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Why do people have rose tinted views of British Rail?

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WesternLancer

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I'm a bit puzzled by referring to a public service as "state capitalism". Is the NHS state capitalism?
Not sure if the NHS would class as such as for most NHS services they are free at point of use and thus not distributed by any market mechanism, but controlled by health service staff who 'ration' them as it were. This is different than the nationalised industry model where irrespective of your income you were still required to pay for the product at some level that was related to use - ie for railway you always needed to buy some sort of ticket, so there is a different sort of market mechanism involved - even if that ticket is subsidised as a result of the provider (in this case BR) making a loss which is underwritten by Government.

But I am not sure of that entirely meets the definition of state capitalism (need to ask an economist).

That's without starting on the debate about whether a service that the public uses is the same as what we understand by a 'Public Service'...

some might say (eg Christian Wolmar I suspect) that the current UK railway model - well perhaps until lock down anyway - is neither state capitalism nor private capitalism but pretend capitalism...:lol:
 
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Vespa

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But we still have that. Tickets have National Rail branding on them, and with a few clear exceptions, they're valid on whatever operators cover the routes concerned. Advances and other cheap tickets with limitations existed under BR as well.

You may well be right however I remember the Northern Rail and TPE fiasco with many cancellations across the board, there was a problem with cross ticketing acceptance wth passengers told their ticket will be accepted, found it was not the case and they have to pay for a new ticket.

It knocked confidence in the reliability in the service and consitency.
 

Purple Orange

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I think the rose tinted glasses comes from people who look back upon an earlier period of their life, particularly when they were young. If bathe period of BR and the big four were swapped, those harking back to the days of BR would be waxing lyrical about LMS and LNER etc.

Re. The NHS, it is a model of socialism. As are state pensions and state education. Even private pensions are born from the ideas of socialism.
 

PeterC

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My rose tinted views stems from the fact that I could afford to travel to London on a train that departed before 10 am, I could catch a cross country train on a Monday-Thursday that meant I could afford to travel to Birmingham (remember Blue days and White days, much simpler than fare structures are today), I could catch a direct train on a Saturday in the summer to holiday destinations, there were special trains run for sporting events, the IC125 was a fantastic train, much more comfortable to travel in than what is now replacing it, often when travelling long distance connections would be held for a few minutes to help you get to your destination by train and not taxi. Plus other reasons

I’m not saying everything was wonderful, the DMUs I remember travelling on were filthy and looked drab and unwelcoming in those BR colours, timetables were irregular and seemingly linked random places for no apparent reason, i encountered many station staff who were clueless at customer services and were just rude, statins were terribly unwelcoming and had suffered lack of maintenance / investment for years plus many more faults.

i think the ideology of a fully integrated system designed to be flexible enough to meet passenger demands and deliver it comfortably and with affordable access to the end user is still what we should be aiming for. BR didn’t quite make it but that was through lack of investment and a very rapid change in lifestyle as people discovered affordable cars for the first time.
Let’s be honest here and admit that we throw more public money at a semi privately operated railway than we did back in the dreary seventies which is partly why they have been such a success.

I honestly think we could still make a 21st century BR work, especially now we’ve decided the franchising model isn’t the way to go. We still pay for it so let’s make it work how e we need it to work.
I agree about fares, if I wanted to catch a train I could simply turn up and the station and buy a ticket. I never thought that a journey was too costly, now I need to plan an itinary and book in advance to travel at a price that I can afford with a higher, in real terms, disposable income.

Trains, of course, are much cleaner now but I don't think that the fact that I no longer need to sit in an ashtray has anything to do with privatisation.
 
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WesternLancer

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Mind you, sometimes I get a bit nostalgic for the early days of privatisation when some of the operators did genuinely seem to try to bring a bit of flair and innovation to the product!
Though that did not seem to happen for very long, and it was fairly modest in the great scheme of things.

And some certainly did none of that whatsoever (whilst simultaneously, I assume, taking the view that BR cleaned their trains far too thoroughly...)

Of course it's possible that most of the problems lie with the crazy model of privatisation adopted, and the consequences that flowed form that. Left to their own devices BR themselves might have come up with a better model!
 

Devonian

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In a somehow-surviving school project from the BR-era I wrote that BR had "a name for poor standards of service, slow trains and long delays". But I suspect that the rosy glow is less from BRs successes than from privatisation's apparent failures.

For those with long memories, I wonder if the level of rose-tinting depends on how you used British Rail: I mostly travelled InterCity between Intercity-operated stations, and look back on most of those journeys with pleasure. When things went wrong, there were some impressive attempts to sort things out: I recall my Plymouth-Paddington train being reversed outside Exeter due to a bomb scare at Taunton and run via Yeovil at walking pace through floodwater to get us to our destination, while we were served free tea, for example. By contrast I remember my occasional forays into Network South East with less of a rosy glow: boarded up stations with bright paint but broken facilities and spartan or decrepit rolling stock.

If you experienced the post-privatistion railways of the late '90s and early 2000s, then there's a fair chance that that period has soured your view of privatisation in comparison to BR: Connex, Operation Princess, and the post-Hatfield omnishambles will have done nothing to persuade a very large pool of travellers that privatisation was an unqualified success. The later shenanigans over the East and West Coast franchises have done nothing to dispel the general suspicion that public subsidy is going somewhere other than into running an passenger-focussed railway, and that high fares are somehow tied to money going to supposedly greedy and incompetent private companies aided by questionable government.

If you are too young to remember any of these, perhaps you simply hope that something might be better than your recent experience: commuters in the south travel on more modern trains that are often cleaner, safer and brighter than BR's, from stations that are generally kept in better repair, but if your trains are overcrowded and lack punctuality at the best of times, and a timetable shambles and series of strikes makes things even worse, it's easy to assume that things were better once upon a time, and could be better again.

This is of course an age-old theme not unique to the railways. As George Orwell put it in '1984': "It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been... The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different."
 

ChiefPlanner

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But BR designed the PEP EMUs, which have the worst seats and worst window alignment of any trains ever!

Not that it mattered, given that the windows were usually encrusted with dirt anyway...


A little unfair - as one of the very first things NSE did was "operation sparkle" to restore the admittedly poor cleaning standards on both stations and trains to a reasonable standard and further improved by careful and concentrated efforts with daily train washing and periodic heavy cleaning. The trough of the early 1980's was a very low ebb in cleaning standards - but when you consider that the SE Division (for one) had masses of outstabled stock and little chance of cleaning properly as well as maintaining the vast slam door fleet with a heavy workload on brake block replacement. I recall a SM who had good ideas on cleaning - but was thwarted by orange brake bloke dust which was immovable without massive wire wool cleaning and copious amounts of hot water. Yes - lots of stabling points had no basics like water , let alone hot water !

What BR could have done , with consistent and reasonable funding would have been the roll-out of more schemes like the Great Northern electrification - a railway transformed from a 19thC railway with dire diesel units to a showpiece once the inevitable teething problems. Yes - it was a bit overspecified fleet and timetable wise ,and yes the customers paid for it with increased ticket costs, -but a good morale booster in the dire days of the 1970's.
 

Ianno87

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Two things that I remember about British Rail.

1. I never felt that what we now call "anytime" fares were excessive given the length of the journey. Now, with a far greater disposable income I wouldn't dream of walking up to the Euston ticket office and buying a single to Manchester as I did for a university visit in 1969.
2. Trains were filthy but only because everybody smoked and the general public just used them as ash trays.

I agree about fares, if I wanted to catch a train I could simply turn up and the station and buy a ticket. I never thought that a journey was too costly, now I need to plan an itinary and book in advance to travel at a price that I can afford with a higher, in real terms, disposable income.

Trains, of course, are much cleaner now but I don't think that the fact that I no longer need to sit in an ashtray has anything to do with privatisation.

Fares, however, are as much to do with government policy in setting then as they are with ownership.

Fares could be halved tomorrow provided the government didn't mind stumping up the difference.
 

Journeyman

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Fares, however, are as much to do with government policy in setting then as they are with ownership.

Fares could be halved tomorrow provided the government didn't mind stumping up the difference.

Exactly. It's a government policy choice, and the government has always been clear about its views on this subject. There's far more protection in place now than there has been in the past, though - most fare rises are RPI-linked. There's been years in the past, mainly in the 70s and 80s, when fare increases were absolutely eye-watering, in excess of 25% on some occasions. Try doing that now! BR also used selective fare increases as demand management tools, an option not generally available now.
 

plugwash

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One thing that has happened in many areas is effective price hikes though changing ticket restrictions.

IIRC in the old days you could use saver returns at pretty much any time as long as you weren't going to or from London and you could use cheap day returns any time after 9:30.

But a few years back crosscountry put a blanket 9:30 restriction on pretty much all the off peak return tickets they set. Some of the transpennie routes also seem to have picked up restrictions that i'm sure they didn't use to have. On the local level a number of northern cities put evening restrictions on their off peak returns
 

Kingspanner

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I look back fondly on BR because of the opportunity to hang out of a droplight window on loco hauled stock, which I have not enjoyed since an HST a few years ago.
Plus it was an organisation with some spare resource so stuff like the Pope's visit in the 80s could be catered for (albeit with extraordinary motive power), and everyday breakdowns could be rescued and relief trains organised and staffed.
 

tbtc

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There seems a contradiction on this thread between people who believe that a "standard" livery is necessary to ensure a good quality of service and people who's favourite period of BR is the 1980/1990s version where each sector had its own liveries.

Absolutely, there were a lot of doom-laden prophecies about in the run-up to privatisation, none of which have come to pass. We were being told to brace ourselves for Beeching Mark 2 and an inability to buy through tickets, and none of it happened. TOCs are now legally obliged to provide minimum standards of service, and it's almost impossible to cut trains or close lines and stations, which BR did frequently, whenever they were strapped for cash.

I think if this pandemic had happened forty years ago, you'd have seen an almost total shutdown of the network, with only parts of it fully reopening afterwards. That's not slagging off BR, that's simply being realistic.

I think you're right there - BR was free to cut services/ lines, so did so. Private operators are stuck with whatever minimum levels that the Government required at franchise time, so there's no scope.

I appreciated the integrated system - though I didn't realise there was any other option until privatisation ... and then I realised what had been lost. Other pluses years back included perfectly good hot food on trains (snacks as well as meals), and things like Red Star parcels, good-sized luggage vans for bikes, etc. And never being called a "customer".

A lot of this would have happened anyway (there are so many places selling sandwiches nowadays that there's very little market for selling food on trains (beyond the long distance routes where you can expect a number of passengers to be on them for three/four hours plus)... the "parcel" market has changed beyond recognition since BR... naive to think that a modern BR would be providing full buffets on most services or devoting an entire carriage of each train to luggage.

Personally I prefer being a "customer" to a "passenger". One suggests that I have rights and expectations, the other suggests that I am merely self-loading freight.

But the "integrated system" bit is the oddest one - you can still buy through tickets from one side of the country to the other - what's not integrated? The fact that different bits of the network have different liveries and brand names? That finished years ago, when brands like InterCity and ScotRail came along. Or was that acceptable but somehow things are different if it's *private* organisations with different liveries and brand names?

If you look back through my posts, you'll see that I was pointing out that the opprobrium caused by the more loony suggestions for privatisation influenced the Government to institute a more regulated form of privatisation. Our less dislocated form of privatisation was developed because of the opposition to privatisation, not in spite of it.

You want to believe that the Government chose a less radical version of privatisation because of protests? Fair enough, believe that if you want but where's your evidence? Was this "opprobrium" in the form of marching through London, signing petitions... or is it just that some enthusiasts wanted to complain about the worst possible version of privatisation (prior to it happening) and then want to claim credit for the fact that something which was never on the table never got into the statute books?

BR had its good and bad points as have private TOC's. However I am sure if goverment had put the effort and finance into correcting the problems I am sure it could have been fixed, however it was not to be. What BR had was a joined up Network. Maybe if goverment had gone for system like London buses where fares , service and vehicle requirements are set by TFL and a standard livery we have got a more joined up service.

Heavy rail fares and vehicle requirements *are* set/agreed by the Government though.

And BR didn't have one standard livery in my lifetime - as soon as they finished repainting the last of the green locos (so that everything would be blue) they started with new liveries on stock like APT. Were the "blue trains" of Glasgow a bad thing, since they didn't fit into one standard national livery?

I certainly think there's something to be said for a consistent product in terms of sectors.

For example, it's good to know roughly what to expect in terms of comfort, buffet facilities, first class offering, pricing structure, special offers if you're getting an InterCity service to Plymouth, Birmingham or Edinburgh for example.

Maybe that's the difference between us - I'm old enough to remember two coach 158s on "Cross Country" services (e.g. Edinburgh/ Glasgow to Manchester), so there was never one consistent level of InterCity "offering" that I can remember.

From my memory, different routes had different levels of service, different food offerings, different degrees of "First Class" - maybe the "InterCity" trains hauled by 73s on the Gatwick Express had the same range of buffet/restaurant facilities as the Highland Chieftan, but I don't remember that.

Fares, however, are as much to do with government policy in setting then as they are with ownership.

Fares could be halved tomorrow provided the government didn't mind stumping up the difference.

Agreed - nothing stopping a huge fare cut (subsidised by increased taxpayer support) - this is one flaw in the Corbyn plans for nationalisation - never an explanation about what a "nationalised" railway could achieve that the current privatised model couldn't.

For those with long memories, I wonder if the level of rose-tinting depends on how you used British Rail: I mostly travelled InterCity between Intercity-operated stations, and look back on most of those journeys with pleasure

I think that this is a great point - people might have grown up with a good memory of BR when their only rail experience was an annual train trip to the seaside through childhood... then they get old enough to need to commute for work and trains become an expensive everyday chore, rather than a rare pleasure.

I'm sure I'd get bored of an Alton Towers rollercoaster if I had to use it every day!

I look back fondly on BR because of the opportunity to hang out of a droplight window on loco hauled stock, which I have not enjoyed since an HST a few years ago.
Plus it was an organisation with some spare resource so stuff like the Pope's visit in the 80s could be catered for (albeit with extraordinary motive power), and everyday breakdowns could be rescued and relief trains organised and staffed.

I appreciate your honesty about the droplights - but there are modern examples of stock utilisation - e.g. TPE doubling up services to the 2014 Commonwealth Games with the use of the 350/3s - EMT used to be good at putting HSTs on Skegness services in the summer and Lincoln services during the December "market" period plus 222s to Liverpool for the Grand National... but there are limits to how much stock you want to keep "spare" to only use on such rare occasions.

I'm not sure that there were anything like as many "relief" trains as people say that they remember though.
 

Ianno87

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One thing that has happened in many areas is effective price hikes though changing ticket restrictions.

IIRC in the old days you could use saver returns at pretty much any time as long as you weren't going to or from London and you could use cheap day returns any time after 9:30.

But a few years back crosscountry put a blanket 9:30 restriction on pretty much all the off peak return tickets they set. Some of the transpennie routes also seem to have picked up restrictions that i'm sure they didn't use to have. On the local level a number of northern cities put evening restrictions on their off peak returns

Again, directly or indirectly required by DfT. Nothing to suggest same wouldn't have been required of BR were they to be still around.


I appreciate your honesty about the droplights - but there are modern examples of stock utilisation - e.g. TPE doubling up services to the 2014 Commonwealth Games with the use of the 350/3s - EMT used to be good at putting HSTs on Skegness services in the summer and Lincoln services during the December "market" period plus 222s to Liverpool for the Grand National... but there are limits to how much stock you want to keep "spare" to only use on such rare occasions.

I'm not sure that there were anything like as many "relief" trains as people say that they remember though.

Other current day examples (but less obvious/sexy due to being effectively part of the standard timetable):

-The Thursday/Friday additional 1846/1857 Euston departures (effectively using a couple of extra trainsets on a Friday only)
-The Up Sunday LNER that omits Darlington and shadows another service
-Extra through Paddington-Penzance on a Friday only
-Some commuter TOCs who do bounce-back of peak stock to act as 'start of off peak' extras
-Until recently the MUFC football trains
-TfW Loco hauled set doing a Manchester-Holyhead 'boat train' between the peaks
-Ditto Avanti sending Double Voyager to Holyhead between the peaks (plus the Pendolinos to Blackpool)
Etc.
 

32475

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My own rose tinted views of BR were as follows:
1- My Dad worked for BR for about 30 years so as a family we got free or reduced 'Priv' rate travel throughout the network, Ireland and western Europe
2- Buffet cars did a fantastic bacon sarnie
3- On much of the stock you could lean out of the window to enjoy the view and inhale the diesel fumes and sound of the locomotive
4- Local trains were often good at waiting at stations for more important express trains, even if you did have a dash between one platform and another
5- There were so many more locomotives
6- There weren't the endless repeated announcements on trains to interrupt your peace and quiet.
And most importantly........
7- Guards were called Guards
On the down side:
8- There was little variety in liveries
9- Stations were more decrepit than they are now and they smelled even more of wee than they do now
 

Ianno87

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4- Local trains were often good at waiting at stations for more important express trains,


Because they could...
A) A less busy network so holding trains had fewer consequences
B) A less stringent performance regime than current operators

Often its the local trains that have less ability to recover delay on intensively worked branch lines or suburban areas.
 

WesternLancer

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In a somehow-surviving school project from the BR-era I wrote that BR had "a name for poor standards of service, slow trains and long delays". But I suspect that the rosy glow is less from BRs successes than from privatisation's apparent failures.

For those with long memories, I wonder if the level of rose-tinting depends on how you used British Rail: I mostly travelled InterCity between Intercity-operated stations, and look back on most of those journeys with pleasure. When things went wrong, there were some impressive attempts to sort things out: I recall my Plymouth-Paddington train being reversed outside Exeter due to a bomb scare at Taunton and run via Yeovil at walking pace through floodwater to get us to our destination, while we were served free tea, for example. By contrast I remember my occasional forays into Network South East with less of a rosy glow: boarded up stations with bright paint but broken facilities and spartan or decrepit rolling stock.

If you experienced the post-privatistion railways of the late '90s and early 2000s, then there's a fair chance that that period has soured your view of privatisation in comparison to BR: Connex, Operation Princess, and the post-Hatfield omnishambles will have done nothing to persuade a very large pool of travellers that privatisation was an unqualified success. The later shenanigans over the East and West Coast franchises have done nothing to dispel the general suspicion that public subsidy is going somewhere other than into running an passenger-focussed railway, and that high fares are somehow tied to money going to supposedly greedy and incompetent private companies aided by questionable government.

If you are too young to remember any of these, perhaps you simply hope that something might be better than your recent experience: commuters in the south travel on more modern trains that are often cleaner, safer and brighter than BR's, from stations that are generally kept in better repair, but if your trains are overcrowded and lack punctuality at the best of times, and a timetable shambles and series of strikes makes things even worse, it's easy to assume that things were better once upon a time, and could be better again.

This is of course an age-old theme not unique to the railways. As George Orwell put it in '1984': "It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been... The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different."
Excellent post!

Exactly. It's a government policy choice, and the government has always been clear about its views on this subject. There's far more protection in place now than there has been in the past, though - most fare rises are RPI-linked. There's been years in the past, mainly in the 70s and 80s, when fare increases were absolutely eye-watering, in excess of 25% on some occasions. Try doing that now! BR also used selective fare increases as demand management tools, an option not generally available now.
But you need to cite inflation for the years concerned of course. 24% in 1975 I see. And it's not simple to just say it is inflation linked now- some of it is due to the baked in regulations around certain fares that have held season tickets down and forced up walk up unregulated fares to compensate the owners as the only option they can use - this is bonkers, and results in the impact on the manchester fare quoted in the post referred to. OK that's govt policy side effect, but it the worst combo of govt policy heavy handedness combined with private operators that passengers then think are 'pulling a fast one'. Using avgs over baskets of fares is another one that looks like a 'scam' to the punter etc etc
 
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PeterC

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But you need to cite inflation for the years concerned of course. 24% in 1975 I see. And it's not simple to just say it is inflation linked now- some of it is due to the baked in regulations around certain fares that have held season tickets down and forced up walk up unregulated fares to compensate the owners as the only option they can use - this is bonkers, and results in the impact on the manchester fare quoted in the post referred to. OK that's govt policy side effect, but it the worst combo of govt policy heavy handedness combined with private operators that passengers then think are 'pulling a fast one'. Using avgs over baskets of fares is another one that looks like a 'scam' to the punter etc etc
The public don't see the government's hand in things, only the TOCs. Considering that the subject of the thread is "views" the important thing is the image.
 

yorksrob

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You want to believe that the Government chose a less radical version of privatisation because of protests? Fair enough, believe that if you want but where's your evidence? Was this "opprobrium" in the form of marching through London, signing petitions... or is it just that some enthusiasts wanted to complain about the worst possible version of privatisation (prior to it happening) and then want to claim credit for the fact that something which was never on the table never got into the statute books?

Perhaps not protests, but certainly a general sense of incredulity that helped the Govenment to steer its course. Remember, there weren't protests or petitions against sleaze as such, but it's perception by the public certainly had an impact on the later stages of the Conservative Government.

And those protestations weren't just from dreamy eyed enthusiasts from the ends of the platforms. I don't doubt that there was some political posturing by opposition parties, but the fact that the late Robert Adley, conservative MP for Christchurch joined those protestations, suggests that there was a genuine fear of what form privatisation would take.

Maybe that's the difference between us - I'm old enough to remember two coach 158s on "Cross Country" services (e.g. Edinburgh/ Glasgow to Manchester), so there was never one consistent level of InterCity "offering" that I can remember.

From my memory, different routes had different levels of service, different food offerings, different degrees of "First Class" - maybe the "InterCity" trains hauled by 73s on the Gatwick Express had the same range of buffet/restaurant facilities as the Highland Chieftan, but I don't remember that.

Was Edinburgh - Glasgow even marketed as part of the InterCity network at the time ? I thought this emerged as part of the Regional Railways express network, which would have managed passengers expectations of the service available.

It's not really surprising that the Gatwick Express didn't have the same restaurant facilities as the Highland Chieftan. It was a bit of a short journey for a full sit down meal.
 

yorksrob

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@tbtc meant Edinburgh or Glasgow - Manchester, and yes they were definitely marketed as Inter City Cross Country.

Well, I guess they could have done with a more InterCity type service, but it was fairly new, so I suppose they had to grow passenger numbers first. Perhaps in time, it would have gained some mk2's/3's more befitting such a service.
 

Ianno87

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Well, I guess they could have done with a more InterCity type service, but it was fairly new, so I suppose they had to grow passenger numbers first. Perhaps in time, it would have gained some mk2's/3's more befitting such a service.

It was a mix of "Intercity" stock on some services (47s+Mk 2s plus the odd HST), as well as the 158-operated services.
 

GoneSouth

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@tbtc meant Edinburgh or Glasgow - Manchester, and yes they were definitely marketed as Inter City Cross Country.
Don’t remember any BR intercity service being done with anything other than 125s and other assorted loco hauled stuff.
Apart from 2 anomalies where I had a trip from Kings cross to Leeds on a WYMetro branded 321 EMU and a trip From Birmingham to Manchester on a very old commuter EMU but can’t remember the class. Both of these were obviously unscheduled changes but it does highlight what some have said earlier that the BR system did have some flexibility when things went wrong unlike today, as all the stock and staff were working for the same organisation. Don’t think you’d get much cooperation to fix things like this today. I think for example the KX to Leeds happened because the 225 fleet were all grounded for checks following an accident.

The 158s I thought were all under the Regional Railways Express brand and did stuff like Birmingham to Cambridge, what is now TPE and Liverpool to Norwich
 

Ianno87

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Don’t remember any BR intercity service being done with anything other than 125s and other assorted loco hauled stuff.
Apart from 2 anomalies where I had a trip from Kings cross to Leeds on a WYMetro branded 321 EMU and a trip From Birmingham to Manchester on a very old commuter EMU but can’t remember the class. Both of these were obviously unscheduled changes but it does highlight what some have said earlier that the BR system did have some flexibility when things went wrong unlike today, as all the stock and staff were working for the same organisation. Don’t think you’d get much cooperation to fix things like this today. I think for example the KX to Leeds happened because the 225 fleet were all grounded for checks following an accident.

The 158s I thought were all under the Regional Railways Express brand and did stuff like Birmingham to Cambridge, what is now TPE and Liverpool to Norwich

No, there were a pool of 4(?) Newton Heath-allocated Class 158s that did 3 trains per day Manchester Airport-Scotland plus 1-2 Liverpool-Scotland trains. This was roughly between about 1994 and 1998-ish, and were Intercity/Virgin Cross Country services (but in the standard 'Express' grey/beige livery).
 

JonathanH

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No, there were a pool of 4(?) Newton Heath-allocated Class 158s that did 3 trains per day Manchester Airport-Scotland plus 1-2 Liverpool-Scotland trains. This was roughly between about 1994 and 1998-ish, and were Intercity/Virgin Cross Country services (but in the standard 'Express' grey/beige livery).
5 (158747-158751) - they worked the relevant services until Voyagers took over. I had my last ride on a Cross Country 158 (158749 from Guildford to Reading) in December 2001.
 

GoneSouth

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No, there were a pool of 4(?) Newton Heath-allocated Class 158s that did 3 trains per day Manchester Airport-Scotland plus 1-2 Liverpool-Scotland trains. This was roughly between about 1994 and 1998-ish, and were Intercity/Virgin Cross Country services (but in the standard 'Express' grey/beige livery).
Now I think about it, I have done some fairly long journeys on the 158s, Bristol to Penzance being the most uncomfortable. Not bad for shorter stuff but I don’t think they should have been running any core IC routes.
 

hexagon789

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Now I think about it, I have done some fairly long journeys on the 158s, Bristol to Penzance being the most uncomfortable. Not bad for shorter stuff but I don’t think they should have been running any core IC routes.

Unlike other 158 first class, these unjts had proper 2+1 seating and better than a motley collection of Mk1s and early Mk2s imo ;)

Though I accept by the time of the 158s such rakes on InterCity services was pretty rare compared to say 10 years earlier.
 

JonathanH

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Now I think about it, I have done some fairly long journeys on the 158s, Bristol to Penzance being the most uncomfortable. Not bad for shorter stuff but I don’t think they should have been running any core IC routes.
The 158 workings on XC (introduced under BR but extended to the privatised era) were effectively an overlay to the underlying core IC routes, a flexible way of allowing through connections to be retained that matched the demand on routes that were not so core to the operation at the time.
 

WesternLancer

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And those protestations weren't just from dreamy eyed enthusiasts from the ends of the platforms. I don't doubt that there was some political posturing by opposition parties, but the fact that the late Robert Adley, conservative MP for Christchurch joined those protestations, suggests that there was a genuine fear of what form privatisation would take.

Some might accuse Mr Adley MP of having been a dreamy eyed enthusiast! However, I suspect he was one of the few in parliament (esp on the Tory side) who understood enough about railways to be able to see that the model being pursued to privatise was flawed - and he was correct.
Not sure if he felt privatization at all was a bad thing, or if he knew it wouldn't really work - to which he was correct. I suspect that sadly his efforts resulted in safeguards for certain things (maybe fares regulation) which had unintended consequences, when it would have been better if he'd been listened too and a revised model come up with. I suspect the Treasury had fixations around the model to be promoted.

The public don't see the government's hand in things, only the TOCs. Considering that the subject of the thread is "views" the important thing is the image.
That's probably true, tho I was mainly considering BR's high fare increases, but they have to be seen in the context of the prevailing inflation at the time. The only really valid comparison is how much above or below inflation fare increases are year on year or course, over time. But there were indeed BR increases above inflation during that period as the govt sought to increase passenger share of costs, as they have done again in recent years of course.
 

Eyersey468

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I'm not old enough to really remember BR being only about 7 or 8 when the privatisation process started, but I find it hard to believe it was all bad. It won't have been perfect but I'm sure most staff tried to do their job to the best of their ability
 
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