Specifically, look at Table 7223 on the page I linked to in post #3
Thanks for posting the link and I had looked at the site and tried to download the subsidy information..
There's a problem for me, though; the ORR has chosen to offer them in '.ods' format which I can't work out how to access without payment.
I wonder why they can't provide it in a format that can be read easily by ordinary members of the public.
I have no difficulty downloading files from almost every other website I've used but they're usually PDF files. I wonder what's the reason for the ORR's choice. As an aside, all the other .GOV sites I've used have a box that says something on the lines of 'was this page useful?' but i can't find that on the ORR one to reply 'No'.
.ods is OpenDocument Spreadsheet, that is the native format for OpenOffice/LibreOffice which are free. Excel gained the ability to read them more recently.
For something that is presumably a large table of numbers, a spreadsheet seems the obvious choice, rather than PDF which was designed for text layout.
I can see where Bald Rick is coming from on this one. It doesn't take an expert to calculate that the number of London-Edinburgh, London-Leeds etc. passengers vastly outweighs all the Bury to Boro, Cambridge to Bradford, Sleaford to Sunderland etc. passengers put together.
There is a net gain, but it's not directly financial.The fact they are funded suggests they are profitable in the grand scheme of things. Taxes wouldn’t be diverted their way if there wasn’t a net gain.
"Survive" - meaning what? That can range from deaths being kept to a level where humans don't become extinct, to society and the planet thriving.We could probably survive in this country without a rail network at all ( some places around the world do ) - but we couldn't survive if we didn't have a road network.
It's not that simple to find the answer broken down to that level, but here's the table extract for 2019-20:Perhaps someone more tech-savvy could answer my original, simple question; did VTEC have half of their track access charges paid by the taxpayer?
Thank you.It's not that simple to find the answer broken down to that level, but here's the table extract for 2019-20:
LNER's Network Rail Charges (which will include track access as well as other costs) were £94m, which is similar to other TOCs. The Net franchise subsidy was -£106m (i.e., LNER paid the DfT £106m more than it received from them.
ISTR that when we discussed this previously you were discounting through passengers, e.g. assuming that the Colne branch was self-contained and all traffic originated from it? Neither line is busy but Colne is definitely in a different order of magnitude to the Bentham Line.I've had discussions on here recently about the lightly used stations between the S&C junction and Carnforth (the three stations west of Giggleswick have a combined fifty departing passengers a day, spread across several departures in each direction) and the Colne branch (an average passenger load that would fit in a minibus)
Of course, if you weren't running trains to all the different branches you wouldn't need the expensive things like grade-separation.Statements like "London-Edinburgh is profitable" are all very well, but if you set against that the remodelling of King's Cross, flyovers at Hitchin, Werrington and Shaftholme and the electrical upgrade of the route, plus ETCS resignalling of ECML South, I'm not sure that remains true.
It would be the same with the WCML and WCRM, and GWR with the recent electrification, rebuilding of Reading and the Crossrail infrastructure (quadrupling the Heathrow connection, dive-under at Acton etc).
Currently, other TOCs benefit from that investment, and all TOCs are nominally equal in business terms.
But once you start down-sizing and you begin to strip away services so that LNER bears more of the cost, you can undermine that profitability.
Most of all those huge costs are routed via Network Rail and the taxpayer, and may or may not be paid back (slowly) with increased access charges.
The answer is likely somewhere, but a clean answer to what you're asking for is likely going to be kept under a commercially sensitive blanket. It depends on how the figures are reached. As an example of how convoluted this process is, the 'diesel fuel' cost column for some TOCs has no data, for others has the diesel fuel only and for others includes the electricity costs under the same figure.Thank you.
It seems that answering my question is not as simple as has been suggested by another respondent.
Private Eye is unlikely to make an allegation it did not feel it could defend in court. This is very different to that allegation being factually accurate.My source may have been 'Dr B. Ching' in Private Eye, not sure; the source suggested that all the 'Inter-City' franchises had a similar arrangement, so the fact that EC payment is similar to the others does not necessarily answer the question.
Of course Private Eye, like most publications, has an agenda but I'm not sure that it could make completely baseless allegations without subsequent challenge.
Thanks again.The answer is likely somewhere, but a clean answer to what you're asking for is likely going to be kept under a commercially sensitive blanket. It depends on how the figures are reached. As an example of how convoluted this process is, the 'diesel fuel' cost column for some TOCs has no data, for others has the diesel fuel only and for others includes the electricity costs under the same figure.
Private Eye is unlikely to make an allegation it did not feel it could defend in court. This is very different to that allegation being factually accurate.
No worriesThanks again.
The total subsidy is published, as that's what the taxpayer is primarily concerned about. It's the detailed breakdown which could cause issues. If you really want to know, by all means send an FOI to the DfT/ORR/NR.B.I.B.; I expect that would be the ORR's response. I can see how, for example, diesel costs aren't directly relevant to the taxpayer but it's a bit of a stretch to say that a possible direct taxpayer subsidy of £90,000,000 should be kept secret from us. But it's trivial, in the context of the total amount of taxpayer support at the moment, I suppose.
do we actually know how many people use local rail to access 'the profitable core'. with split ticketing its probably hard to find from ticket data. someone here will knowI can see where Bald Rick is coming from on this one. It doesn't take an expert to calculate that the number of London-Edinburgh, London-Leeds etc. passengers vastly outweighs all the Bury to Boro, Cambridge to Bradford, Sleaford to Sunderland etc. passengers put together.
It's not that simple to find the answer broken down to that level, but here's the table extract for 2019-20:
View attachment 96363
LNER's Network Rail Charges (which will include track access as well as other costs) were £94m, which is similar to other TOCs. The Net franchise subsidy was -£106m (i.e., LNER paid the DfT £106m more than it received from them.
Of interest is just how unprofitable the Cally Sleeper is.
Statements like "London-Edinburgh is profitable" are all very well, but if you set against that the remodelling of King's Cross, flyovers at Hitchin, Werrington and Shaftholme and the electrical upgrade of the route, plus ETCS resignalling of ECML South, I'm not sure that remains true.
Yes you did, in a rather matter-of-fact "take it or leave it" tone without any further explanation.
Given that the hunt for the profitable core seems to carry some sort of mythical status suggests that proving it's existence might be hard to do. Quite apart from the problems proving the issue by picking apart the revenue and costs already outlined above, it's not clear whether you mean that the East Coast route in it's entirety is profitable, including the infrastructure and all other operating costs, or if you're simply making the case that the relevant TOCs (presumably LNER and GTR GN/TL) are showing operating profits. It is perhaps worth noting also that, although LNER is paying an operating premium, it is getting a slightly easier ride as an operator of last resort than either of the previous two franchised operators did. It would be interesting to speculate (or maybe it is even provable) just how VTEC might have compared during the last operating period compared to LNER.
Even if we allow the assumption based on TOC operating profits, these services do not operate in a vacuum. People arriving at East Coast route interchanges will have travelled from somewhere to get there, perhaps not far by taxi or private car, but just possibly on a feeder service; even those joining the route at Kings Cross. This suddenly becomes a fair bit trickier if those feeders are closed down on the basis of their poor financial performance. Are we to assume that the passenger travelling from, say, Bury St Edmunds to Middlesbrough is still going to want to consider travelling by rail given that the train will only take them from Peterborough to Darlington?
I think you're going to have to walk me through this one, because simply stating that it is so doesn't enlighten me any.
Would you happen to know what "other train related income" is?
Is that fees from the buffet or something?
No worries
The total subsidy is published, as that's what the taxpayer is primarily concerned about. It's the detailed breakdown which could cause issues. If you really want to know, by all means send an FOI to the DfT/ORR/NR.
Even if we allow the assumption based on TOC operating profits, these services do not operate in a vacuum. People arriving at East Coast route interchanges will have travelled from somewhere to get there, perhaps not far by taxi or private car, but just possibly on a feeder service; even those joining the route at Kings Cross. This suddenly becomes a fair bit trickier if those feeders are closed down on the basis of their poor financial performance. Are we to assume that the passenger travelling from, say, Bury St Edmunds to Middlesbrough is still going to want to consider travelling by rail given that the train will only take them from Peterborough to Darlington?
As an aside, Dr B. Ching's articles are interesting but I personally find the constant use of 'Worst Group', 'DafT' etc. tiresome. But that's a Private Eye convention, defended by 'sorry it's a misprint'.
Are you sure you don’t own a coach and bus company... maybe there are some that are more suited to a once-a-day direct National Express coach - but heavy rail can't do everything.
Fair enough, I was being rather general.
...but then presumably those "Bury St Edmonds to Middlesbrough" passengers aren't just travelling from Bury St Edmonds train station to Middlesbrough train station - they'll somehow get from their initial place to the station in Bury St Edmonds and manage to get from the station in Middlesbrough to their ultimate destination
The pro Beeching lobby was Ernest Maples; Beechings then boss who was a road building contractor so no conflict of interest there.That's not why 'Beeching' happened - it was a combination of many factors, of which the largest was probably the rise in post-war car ownership making many routes seemingly surplus to requirements - the rise of the car was seen to be the future, and social and environmental considerations were well in the future in the early 1960s. The more extreme pro-Beeching advocates also talked of paving over main lines to increase motorway provision, car space, etc. as recently as the 1990s. The Inter-City sector of BR made an operating surplus in, I think, 1994, just before privatisation.
However, given that there have been assumptions made with regard to the usage of the East Coast route and the difficulty in knowing for certain what proportion of travellers will use it as only part of their total journey it is not necessarily the case that the notion of profitable routes being supported by unprofitable ones is a misconception. I think that we shall have to agree that the point is unprovable one way or the other.
As a subscriber, I find Dr Ching's column one of the poorer parts of the magazine - whilst a lot of Private Eye is an equal opportunities satirist (laying into all targets on each side), the railway stuff is written through the prism of the author's clear agenda, which makes it harder to read - it reads more like a Guardian/ Daily Mail/ Telegraph opinion column where the author finds new "evidence" to make the same argument every time - a shame when most of the rest of the magazine is a lot more nuanced (e.g. MD's column's about Covid recognise arguments on all sides of the debate)
Are you sure you don’t own a coach and bus company
The problem is that, as @Bald Rick points out, without data about point-to-point flow and revenue we can never truly know how many people are making East Coast exclusive journeys and how many use the route only as one part of their journey and, therefore, how big a loss might be experienced with the loss of these through travellers and what impact it might have on the route's profitability.
I actually agree; co-incidentally there was a nuance to my use of the word 'interesting'. A word with many meanings, a different one again in 'may you live in interesting times'...
Agreed. Which is why it’s important to have a proper joined up public transport plan. Then using the most appropriate transport system. Plus having bus routes feed into rail. AND have rail feed into bus routes. Same with metro systems and underground systems.I just get a bit tired of this binary attitude that heavy rail must be the answer to everything, and that if we remove heavy rail from a particular market then there's no other possible way of offering some public transport options.
I’ll agree it’s not provable on this forum. But it’s definitely provable with data that is available to a limited numbe4 if people in the TOCs and DfT.
Yes! This, more than anything else, is the key that starts unlocking a lot of the social and environmental benefits that all modes of public transport can offer.Which is why it’s important to have a proper joined up public transport plan. Then using the most appropriate transport system. Plus having bus routes feed into rail. AND have rail feed into bus routes. Same with metro systems and underground systems.
Then why was the Ministry of Transport involved with the development of cost-benefit analyses in the early 1960s as referred to by Beeching himself in the section of the Reshaping Report on suburban services? This method of analysis is what keeps the railways afloat today.The pro Beeching lobby was Ernest Maples; Beechings then boss who was a road building contractor so no conflict of interest there.
I just get a bit tired of this binary attitude that heavy rail must be the answer to everything, and that if we remove heavy rail from a particular market then there's no other possible way of offering some public transport options.
So, in the case of the ECML, there's a clear demand from Edinburgh/ Newcastle/ Leeds to London which requires direct trains. But some of the other combinations of places that get brought up are much smaller, hence the suggestion that they'd be more suited to National Express etc
The problem is that, even if this highly confidential data were ever to be made public, the excuses would come out about how "actually, most of these city-to-city tickets are actually bought by people who are splitting tickets and doing significantly more complicated journeys" etc etc
People will never accept inconvenient statistics (just like any poorly performing line will always have apologists using some unquantifiable "social benefits" which prove how "useful" they are etc etc)
BR managed to trim lots of "quiet" lines without it having a huge impact upon national passenger numbers - but any suggestion that we make any cutbacks brings out suggestions that removing a lightly loaded Sprinter will mean thousands fewer passengers on InterCity services
Marples had nothing to lose and he knew it. It's not a roads V rail debate. The car was always going to outdo the railways but rail was always needed. Your last point illustrates that perfectly about roadbuilding not starting under Marples. Cost benefit analysis. Just words.Then why was the Ministry of Transport involved with the development of cost-benefit analyses in the early 1960s as referred to by Beeching himself in the section of the Reshaping Report on suburban services? This method of analysis is what keeps the railways afloat today.
And why did Marples commission the seminal 'Traffic in Towns' report (published November 1963) which questioned the rebuilding of town to accommodate the motor car?
Please change the record... The first 'motor roads' were built in the USA before the First World War as a result of the introduction of the Model T in 1908 and the growth in car ownership. The first Autostrada were built in the 1920s and Autobahnen (although not called that then) were being built in Germany by the 1930s. In this country there were many road improvements made during the 1920s and 30s - look, for example, at the way the Great West Road was carved through the terraces of west London and the works done on the Brighton Road. Road building didn't start with Marples although it appears to me many on this Forum don't really want to accept these facts.