The UK government? Owning things? Surely you can't be serious...
Maybe not: "The Transport Secretary announced on 19 October 2022 that the Transport Bill which would have set up GBR would not go ahead in the current parliamentary session."
the franchising sysem won't be coming back
TPE is still under covid arrangements and Avanti West Coast is under a new style management contract as I described above
switching out top level boss doesn't suddenly improve underlying problems with the service
in the UK this is almost always the infrastructure, which has been nationalised since 2002
the government (DfT) had more control over the railways under the franchising system than they had when BR existed
almost all of what the hated "train companies" consists of is putting a driver in the cab, the rest is down to the DfT
[0] - interestingly his "RailNatter" this Wednesday was titled "How to fix Britain's broken railways". I haven't watched it yet, but it will certainly feature some good insight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmKhVjw1xDA
Some of that is infrastructure (the cancellation of platform 15/16 at Piccadilly means the new Ordsall chord is basically useless, but they tried to use it anyway), I don't know enough about TPE to fairly attribute it, but with AWC it's franchise operation -- especially staff availability. Some of that is also government interference.
Why the left think a tory government would be any better running services than the train operators is anyones guess. When you dig down to it they seem to want more tax subsidies to big businesses (the ones who pay the £400 first class peak time returns on Manchester-London) and high income commuters (the ones with 50% discounts via season tickets who cause peak problems in the same way peak is a problem on the electric grid, and who typically earn far more than the average UK person who commutes via bus or van/car)
Fortunately the franchise system means many lines have significant competition, and you can choose based on journey time, price, and reliability.
Where privitisation does have its weakness is the financing of rolling stock.
The popular opinions I have seen are:
- “nationalise the railways”
- more frequent, reliable and cheaper services overall
As discussed, nationalising the railways isn’t necessarily the silver bullet many people think, but if you engage with those people and don’t insult/berate them they’ll come round easily. They're not hardline communists, hellbent on the destruction of private companies - they just want better train service somehow and may not fully understand how to get there. That's not to deny the existence of "tankies" and other weirdos, they're just a very very tiny minority.
HS2 should enable the “more frequent” part over the regions it covers. I don’t know how to make services cheaper or more reliable, I imagine subsidies come into it somewhere though, and this inevitably means that yes someone wealthy at some point will benefit from a cheaper rail ticket.
Nope, 10 years of plain simple facts and it doesn't help. It's still Richard Branson that's stealing everyones money, if only the west coast mainline wasn't run by him then it would be £20 return for Manchester to London. HS2 of course will apparently cost £600 return for every journey and nobody will be able to afford it or something.
HS2 should be cheaper than current trains, if there is the demand.
Currently to run 1000 seats London to Manchester return takes two 11 car trains, each with 3 members of staff (driver, manager, shop) on a 5 hour return trip. That's 10 hours of train and 30 hours of staff per return.
To do that under HS2 will be 2h30 return for a single train and not need a shop, so that's 5 hours of staff and train costs, so should be far cheaper operational costs.
Track costs should be far cheaper than maintaining 150 year old structure
Whether those lower train and staff costs translate to lower fares, lower subsidies, or more subsidies elsewhere on the network, is a political decision.
I fear the government is killing demand though - for 2 of my last 3 trips to London down the west coast I've hired a car and driven, and it wasn't terrible.
Network Rail sells access to the network to train operating companies, which are private (though often state-owned by other countries).
The network was originally built by private companies until nationalisation in 1947 (railway companies were bankrupt after WW2). It was private for a while in the 90s, then went bankrupt and renationalised in 2002. Seems to be quite the money pit!
It's just another example of the hubris of the Conservative party. We've seen it play out repeatedly over the last decade and even earlier in Thatcher's neoliberalism. Labour's lurch to the right resulted in displays of similar small minded arrogance. Their undermining of the NHS through piecemeal privatisation is nothing short of a crime.