Could GB railways return to profit?

[Dr Hoo]

Marples had also supported the use of cost-benefit analysis to justify the building of the Victoria Line. (Yes! An expensive new railway.)
Marples also led the multi-modal Conurbation Studies (that were later picked up and developed into the Passenger Transport Authorities).
The Re-shaping report was full of stuff about developing new freight services and winning traffic back to rail from the trunk road network.
The Re-shaping report recognised that 'inter city' services were one of rail's key strengths and opportunities (unlike rural lines that generated 1% of the revenue from a third of the network), which again could reduce or delay the need for new motorways.

(But perhaps Master29 is right and Marples Ridgway were salivating at the likelihood of new motorway contracts for links to Silloth and Bardney as a change from other things that they built like power stations and harbours.)

 

[Master29]

Marples had also supported the use of cost-benefit analysis to justify the building of the Victoria Line. (Yes! An expensive new railway.)
Marples also led the multi-modal Conurbation Studies (that were later picked up and developed into the Passenger Transport Authorities).
The Re-shaping report was full of stuff about developing new freight services and winning traffic back to rail from the trunk road network.
The Re-shaping report recognised that 'inter city' services were one of rail's key strengths and opportunities (unlike rural lines that generated 1% of the revenue from a third of the network), which again could reduce or delay the need for new motorways.

(But perhaps Master29 is right and Marples Ridgway were salivating at the likelihood of new motorway contracts for links to Silloth and Bardney as a change from other things that they built like power stations and harbours.)

Voices of the consultants. You left out those bits about tax fraud, curb crawling and conflicts of interest.

 

[Dr Hoo]

Voices of the consultants. You left out those bits about tax fraud, curb crawling and conflicts of interest.

I have posted before that I deplore Marples' tax affairs and so on along with most people. However, I don't buy into the conspiracy theories that the Re-shaping report was simply a 'fix' to give his company some road-building contracts. Withdrawing services that very few people were using was never going to generate a pressing need for highway enhancement. Developments like liner trains and pressing ahead with some electrification schemes actually reduced road traffic.

Some of the most successful elements of 'Britain's railways' today are still drawing on Marples' (and Dr Beeching's) legacy.

 

[plugwash]

In the past, there have apparently been comparisons between the cost of construction of a new railway line and of a new road with equivalent capacity.

I suspect the results will depends heavily on what assumptions you make.

From some searching it seems a regular road with one lane in each direction can take about a thousand cars per hour, a busy two track railway with all trains being of the same type and stopping at the same stations can manage about 20 trains per hour. A 12 car Thameslink train can take 666 seated passengers and over a thousand standing, so if you assume each car carriers only one passenger then the two track railway can move over 30 times as many people as your basic 2 lane road.

But most two-track railways are not thameslink, they have a mixture of traffic with different stopping patterns and external constraints from other lines dramatically reducing the number of trains that can stop. Most local routes outside the southeast can't justify 12 car trains either and people will only tolerate "full and standing" trains if the alternative is much worse. So the usable capacity of a typical railway line is much lower than that theoretical max.

Also the road network is built to keep transit passengers away from cities, but the railway uses cities as it's hubs for transit passengers. Building new links into major cities is eye-wateringly expensive.

 

[Ken H]

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'.

Perhaps someone more tech-savvy could answer my original, simple question; did VTEC have half of their track access charges paid by the taxpayer?

Its an open office spreadsheet. Excel should open it. If not, get open office at openoffice.org

 

[XAM2175]

Its an open office spreadsheet. Excel should open it. If not, get open office at openoffice.org

Somebody else posted this nearly five hours before your previous post in this thread.

 

[Annetts key]

A recent version of Excel will definitely open office files.

Older versions however, will not.

 

[Pugwash]

The fundamental difference between the accounts of the old BR and GB Railways are the Insurance costs ( BR used to self insure ), the inbuilt profits of the Rolling stock owners and the wage inflation since privatisation.

Unless the above are tackled I would think a profit is impossible.

 

[LAX54]

Hence why no one in government has the "balls" to replace vehicle excise duty (i.e. road tax), with an extra duty on fuel, so those who use the roads most pay the most, just like with rail.

I don't know what the road tax rate is on HGV's, but if you consider the "load" exerted on a given road surface is the cube of the axle weight, it's probaly not enough?

Fuel Duty: Interesting to see that in the USA Fuel prices are soaring towards $4 a gallon, (mainly due to the Ranson incident), yet over here the normal price for fuel is in the region of $7.50 to $8 a gallon.....U.S tourists would, or must have, kittens when they fill up the rental car in the UK !

 

[Grumpy Git]

U.S tourists would, or must have, kittens when they fill up the rental car in the UK !

I bet they have no idea that they are getting 20% more fuel for their gallon though!

 

[ABB125]

The fundamental difference between the accounts of the old BR and GB Railways are the Insurance costs ( BR used to self insure ), the inbuilt profits of the Rolling stock owners and the wage inflation since privatisation.

Unless the above are tackled I would think a profit is impossible.

Surely at least Network Rail is big enough to self-insure?

 

[24Grange]

Is there any other country that has a more complex system for operating and maintaining their railway system? We seem to have gone out of the way to make ours as complex, expensive, and needlessly complicated as possible - Didn't somebody say, instead of saving money, The system now costs a lot more to run than BR ever did ( OK with more passengers).

 

[zwk500]

Is there any other country that has a more complex system for operating and maintaining their railway system? We seem to have gone out of the way to make ours as complex, expensive, and needlessly complicated as possible - Didn't somebody say, instead of saving money, The system now costs a lot more to run than BR ever did ( OK with more passengers).

I suppose the US system is not exactly massively efficient. It's often quoted that the rail network was deliberately fragmented as much as possible to make it impossible for any incoming labour government to renationalise, as they'd have to buy out too many contracts at too high a price. I suspect the real reason we've ended up with a very complex (but regrettably necessarily complicated) system is that no private investor is going to expose itself to an unacceptable level of risk. So it had to be packaged down to an appropriate size for anybody took it on. Once you've got lots of people competing in the same space to deliver contractual obligations, it will inevitably involve a complicated structure to make sure nobody is unfairly treated but that the appropriate decisions are made.

One of the advantages of the potential concessions system is that you might be able to avoid the situation where one TOC stands firm on a WTT path that if it moved by just 1 or 2 minutes would unlock an entire additional path for a freight or even other passenger TOC. You'd also be able to conduct more effective optimisation mid-timetables, increasing efficiency and therefore reducing cost. In theory.

 

[Annetts key]

Is there any other country that has a more complex system for operating and maintaining their railway system? We seem to have gone out of the way to make ours as complex, expensive, and needlessly complicated as possible - Didn't somebody say, instead of saving money, The system now costs a lot more to run than BR ever did ( OK with more passengers).

You can thank John Major’s government for slicing and dicing the railways, probably deliberately to make it very difficult for any later (Labour) government to renationalise it.

Since then various governments have tinkered around with it, the end result is where we currently are...

 

[Pugwash]

Surely at least Network Rail is big enough to self-insure?

I am not sure what Network Rail do, however as I understand it all of the TOC's currently purchase insurance, the bills are considerable.

 

[Annetts key]

It's often quoted that the rail network was deliberately fragmented as much as possible to make it impossible for any incoming labour government to renationalise, as they'd have to buy out too many contracts at too high a price. I suspect the real reason we've ended up with a very complex (but regrettably necessarily complicated) system is that no private investor is going to expose itself to an unacceptable level of risk. So it had to be packaged down to an appropriate size for anybody took it on. Once you've got lots of people competing in the same space to deliver contractual obligations, it will inevitably involve a complicated structure to make sure nobody is unfairly treated but that the appropriate decisions are made.

Privatisation resulted in over one hundred private companies involved just in the maintenance and renewal contracts with Railtrack. That number does not include the TOCs and their contractors, or the ROSCOs or the FOCs.

So yes, it was not practical to sell BR as one or a handful of large chunks. But for the system to have been made so complex, there must have been some reason other than making each bit small enough to reduce the risk to a very low level. After all, apart from Carillon, which railway or former railway companies have gone bust? And withdrawing from a franchise does not count on its own.

I don’t remember any other of the so called Crown Jewels being chopped up so much.

 

[Bald Rick]

Fuel Duty: Interesting to see that in the USA Fuel prices are soaring towards $4 a gallon, (mainly due to the Ranson incident), yet over here the normal price for fuel is in the region of $7.50 to $8 a gallon.....U.S tourists would, or must have, kittens when they fill up the rental car in the UK !

I bet they have no idea that they are getting 20% more fuel for their gallon though!

I have met Americans who think petrol is really cheap over here. But then they thought £1 = $1, and that litres were gallons (and didn’t understand why they were only getting about 10mpg)

 

[Titfield]

I don’t remember any other of the so called Crown Jewels being chopped up so much.

Not quite the same but they managed to divide National Bus Company into as many parts as possible.

(Only of course for the vast majority to be brought back together owned by one of the big5? public transport providers).

 

[LAX54]

I have met Americans who think petrol is really cheap over here. But then they thought £1 = $1, and that litres were gallons (and didn’t understand why they were only getting about 10mpg)

Remember when I first went to the USA and had a rental car, after I twigged you have to pay first, then get fuel, toddled into the store, and said $40 on Pump 1 please, he gave me a funny look, but took my money......5 mins later back in the store.......can I have $20 back please a smile as he handed it over, the accent giving the game away that I was new to this malarky !

 

[Grumpy Git]

Remember when I first went to the USA and had a rental car, after I twigged you have to pay first, then get fuel, toddled into the store, and said $40 on Pump 1 please, he gave me a funny look, but took my money......5 mins later back in the store.......can I have $20 back please a smile as he handed it over, the accent giving the game away that I was new to this malarky !

True stroy, back in the late 80's after filling my firms car at a small filling station in the East-End, I asked for a receipt. The yound lad quickly wrote one out by hand with "Unleaded £30.00" on it. I had to ask him again for one showing the actual amount I had paid, as it was not physically possible to get £30 worth of fuel in a Ford Sierra, even with an empty tank in 1989.

 

[snowball]

I have met Americans who think petrol is really cheap over here. But then they thought £1 = $1, and that litres were gallons (and didn’t understand why they were only getting about 10mpg)

They could also have been making a third mistake, by assuming that 1 gallon = 1 gallon.

 

[O L Leigh]

While we're allowing ourselves this little off-topic perambulation...

A few years back I was filling up the bike at an Inverness filling station prior to venturing further north when I was approached by an American gentleman who asked me "What's the secret?". I was about to tell him that there was no secret; that you just picked six numbers, paid a quid and waited to see what came out of the machine on Saturday evening when it occurred to me that he probably wasn't sure how petrol stations worked here in the UK. So I told him to fill up first and then go into the kiosk to pay. "Jeez!!" he said in that stereotypical way that all Americans do. "You try that in the States and they'll come out and shoot ya!" Well, we're more civilised than that", I may or may not have said.

 

[24Grange]

And yet in a US bar, you drink yourself silly and pay your bar tab at the end ( opposite to the UK)

 

[Grumpy Git]

And yet in a US bar, you drink yourself silly and pay your bar tab at the end ( opposite to the UK)

To paraphrase............ "A drunk and his money are easily parted............"

 

[Ken H]

Not quite the same but they managed to divide National Bus Company into as many parts as possible.

(Only of course for the vast majority to be brought back together owned by one of the big5? public transport providers).

to be fair, the big 5 also run what were the municipals. Excpet for those that were driven off the road, in Lancaster, Barrow and Darlington, for example. A lot more buses than just the NBC

 

[Trainer2]

To answer the OP

the railway as a whole will never make a true profit, it’s now in a long term managed decline and will inevitably become an out dated mode of transport.

 

[Robertj21a]

This thread has, presumably, been overtaken by the latest announcement by the government,

 

[SuperNova]

To answer the OP

the railway as a whole will never make a true profit, it’s now in a long term managed decline and will inevitably become an out dated mode of transport.

Wasn't this said 60 years ago? Yet passenger numbers doubled between 1985 and 2010. Rail will always have a place in public transport and is certainly not outdated, unless you're Elon Musk and think putting Tesla's in an underground tunnel is somehow innovative.

 

[Trainer2]

Railway short to medium term is still considerably more expensive for a family travelling than a car albeit it can be cheaper and more convenient long distance for an individual.

The railway long term will lose out to driverless cars.

 

[SuperNova]

Railway short to medium term is still considerably more expensive for a family travelling than a car albeit it can be cheaper and more convenient long distance for an individual.

The railway long term will lose out to driverless cars.

Again this is fantasy. A driverless car can't do 125mph not will it sort out the issue of congestion. They're an irrelevant solution to a problem that's not there. And certainly won't kill off the railway.