There's good reason why they can't do this on day 1: it would break the current law which requires separation of infrastructure and services - they can't be in the same entity with a combined P&L. This is why it's significant there's a commitment to legislation in the first parliament, but this won't happen on day 1 (and, frankly, there will be higher priorities for a new government), and until this becomes law there can't be a true merger of NR & OLR.
Nationalisation of Rail wasn't in Labour's 1997 manifesto.
Despite East Midlands Railway current contract expiring in 2030. Textbook accuracy from the Labor Party (ironically on BBC as well).
It's worth mentioning that when privatisation was on the stocks in the early 90s, the general public consensus was that "it can't be any worse than BR".
That was the case with all privatisations in the 80s and early 90s.
Does this not just sum up the current state of the country as a whole? Every single day in my line of work I meet members of the public who are content with things being crap because even rock bottom is quite a distance from crap. In essence, we know where we stand with crap. It's the kind of apathy one would expect in Tory Britain.
Surely not quite all, I don’t seem to recall privatisation of the gas & electricity supply industries happening under the ‘can’t get any worse’ cloud .
So an excuse to rip up their access agreements as they will be deemed as not adding 'value' as labour don't like competition.
It went the other way for a while when Railtrack lost sight of the state of its infrstructure. Also the ToCs were allowed to adopt arguably unsafe working practices. I'm think of the Southall crash, where a single manned HST was allowed to run at full speed without an operational warning system. For that matter did the signalling a freight train to cross in the path of the HST have anyting to do with it?
Yes, I think it would. The TOC expertise would outweigh that of NR as they have the knowledge of diagrams and inner workings. It would remove a lot of transactional processes.
That was indeed a stupidity, but nothing to do with privatisation. Some years earlier there was a fatal collision at Bridgwater when it had been decided to end the practice of changing locos at Bristol to ensure only those with GWR-pattern AWS were used on the lines so equipped. Off went an LMR loco now working through, no compatible AWS, ran through signals at speed, accident ensued. Just the same. That was all under nationalised managers who decided to start running like this. Deciding AWS was "optional" was in place both before and after privatisation.
There was not a uniform assumption that "anything would be better" in the '90s: there was also a feeling that BR was being shaped to make it attractive to buyers rather than focussed on the
It has been one positive of the period since privatisation, but only after a number of accidents attributed to defective infrastructure caused maintenance to be brought back 'in house' by state-owned Network Rail after the failings and failure of shareholder-owned Railtrack.
When that happened, we joined nPower and they were diabolical. We moved to OVO, a much smaller and customer-friendly company and they were brilliant. Then they took over SSE and are now just as poor as nPower were.
Taking this nugget as a case study of possible ‘quick wins’/‘low hanging fruit’ that might be available for GBR; how many drivers are based at Gloucester? How much effort would it take to get Class 170s on all of their traction cards and keep that competence up to date?
