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Comment by rebolek | Hacker News Reader

We have no high speed rails, are finally privatizing some trains and it's for good. The quality of service is finally going up even in the state run train company.

The competition works differently. Our country wants train that will run from A to B, X times a day and companies will present their offers. Who has the best offer will run this route for Z years.

Nationalization was tried and doesn't work. It has to be supervised by state, but not run by them, that will lead to inferior service.

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Privatisation was tried in the UK and it hasn’t worked. Our trains are just as unreliable as they always were. The food is still shit. Only difference is that the fares have been going up way faster than inflation for years now because we not only have to pay for the maintenance and operation costs but also the cost of someone making a profit from it and all the administrative costs of having 100 organisations all arguing over who’s fault the delay was. Our running costs are considerably higher than other EU countries because of this. Railways are a natural monopoly, just like power lines, water pipes and roads.

Rail ways are natural monopoly, but trains running on those tracks are not. I'm certainly not arguing for Thatcher-style privatization of trains, but the step by step privatization that is happening here in Czechia makes sense, improves service and lowers prices.

I think it depends how busy the network is. If there are lots of free slots for new services and it’s possible to run faster by just buying new trains then maybe. But in the UK it’s saturated and many services have been running to pretty much the same timetables since the 1970’s so the whole network operates like a massive interlinked system of gears covering the whole country which in most cases has to be centrally coordinated. The only real flexibility that private operators have is what colour the train is and how clean are the carpets. They are allowed to offer cheaper fares, but many don’t offer particularly good deals because the network is saturated and demand is high so there is no reason to do this.

Edit: added ‘which in most cases has to be centrally coordinated.’

If you can be flexible when you travel there are some cheap fares to be had (like Leeds to Southampton for £62 First Class) but, at peak times it is a different story, especially if you buy a ticket on the same day of travel.

The real problem is that so many people need to travel within a narrow time window.

Also, in the south, lots of people are commuting 100 miles or more each way because they can't afford to live near where they work.

Rail travel in the UK is a victim of its own success in a perverse kind of way.

The trip you mention is 200-250miles, depending on route. Thats about $2 a mile, is that considered cheap when last mile is still an issue?

Asking seriously, I have no concept of rail pricing.

Regular price for such a journey would be around £300.

As an example: Southampton to London is a relatively short journey and IIRC the standard non-first class fare is over £70.

Interestingly, support for railways being owned and run by the state seems to be a popular policy among voters in many European countries.

Below is a link to is a YouGov poll from November 2018 (see the second-to-last question).

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inline...

Every country polled had support for state-owned railways above 50%. The exceptions were Germany and the US. Of course, you have to view these polls with caution - it's a snapshot in time. Nevertheless, it's interesting that even in countries perceived to have reliable and affordable railways, support for state-run railways is high.

After privatisation people flocked back to UK rail. Volumes that had been largely static for more than fifty years have doubled since privatisation.

A Virgin Pendolino is a far more pleasant experience than the old British Rail equivalent.

I agree on the fare rises but rail remains subsidised while road and air travel are taxed.

But virgin rents that train from a company that was directed by the state to buy it and given a grant to do so. They had some influence over the design styling, but the decision to run 10 coaches at 140mph between London and Glasgow at specific times was not made by them anyway because they have to fit in with all the other services which have to connect to allow efficient transfers. Also, if BR hadn’t been privatised those trains might have been in service 15 years earlier because the technology was developed by their R&D department which was privatised and asset stripped in the 1980s. The tilting technology was sold to the Italian company that makes Pendolino trains.

That’s debatable and dependent on what metric you’re looking at. Prior to nationalisation the number of rail passengers in the uk had flatlined for decades. After prioritisation it has been growing like mad [1].

There are valid criticisms against privatisation or how it was executed, but generally claiming that it hasn’t worked is not accurate. From a usage stand point, it has worked rather well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Correlation is not causation though. It is just as likely that road congestion and land values have more to do with this than privatisation. Rural services are still underused. Many more families now own two cars. Services in South East England have high demand because people can’t afford to live in London. Intercity services are in high demand because motorways are so congested that road journey times are much slower and more unpredictable. This is probably due to effects like increased road freight and local commuters using motorways for parts of their trip.

The German national train service was mostly privatised in 1994, because of the public cost. Since then, service was reduced, 5000km of rail tracks decommissioned, former flexibility lost, prices hiked, reliability reduced.

But best of all: maintenance is paid by the new private company, but replacements/acquisitions are still paid for from taxes. Therefore it pays to scrimp on maintenance until stuff breaks, then get a replacement for free. Really bad incentive structure there. I sincerely doubt privatisation was a good deal overall.

> The German national train service was mostly privatised in 1994, because of the public cost.

This is wrong. Deutsche Bahn is 100 % owned by the Federal Republic of Germany: https://www.deutschebahn.com/en/investor_relations/ir_tochte...

Sorry for the bad face value of my sentence.

I meant to say, that the Deutsche Bundesbahn was legally non-independent. It's successor is a stock company, even if wholly owned by the state. It was touted, using the structure and mindset of a public company, that costs could be reduced by increasing efficiency. With disappointing results.

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