Re-Nationalisation

But Holborn Viaduct was replaced, by City Thameslink

Indeed, but that replaced Holborn Viaduct LOW Level or Snow Hill as it was better known, which until its' closure to passengers in 1916, was an Edwardian version of Thameslink serving the city Widened Lines.

What we know as Holborn Viaduct was a terminus and CT doesn't fit the bill as a replacement for that. Not quite the same as Michael Palin's 'I've got a slug' routine, but still not a replacement.

The one problem with not renewing franchises and simply taking them over is what happened in the EU referendum. Without getting into the politics of it, that has created serious thoughtfulness and caution in financial circles and can be viewed as a very good reason/the perfect excuse to do nothing, depending on one's own viewpoint.

Getting back to the original thread, I commuted before privatisation and the cattle-truck mentality was still there at that time. It's probably inevitable because they are the major cash-cow for railways & have been for around 60 years, since freight moved to the roads big-time.

AS I said, it's pretty complicated & anybody's chances of pleasing most people are small.

The latest Kent Route consultation mentions briefly the long term need for further terminal capacity, and from memory most other RUS's did as well. Holborn Viaduct might have ended up to prove useful now. Broad Street would given useful flexibility whilst Euston is rebuilt for HS2. Such is the pendulum of life though. The only hope for future platform capacity comes from double decking where possible, and diverting commuter lines into cross-town links.

I doubt HV would be more useful than what we've got - a through station will always have more capacity than a terminus, even if the terminus had three platforms rather than the two in the through station. As for Broad Street, its approaches have been take over by the Overground, and again the throughput on that line is much greater than Broad Street could have coped with.

Difficult to see how a subject like 'Nationalisation' can be discussed without political comment, seeing as it involves politicians deciding to buy and run an industry.

So, I think we need to look at these things in a broader economic context. Realistically, it's to do with incentives and how those align between different groups. At the moment, the government's goals are misaligned with the TOC's incentives (not to mention the far less public ROSCOs).

We're long past "Beeching" thinking from a govenmental perspective, especially when looking at London, because it's realised that there's a notable economic disadvantage to have people stuck in traffic all day. I couldn't find the UK's statistics, but the US loses approximately $1 trillion a year due to "people stuck in traffic". That's a whole lot of money. The UK has got a much larger public transport modal share (and London even more so), but has roads which were not designed "from the ground up" like the US's are, not to mention tackling global warming and a general desire to move away from fossil fuels in the UK, which means that all forms of government believe it necessary to ensure that the railways have a decent modal share. The fact is also that all those people getting the train are voters (for the most part), so the government (no matter which) is incentivised to have good railways. If we accept in general that that is the case, we now need to look at how that transfers.

Well, it depends. See, this being a London-centric forum, there's quite a lot of discussions about South West Trains, Go-Via Thameslink Railway and South Eastern with some nods to others. The thing is, the franchising model was designed with a couple of things in mind. Firstly, "managing decline". It was assumed that quite a lot of lines outside of London were going to slowly close as people stopped taking the train. That didn't happen, for various reasons, some of which are to do with "private companies like making money" and some of which are to do with "man, petrol got expensive" among other, specific, localised reasons. Secondly, getting the most out of the inter-city network, in order to attract companies to actually bid for franchises. Now, both of these things meant that the franchising model was designed to offer a nice buffer to TOCs to help them "manage decline" and to encourage more rail travel to get the most out of the inter-city network. Unfortunately, neither of these things apply to London Commuter services, which are at capacity, and just need to offer enough capacity to physically get people into a spectacularly growing London. Now you look at what has happened with the inter-city TOCs and you can generally see quite a success story. Sure Cross-Country has its problems (largely because Virgin XC's discussions with the SRA went along the lines of VXC: "We need 7 and 5 car trains", SRA: "You can have 4 car trains"), but the WCML got an entirely new fleet, frequencies have gone up across the board, generally moving to hourly or half-hourly clockface services (or better for Birmingham and Manchester), as opposed to the previous eclectic mix of departures and stopping patterns. In this case, the goals align, people are choosing the train over their cars, the TOCs make money from more patronage, the roads are less busy - Win Win.

As has been stated ad-infinitum, the TOCs are really only answerable to their shareholders. ie: They mainly want to make money. So, given a rail service, how do you increase money? Well, you can either have more passengers, or you can cut costs. With inter-city services, travel is discretionary. People generally have a choice, which means that TOCs can attract more people to their rail service, because there are people to attract. At the point of privatisation, there was stacks of spare inter-city capacity, not to mention building new trains or polishing up some old ones. Operation Princess on the Cross-Country network was too successful in fact (partly though, it was the SRA that screwed that one - see above). This way, more people would make the choice to get on the trains. With London commuting, that just doesn't work. Most of the people taking the train HAVE to take the train. They have no other choice. Attracting more people onto over-crowded trains won't work, because they'll just displace other people, so the TOC's only incentive is to cut costs. There's nothing wrong with that behaviour, it's what a business is supposed to do, but it doesn't help align with the government's goals.

What is needed is for different franchising contracts to specifically have different incentives (ie: things that either cost the TOC money or benefit the TOC depending on how good they are a shifting passengers, beyond just being rewarded with ticket receipts and punished with a lack of them). Now, things like delay-repay help, as do PPM penalty payments, but the former puts the onus on the passenger to ask for their money back and the latter is a very poor measure of delay (and due to the complicated delay-attribution process, often ends up back at Network Rail - thus the taxpayer - anyway).

Now you don't need nationalisation to help align incentives and one could put forward that there are very easy ways to do it without nationalisation. The most successful TOC in pretty much everyone's eyes is Chiltern Railways. It helps that they inherited probably the worst rail service in the country at the time, but they were also given a massive franchise length (it'll be 25 years by franchise end in 2021 - although the current contract is 19 years). That means they could invest some of their own money to improve the service, because they were going to see a return on investment, because railway lead times are huge, because passenger numbers can take years to build up, because infrastructure improvements take years to complete and because trains have a 40 year lifespan. It's an example of somewhere where privatisation has been very successful and where the franchising contract helped align the incentives of private enterprise with those of the government.

Nationalisation could absolutely help with an incentive alignment, but the problem comes when priorities change. Governments have the same problem as TOCs. They don't last very long and when extra funding is needed for something that can be done in a year, railways are less politically romantic than schools and hospitals and have make the incumbent look less good when the "project" is complete outwith the term of the government. This above all else must be remembered.

I mean, other than the fact that you couldn't run the VHF timetable off of 86s and Mk 2s the point being the new trains were purchased, not that the new trains were any good (that has to do with all sorts of other decisions).



Indeed.



I was talking about the Evergreen program. Total Route Modernisation if anything was a downgrade, sure they resignalled (with ATP), but they rationalised lots of the 2 track sections down to single and lots of 4 track sections to 2. It was designed to operate on a purely commuter basis - which is one of the reasons Chiltern was given such a long lease. They didn't think they could make any money with a shorter one. The Evergreen program re-doubled Bicester North to Aynho Junction, increased linespeeds all over the shop, added 2 platforms to Marylebone and resignalled it to allow for frequency increases, re-opened two platforms at Birmingham Moor Street and while it's now been championed as part of "East West Rail", is where the extension to Oxford has come from.

Neither 86s nor Mark 2s were a common sight on WCML services from about 1988 - the fleet Virgin inherited was almost entirely mark 3 (which can do 125mph - the same as a Pendolino), with class 87 or 90 haulage.

Indeed.

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Most of that rationalisation took place long before the NSE era. And TRM also included the small matter of complete replacement of the dmu fleet on that route. These (class 165) still form 2/3rds of the Chiltern fleet - and NSE had already planned the 168s before privatisation intervened.

Absolute Rubbish

There were simply not enough loco hauled Mk3s or class 87 / 90 (InterCity allocated that is) locomotives to allow that to happen.

Until they were replaced by Pendalinos, most London - West Midlands services were in the hands of air conditioned Mk2s (with a solitary Mk3 catering vehicle and a Mk3 based DVT). The coach sets containing all Mk3s were focused on WC services to the North West and Scotland where the extra 10mph (the Mk2s being restricted to 100mph and the class 87 / class 90s being allowed up to 110mph) made more of a difference)

As for locos while the 87s and 90s did handle pretty much all WCML traffic originating from London, Class 86 locos were used for trains starting their journeys from Birmingham (most being Virgin XC departures, although some being WC only diagrams still remained) - again with Mk2 sets limited to 100mph.

The class 87s, class 90s, were all limited to a maximum of 110mph so the 125mph max permitted speed of the Mk3s is irrelevant.

As such Virgin liveried 86s and Mk2s were a common sight on the WCML in the years immediately after privatisation.

May I add one more factor to Chiltern's already well documented success? Good management. Possibly one of the biggest differences of all is when you have people right at the top who are knowledgeable, experienced, and interested. Read somewhere that when Chiltern sold out to DB, it was told to scale back its ambitions. The new big big bosses just weren't as interested in developing future custom as they were in focusing on current travel. And thats an interesting key; playing the offensive needs to be an explicit trait otherwise all that happens in a long-lead time industry like rail is tendency to the reactionary and defensive.

I was also a little miffed when Chiltern attempted to charge me extra for travelling in their business zone. When I already held a 1st class ticket.

But technically Chiltern are a 'one class railway' and they are quite clear their 'business zone' is not 'first class' (presumably because that then destroys the "we don't have a first class that is underused when the rest of the train is crowded" PR angle. As such by the letter of the law (or the conditions of carriage) the Guard was technically right to say you couldn't travel in that coach without paying extra.

In reality however, many seasoned railway insiders readily consider the 'business zone'  carriage is first class in all but name. Especially as it owes its existence to the wealthy commuters of Warwickshire (natural first class customers on other TOCS) whose frequent letters to Chiltern making unfavourable comparisons with Virgins 'first class' offering and hinting that they would be far more inclined to travel with Chiltern we some sort of 'premium class' be provided to be hard for Chiltern to ignore.

Was that a 'no comment' Rincew1nd

If a service provider/product seller knowingly sells you something that you are unable to enjoy, is that not fraud.... which is a criminal offence ?