Could GB railways return to profit?

[Scott M]

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.

 

[Merle Haggard]

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'.

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

 

[JamesT]

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.

 

[Merle Haggard]

.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.

Thank you for that, I'll get on the case. Funnily enough, 'Store' didn't offer OpenOffice. Excel requires payment, and having escaped work some time ago my use of it would be small.

 

[O L Leigh]

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.

Yes quite probably. But, as I mentioned, even those passengers starting at Kings Cross have come from somewhere.

 

[Deepgreen]

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.

There is a net gain, but it's not directly financial.

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.

"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.

 

[zwk500]

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

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.

Of interest is just how unprofitable the Cally Sleeper is.

 

[Merle Haggard]

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.

Thank you.
It seems that answering my question is not as simple as has been suggested by another respondent.
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.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

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.

 

[willgreen]

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)

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.

 

[zwk500]

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.

Of course, if you weren't running trains to all the different branches you wouldn't need the expensive things like grade-separation.

Thank you.
It seems that answering my question is not as simple as has been suggested by another respondent.

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.

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.

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.

 

[Merle Haggard]

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.

Thanks again.

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.

I don't think we'll ever know one way or the other...

I take your point about publications.

 

[zwk500]

Thanks again.

No worries

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.

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.

 

[Ken H]

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.

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 know

 

[HSTEd]

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.

Would you happen to know what "other train related income" is?
Is that fees from the buffet or something?

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.

But if your only railway operation on the ECML was the profitable ICEC services, you likely wouldn't need most of that.

Indeed you could probably operate the relict ICEC service with RETB!

 

[Bald Rick]

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.

Fair enough, I was being rather general.

Obviously point to point flow / revenue data is guarded like the Crown Jewels by the TOCs, and is not publicly available. So treat what follows with a pinch of salt. And this is , of course, all entirely hypothetical, based on pre-Covid, and assumes the tube still exists. However...

The ECML (London - Edinburgh / Leeds / Cambridge) is a relatively simple piece of railway - about 500 route miles in total. It is all fairly modern, and infrastructure operations costs are low on a normalised basis. The ‘ICEC’ operation generates nearly a £billion of passenger income (fares plus ancillary revenue). Having done survey work on that line myself, I know that little of it involves a connecting train. Take York - London for example; very few people who make that journey have a connecting service at York. Almost all the Peterboro’ / Grantham / Newark commuters drive (or walk / cycle) to the station. The same applies for the Peterboro’ / Cambridge GN flows, almost all point to point. Same again for the GN inners. At an educated guess, 90%+ of the revenue is tickets bought for trips that only use the ECML. In this hypothetical world, if the connecting services that the other c10% use didn’t exist, some of them would still use the train, but drive to their nearest ECML instead. (E.g. a Pickering - London traveller might drive to York rather than Malton). Overall, the ECML generates somewhere in the region of £1.2-£1.3bn of ‘ECML only’ income.

To be profitable, the hypothetical ECML profitable core (all parts - TOC and NR) therefore needs to cost less than that to operate, maintain and renew on a replacement basis. And it does.

The GN operation is extremely efficient - 1 member of staff on trains that mostly operate at high average speeds and that can each carry over 1000 people willing to pay pay (relatively) high fares. Not much in the way of station staff. All electric fleet and relatively simple trains, all maintained at Hornsey.

The LNER operation, if it was concentrated on London - Leeds / Edinburgh only would be similarly efficient. High speeds, good stock utilisation, high passenger numbers, good yields. The less efficient parts of LNER are those where it branches off the main line (and north of Edinburgh) running at slow speed (lower utilisation) with fewer people.

Another way to look at it is in the tables the ORR publish each year on TOC finances. They take some deciphering, but the one attached below probably sets it out in the most simple terms. The bottom line is, essentially, what each TOCs net financial support is when NRs costs have been taken into account and allocated to each TOC. (The allocation methodology is quite complex, but is broadly based on actual NR costs and the size of each TOCs operation). You can see that in 2018/19 only two TOCs were ’profitable’ on a whole railway basis: c2c and SWR. (Note this does not mean they were profitable for the TOCs owners). GA and LNER were very, very nearly profitable (£4m support on £700m revenue, and £26m support on £900m revenue respectively) and it’s easy to see how they could be made profitable, as I’ve explained above. West Coast would need a bit more work, but there’s definitely a fully profitable ‘core’.

Within the franchises, there are of course routes / services that are less ‘profitable’ than others, so even the ‘profitable’ TOCs could be made more so. Using SWR as an example - I doubt very much if the extensions to Bristol or the Ramsey shuttles cover even their operating costs, let alone a contribution to infrastructure costs or fleet replacement.

I must stress that I am not advocating a profitable core railway, nor even suggesting one should be looked for. It would be the wrong thing to do for society. But it does exist.

Would you happen to know what "other train related income" is?
Is that fees from the buffet or something?

It is other income TOCs receive not through the farebox. This includes car parking, onboard catering, leases from station retail outlets, other rental income, commission from selling tickets for other TOCs, and charges for services to other businesses (for example, cross hiring train crew, stock, maintenance services, etc).

 

[Merle Haggard]

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.

Thanks, again. I thought that the Private Eye article - which I now remember was based on evidence at the DfT vs. Virgin 'discussion' - implied that the payment of some of the access charges (an amount not much less than the VTEC profit, so significant) by the taxpayer was in some way hidden and not included in the subsidy figure. If, however, the BIB is true (and I'm not disputing your statement but using it in a logical process) then that's not the case - my question was aimed at checking that all the subsidies were counted, rather than drilling down into detail.

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'.

 

[tbtc]

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?

...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

Yet (given the lack of suburban train services in both Bury St Edmonds and Middlesbrough) these people manage to do the overall journey despite only some of it currently being heavy rail.

We could have feeders and feeders and feeders, but ultimately heavy rail works best on bulk flows - mass transportation - it can't suit every market - maybe there are some that are more suited to a once-a-day direct National Express coach - but heavy rail can't do everything. For avoidance of doubt, I'm not suggesting we strip the entire network back to just one London - Edinburgh line.

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'.

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)

 

[Annetts key]

... maybe there are some that are more suited to a once-a-day direct National Express coach - but heavy rail can't do everything.

Are you sure you don’t own a coach and bus company

Of course, each and every line and station will have a number of different variables.
Most have very different people flows during different parts of the day, as well as at weekends.
And some lines/services are supported by local authorities/councils or equivalent.

Cross road / interchange stations that have both through and local commuter traffic as well as plenty of leisure travel are particularly difficult to pick apart for example. Especially where more than train company is providing services.

 

[O L Leigh]

Fair enough, I was being rather general.

Thank you for showing your working-out. I agree that many of your assumptions appear to be reasonable, and I do respect that you have a professional view of this that I have not been afforded. 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.

...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

I guess we could have ourselves a round of "Who has a station at the end of their street?", but I don't think it will be well subscribed.

Yes of course they have had to come from somewhere, as is the case with every rail journey. To expect otherwise would just be daft. If you look at the catchment area around Bury St Edmunds in particular (please note the spelling as the town has nothing to do with the popularly reviled TV presenter and former DJ) it is not hard to see that some folk may need to travel a fair distance to access the rail network. This is not the sort of thing that is likely to make rail travel particularly attractive and issues such as this will have caused many to decide already that rail is not an option for them. If the access point is suddenly moved much further away to, say, Peterborough, how much less attractive does rail become as an option and how many fewer passengers will be carried on the profitable sections?

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.

 

[Master29]

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.

The pro Beeching lobby was Ernest Maples; Beechings then boss who was a road building contractor so no conflict of interest there.

 

[Bald Rick]

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.

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.

 

[Merle Haggard]

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)

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'...

 

[tbtc]

Are you sure you don’t own a coach and bus company

Fair point!

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, 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.

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

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'...

 

[Annetts key]

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.

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.

Especially as not all centres of population have a railway station. Even if there is a railway line, no one is going to spend millions building and maintaining a station for a handful of passengers.

However, I also don’t think that there should be any early decisions made until we are much, much further past the disruption caused by COVID19. As no one knows if the number of people (passengers) and railway journeys will resume the growth trend that was present in the recent past. Or if large numbers of commuters will become ‘part time’ at their offices. Good policy should be based on reliable data.

 

[Clarence Yard]

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.

Profitability isn’t because costs within TOCs are not allocated to route. Route costing hasn’t been a thing since BR days. TOCs tend to look at costs at the total or near total level only.

 

[XAM2175]

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.

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.

 

[coppercapped]

The pro Beeching lobby was Ernest Maples; Beechings then boss who was a road building contractor so no conflict of interest there.

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.

 

[O L Leigh]

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 don't disagree. Public transport needs to be appropriate to the area it's being deployed into, and I do see that heavy (or even light) rail is not always the correct answer (see discussions about the Cambridge guided busway).

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

It is a bit hard to tell from their website at the moment due to the current restrictions, but it appears that National Express are also primarily interested only in the profitable routes. It appears that our traveller starting their journey in Bury St Edmunds would be plum out of luck because it appears that National Express doesn't serve the town at all.

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)

No doubt. But quantifiable or not, this does get to the heart of the question just what is the railway (and public transport in general) for and what value do we place on the unquantifiable social aspects of the services.

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

Clearly the two are non-sequiturs, but then arguably so is your point about the closure of "quiet" lines and it's impact on the national passenger numbers. If you have a growing number of commuters heading into our big cities, for example, then of course the closure of a small line in, say, Lincolnshire won't have a noticeable impact on national numbers.

But that does rather obfuscate the situation for those who've had their service withdrawn. Now just maybe they've had a new bus service to make up for this, but that doesn't mean that they're all going to take to it. Human behaviour can be a bit more complicated and difficult to predict. The problem seems to be that those areas that have poorly performing rail services tend to be rural and cover sparsely populated areas where the alternatives can be unrealistic at best and non-existent at worst.

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that no services be withdrawn ever. I do agree that we need a properly joined-up public transport policy that gives a realistic and affordable service to every traveller no matter where they live. But heavy rail is part of that portfolio and shouldn't just be the preserve of those lucky enough to live along a "profitable" line.

I would come back again to a point that I have raised on numerous times before, which is the idea that transport infrastructure and the services that use it should be "profitable". No doubt they ought to be operated efficiently in order to deliver value for money, but my belief is that extracting a profit is not really what it's for. Infrastructure is what you invest in to help the economy as a whole perform better.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

[Master29]

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.

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.