Readers letters
I was aghast at the number of contributors to “Soundbites” this month who advocated a return to a nationalised rail service.
Surely they cannot have travelled on BR during the times I had to suffer it.
I simply cannot, from my rail travel over forty years, recognise the "good old days" of BR and "the bad times" of today. The current system-at least on the routes I have used- is vastly better than BR ever was in my lifetime. If I do pay relatively more (of which I'm not sure), the huge improvement in service makes up for it.
First, timekeeping- much better, compared with the Nottingham/ Birmingham train to which I was well used, and on which particular services were always late and always missed connections, or the Birmingham/ London service.
Customer service- you now at least get an acknowledgement of your presence, usually something polite, and under the new regime I have neither been directed to the wrong platform, nor treated as if someone is doing me a huge favour by letting me on their precious train.
Standing or sitting- under BR I’ve stood from Birmingham to London; in recent years I’ve always at least had a seat. Trains are cleaner, too.
Cost. Interesting. When I compare the cost of a walk on ticket from Chippenham to London today with Leicester to London twenty years ago-a similar distance-it has not kept pace with most other prices. I used to be able to crudely cost a train journey by estimating it as twice the cost of putting fuel in my car (or equal when I had a student railcard). Here, I’m afraid that the situation is less clear. My current journey to London on the train costs considerably more than twice the fuel cost; my journey to Bristol is much less than double the fuel cost; it used to be the case that the per mile cost fell with distance; now it's clearly not always so, a symptom of the complex pricing. Over my thirty years of car ownership, the cost of fuel has barely-if at all- kept pace with inflation (look beyond the last few years before condemning me), and by going diesel, my fuel consumption has almost halved,so relatively the cost has fallen . My crude comparison was always going to be unfair to the railways, and perhaps I now need to work on a three fold or four fold factor to cater for the fact that such a transport system with rolling stock measured in thousands, compared with millions of cars sold per year could never afford the investment or make the progress that goes into the motor car. However, for personal cost only, it remains more expensive to go on the train on a walk-on ticket than to run a second hand car, despite the amount by which the private car driver subsidises road freight. Of course, the complex ticket buying options mean it can be much less, so whether average ticket prices have gone up, I really cannot say.
With regard to the cost of running a railway system, private industry could generally run any operation with one half to one third of the staff that a Nationalised business would employ. Therefore there is room for profit and service provision.
What I will say is this- anyone who thinks that we would have been better off retaining a Nationalised Railway system is at worst foolish, and at best overlooks the spectacular failure of the system when it was nationalised. Unless you’re a Labour MP still reeling from the loss of lots of lovely closed shop union votes and subscriptions. In my lifetime, BR, with high prices, with overmanning, with regular pay strikes, with less competition, with woeful reliability, was a sad, sick joke.
Many argue that railways need the way and the rolling stock to be under common control. I always have to ask- why should rail be unique in that respect ? The air is not nationalised, yet operators fly (I can fly to Glasgow much more cheaply than going by train); I drive a private car on publicly owned roads which make billions for the government in road tax and fuel duty, and I use a boat on many differently owned waterways.
Seriously, I am being argumentative and deliberately so, but please take emotion out of this; do not treat the railways just as something unique and precious. They need to have a purpose, an output, and an acceptable cost.
I know I will get condemnation from pro Nationalisation dinosaurs who won’t read this far, but I actually believe in having a good rail system; I know that even I may be being overly nostalgic in that (although not gullible enough to fall for HS2); we now have the best rail system I've seen in my lifetime (from my usage, I admit). We need to acknowledge want we want from it and what we are prepared to pay.
Mike West, Wiltshire