are all properly linked in single ticketting systems.

The only national bit that “needs” to be national is intercity (and freight).

Still run open-access services on it.

Oh that just described the German rail / transport network (that people claim is a state monopoly, but isn’t).

Still don’t think they can really be compared though, given that a huge chunk of UK is practically deserted, and another small area has such high throughput that one single station can exceed the entire network passenger throughput of smaller countries.

That’s why I said denser, not longer.  The density and therefore the number of junctions and intersections of journeys and lines is what causes the issues.  The USA has 250k km of track, but I’d wager it’s far simpler as most of those kms are crossing open prarie without bumping into each other.

The US is an interesting example as, broadly speaking outside of the North East, the infrastructure is owned by the freight operating companies, and they provide track access rights to Amtrak for passenger services. This means the passenger services are the lowest of the low priority and are frequently many hours late!

With domestic air travel being so cheap in the US long distance rail travel is really one for enthusiasts!

The only national bit that “needs” to be national is intercity (and freight).

Not sure I understand what you mean? Nearly all services join cities, unless they’re suburban. Are they “intercity”? There are plenty of PTEs that operate metro services in and around their area of authority. That doesn’t work on a wider basis though.

 Out of curiosity how do the people in this thread criticising this large government run bit of spending on railway infrastructure square that criticism with their view that everything else on the railways would be better if the government was running it?

Personally my concern is the separation of rail infrastructure, operating companies and government. It seems a complex, issue laden way of running a rail system that should be coherant, reliable and simple at point of access. And at present, it is not. It is better in Scotland (we only have one main company), but the issues I and family have had this year all stem from multiple companies being involved, none of whom put passenger first.

As for HS2, I am generally for it. My concern again is that we already have companies milking it for every penny of profit – delay and overspend almost from week 1.

Out of curiosity how do the people in this thread criticising this large government run bit of spending on railway infrastructure square that criticism with their view that everything else on the railways would be better if the government was running it?

its about accountability

TFL is a great example of how to do things, but its he Mayor of London who gets it in the neck if it goes wrong, so more of that please.

HS2 however, if that has huge overruns, who bears responsibility?

Talking about HS2, and bringing things back to cycling:

https://www.citymetric.com/transport/parliamentary-meeting-cycling-provision-route-hs2-showed-me-mps-just-don-t-get-4113

It’s a depressing article to read 🙁

What is it people are actually wanting? Not being obtuse, genuinely don’t understand.

It talks about tunnel widths, which suggests they’re meaning a cycle lane adjacent to the railway, which given it avoids most major settlements seems a bit weird; not many people will want to cycle from London to Birmingham.

But then it makes lots of talk about crossings. Flat crossings on a high speed rail route are a really, really, really bad idea, it’s where the DLR comparison stacks up nicely – you want to minimise the chance of people and trains coming into contact (literally), so then you’re talking about bridges, and I’m not sure I’d expect cycle lane bridges to criss-cross a railway, there aren’t many currently after all, just use the roads. 😕

The MPs sound like **** though, which is hardly surprising.