Whilst there may be some consolidation of TOC-only tickets, there will always be the need to price people off busier InterCity services. This was done in BR days too...It means no "operator X only tickets", meaning more freedom for the passenger (they can choose any service on their line, fast or slow),
If you divide on something similar to current TOC boundaries, there aren't actually too many overlaps. Where they do exist, most would still be inter-regional under a regional setup and thus have timetabling constraints.and means that the division can plan its services, paths, etc without having to compete with other operators for paths.
What duplication were you anticipating?If maximum savings need to be achieved, then the Regional set up is the most efficient way to achieve them because you are not having to duplicate at the production level.
What do we currently have on the railway that would be prevented from effective use by Sectorisation 2.0? And could it not be overcome by including mechanisms for easy resource sharing?Where Sectorisation failed was that it had a beggar thy neighbour approach and it became very difficult to cross sector boundaries when it came to sharing resources. Good multi sector parts of the railway were emasculated as the rush to control your own assets and do your own thing regardless came into play.
It would make sense to line the commercial, ops and engineering sides up - anything else creates confused responsibilities and accountabilities. I've always found the part of Stephen Poole's book about his time in freight on BR(S) to be illustrative of this.The lesson here is that while you can split the commercial functions how you want, the production and delivery side should stay regional so GBR is set up to counter any balkanisation or any sub sector or sector fiefdoms.
Does the industry still know how to run services jointly, or is it too comfortable in its silos? I suspect the transition to sub-sectors (i.e. beefed up TOCs) would be less painful than regionalisation.Significant cross regional services are easy. You make them joint regional operations and if your costing set up is attributed cost only (coded like BR did in their initial AXIS II financial set up), rather than actual transferred cost, it will be relatively easy to manage.
Production and delivery can be effectively delivered on a regional level - they're just too large. So you divvy it up by area, and then there is not enough focus given to each service group. For the services run by LNER for example, they'd be going through, say, the London area, West Yorkshire, North East, Edinburgh, and north-eastern Scotland. How would you propose that each of these areas are held accountable for the provision of the service?