I am with CB. Cost is an issue for sure but the service I get is actually very good. Punctual, rapid, and train standards are improving.
The old British Rail had some advantages but the service was pretty shocking. Since then passenger numbers have shot up massively.
Even cost is not always an issue now. On Friday I got from London to Birmingham on a modern, spacious Chiltern train from Marylebone (ignoring the more obvious Virgin train out of Euston) for £9.
This is an interesting move by Smith. He’s opposing invoking Article 50 until the government agrees to a second vote.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/37167253
It’ll have no impact on the leadership vote and he’s going to further alienate pro-Brexit labour supporters, but it signals to me the way the next general election might be fought.
Obviously, Smith won’t* be leading Labour, but following a split, it might signal the platform that a new third party might stand on.
*unless something completely unforeseen happens.
The last time the railway was under public ownership was one year ago, when the East Coast Mainline was sold back to private interests. Having spent 5 years under public ownership because private ownership (National Express) walked away from the problem when they decided that they were unable to turn a profit. Whilst under public ownership the operator became the most profitable in the country, taking the least amount of subsidies and with the highest levels of customer satisfaction.
The link you posted states: “in the financial year ending in March 2012, the train companies gained an average return of 147% on every pound they put into their business.” However, fullfact.org found that in reality the amount of return made after subsidy and paying money back to the government was 3.4% for the financial year ending March 2012 (i.e. the same period).["
How on earth you can defend these cunts I have no idea.
I stopped using trains as a matter of course a long time ago because of cost. I’ve got a 500 mile round trip to do on a regular basis which is rarely viable because of cost, nigh ruinable if you’re taking more than one person or if the fixture changes.
Buck and CB’s point essentially boils down to I’m alright, Jack.
Can we also rid ourselves of the idea that rising passenger numbers are a good thing and surely indicative of how well the whole privatisation business is going?
Those rising passenger numbers are all too visible in the overcrowded shots. The train companies will take their money, but they won’t necessarily get a seat.
Also, has anyone making that argument considered why more people might be bundling more people onto trains? How many of those train journeys are being made in and out of London, for example, rapidly growing and charging a tariff for anyone wanting to bring a vehicle into the centre of the city?
How many of those numbers are inflated outside of London by people needing to make multiple journeys getting to one place? How many people have needlessly stood in Crewe, FFS!? 
Most people that rely on trains do it because they have to.
Seriously. Privatisation has been a mess, first to last - an moving embodiment of the utter failure of neo-liberalism as an ideology. The losses have been socialised, the profits have been privatised. Our rolling stock would be a laughing stock if it didn’t cause so much misery, or cost so much money.
You think train use has gone up because the service provided is so good since privatisation that people are happy to pay extra for the privilege?
You don’t think it could be because people have no other choice? E.g. boom in numbers of young people going to University, introduction of congestion charges, ongoing centralization towards London, increasing fuel prices?
So I spend most of my life on trains, whether that be travelling into London on the suburban SWT services, or from Kings Cross to Leeds on Virgin East Coast.
SWT: Service is not great, with many delays. However, most of the delays are due to either points issues or suicides, which neither is the responsibility of SWT, which is why we rarely get a decent refund on our ticket. Trains are packed, but one of the issues is that the infrastructure of the Surbiton mainline doesn’t allow for more trains as the network is already full. They need another set of rails to allow for more services, which is just not possible apparently.
I pay £316 a month for unlimited travel into and out of London, and unlimited tube.
Virgin East Coast: Very impressed with the service in general, always get a seat, generally book about a week in advance and get a return for circa £70. If you are half an hour late you get 50% of your ticket price back, and 100% if it’s over an hour. By the way, I have NEVER seen people leaving their bags on seats to save them, and then just leave them there, especially a whole carriage full. Again, any delays I have tended to experience have been due to power lines going down, which is Railtracks responsibility.
Personally, I’m not against re-nationalisation of the railways, but it all depends on how they’re going to approach the issues we have (too many people on an already “at capacity” network), and the piss poor work of Railtrack (who are already Government owned).
Not all franchises have been well run, as you point out, however, in the same vein, your example does not extrapolate out to total public owberhip being a guaranteed success.
What did you think of British Rail? Was it well run? Was it punctual? Did it have modern rolling stock?
The main problem with public ownership is that is gets used as a political football and is subject to ever changing short term decision making.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it is perfect and certain structural elements like the subsidies need to be resolved, but I do take issue with the blind assertions that everything will be hunky dory as a publicly owned entity.
Originally posted by @pap
I stopped using trains as a matter of course a long time ago because of cost. I’ve got a 500 mile round trip to do on a regularly basis which is rarely viable because of cost, nigh ruinable if you’re taking more than one person or if the fixture changes.
Buck and CB’s point essentially boils down to I’m alright, Jack.
Can we also rid ourselves of the idea that rising passenger numbers are a good thing and surely indicative of how well the whole privatisation business is going?
Those rising passenger numbers are all too visible in the overcrowded shots. The train companies will take their money, but they won’t necessarily get a seat.
Also, has anyone making that argument considered why more people might be bundling more people onto trains? How many of those train journeys are being made in and out of London, for example, rapidly growing and charging a tariff for anyone wanting to bring a vehicle into the centre of the city?
How many of those numbers are inflated outside of London by people needing to make multiple journeys getting to one place? How many people have needlessly stood in Crewe, FFS!?
Most people that rely on trains do it because they have to.
Seriously. Privatisation has been a mess, first to last - an moving embodiment of the utter failure of neo-liberalism as an ideology. The losses have been socialised, the profits have been privatised. Our rolling stock would be a laughing stock if it didn’t cause so much misery, or cost so much money.
First, it’s not a case of “I’m alright Jack”. I haven’t said that.
Second, picking up on you last comment, why is our rolling stock a joke?
Originally posted by @CB-Saint
First, it’s not a case of “I’m alright Jack”. I haven’t said that.
Nah, not exactly, but “my subjective experience is that the service is okay, and besides, was worse when it was public” doesn’t quite have the same ring. I know you didn’t say that either, exactly.
Second, picking up on you last comment, why is our rolling stock a joke?
Well, that was mostly flourish, but I can defend it.
We’ve people, especially proud TOC proprietors, drooling over their rolling stock that glides in and out of London, while you’ve got shitty little bus trains still wheezing their way between Wigan and Manchester. As a gag, it’s at its funniest when Joe Public says “ooh, new train! Isn’t privatisation good!”, not realising a good deal of the cost has come out of their own pocket, even if they don’t use trains.
Where did i say that? I was saying that the old BR service was often very poor - when passenger numbers were much lower - and so if they were running it now, they would have to cope with vastly greater numbers of people.
As opposed to the entire cost if it were public 
Originally posted by @Bucks
Where did i say that? I was saying that the old BR service was often very poor - when passenger numbers were much lower - and so if they were running it now, they would have to cope with vastly greater numbers of people.
It’s probably worth clearing up a few of the usual canards. First off, while I accept that British Rail wasn’t a superb service, equally, there was never much political will in doing much with it. Privatisation was on the agenda for a long time. The Conservatives weren’t in power long enough to implement. New Labour ended up doing the deed.
I think that there is a huge argument to be made that privatisation has helped to drive centralisation. I’m sure that those at the “centre” (it really isn’t) don’t feel it as much as those on the fringes. In many cases, a huge amount of investment has been made with the proceeds of subsidies and profits. The rest of the country? Not so much, really.
Passenger rail strategy has mostly been about getting things to London, because it’s a guaranteed money spinner. While we’ve got some excellent local links, established long before privatisation, some theoretically easy trips end up taking far too long. Liverpool to London is about 2 hours. Liverpool to Hull is about three hours.
The country needs long term planning for the whole island. The fragmented nature of these train operating companies doesn’t really allow for it, and frankly, they couldn’t give a fuck either way. Fragmentation not only suits them fine. It suits them better. Keeps you on their bit of the network longer, buying their on-board shit.
It is passengers and the economy that ultimately suffer, and for what, so the likes of Branson can pour more money into private islands or getting the fuck off the planet?
If we had better links between cities, the overcrowding in and around London (and I’m not just talking trains) would be much less of an issue.
Anyhow, back onto the Labour party, Owen Smith has come out to say that there would be a second referendum on Brexit once the terms of the Brexit Deal were known, I guess as an attempt to hoover up the remainers in the labour party.
I think someone needs to tell him that we wont know the terms of the Brexit until we have finished the negotiations. We can’t start the negotiations until we invoke Article 50 and once we invoke Article 50 whether we stay or go is outside of our control.
Don’t see it that way. People think trains are privatised and they really aren’t, not in the sense that they’ve stopped costing the taxpayer money.
A publicly owned system would be “sold” as such.
So that’s 1/3 of Labour voters annoyed, including probably some on the right.
Going by the ref result, that is 17m of the voting public.
Finally, way to address that scary Labour to UKIP swinger danger.
Could they not add a couple of coaches to each train?
Genuine question - or are the trains already at some sort of limit?
And if so, why can’t that limit be extended? I often pass, and occasionally alight at stations with short platforms where you can only get out from a carriage near the front.
Either way Shirty, you should take your money to another service provider, but of course, that’s pretty difficult with train franchises.
Perhaps it’s the fact that you often can’t take your money to another service provider that means these companies don’t really have to fix the problem.
Which sort of makes a mockery of much of the motivation for privatisation. It’s the free market with none of the alternative.
A rail franchise is little more than the right to levy a tax which we bestow upon private companies once every 10+ years or so. Oh and we the tax payers, whether we use trains or not, pay a subsidy to those private companies so that they can raise a dividend for their shareholders.
If public ownership is any more fucked up than that, then Thatcher was a card-carrying member of ASLEF.
I ask again. #brickgate and #officegate. How good did they look day two?
Search those tags today, and you’ll mostly find them being disputed or being used in relation to the train incident.
The whole thing is backfiring today. Said that the CCTV thing was creepy. It’s probably illegal. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating.
Surprised no one mentioned this:-
Originally posted by @saintbletch
Originally posted by @Chertsey-Saint
So I spend most of my life on trains, whether that be travelling into London on the suburban SWT services, or from Kings Cross to Leeds on Virgin East Coast.
SWT: Service is not great, with many delays. However, most of the delays are due to either points issues or suicides, which neither is the responsibility of SWT, which is why we rarely get a decent refund on our ticket. T rains are packed, but one of the issues is that the infrastructure of the Surbiton mainline doesn’t allow for more trains as the network is already full. They need another set of rails to allow for more services, which is just not possible apparently.
I pay £316 a month for unlimited travel into and out of London, and unlimited tube.
Virgin East Coast: Very impressed with the service in general, always get a seat, generally book about a week in advance and get a return for circa £70. If you are half an hour late you get 50% of your ticket price back, and 100% if it’s over an hour. By the way, I have NEVER seen people leaving their bags on seats to save them, and then just leave them there, especially a whole carriage full. Again, any delays I have tended to experience have been due to power lines going down, which is Railtracks responsibility.
Personally, I’m not against re-nationalisation of the railways, but it all depends on how they’re going to approach the issues we have (too many people on an already “at capacity” network), and the piss poor work of Railtrack (who are already Government owned).
Could they not add a couple of coaches to each train?
Genuine question - or are the trains already at some sort of limit?
They are all 12 coaches long, which is the maximum length stations are built to, so is assume not. It would block crossing tracks at Waterloo.
And if so, why can’t that limit be extended? I often pass, and occasionally alight at stations with short platforms where you can only get out from a carriage near the front.
Either way Shirty, you should take your money to another service provider, but of course, that’s pretty difficult with train franchises.
It’d be difficult because there is only one route in and out of London from where I am. Geography is more of an issue rather than the monopolisation of those routes.
Perhaps it’s the fact that you often can’t take your money to another service provider that means these companies don’t really have to fix the problem.
Which sort of makes a mockery of much of the motivation for privatisation. It’s the free market with none of the alternative.
A rail franchise is little more than the right to levy a tax which we bestow upon private companies once every 10+ years or so. Oh and we the tax payers, whether we use trains or not, pay a subsidy to those private companies so that they can raise a dividend for their shareholders.
If public ownership is any more fucked up than that, then Thatcher was a card-carrying member of ASLEF.
As I say, I have no problem with privatisation myself. I think it will be interesting to see what would happen if we privatised one route, whether or not we’d see a drop in prices…
Originally posted by @pap
I ask again. #brickgate and #officegate. How good did they look day two?
Search those tags today, and you’ll mostly find them being disputed or being used in relation to the train incident.
The whole thing is backfiring today. Said that the CCTV thing was creepy. It’s probably illegal. The Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating.
So you’re trying to get away from the fact that Corbyn lied by saying the proof that he lied was illegal. Brilliant.