Broken & Late Ltd: Britain's Railways

[Capybara]

Passenger numbers have never reached the lowest of forecasts

I've read/heard this before but from my observed experience (and I use Eurostar a lot) it doesn't seem that way. Every train I travel on is more or less full and you rarely see the £39 fare that they are always alerting you about, other than on the first train out in the morning or the last one at night, neither of which are much good to me at least. I just thank goodness they are there for those of us who won't fly.

[Paul S]

That's because Eurostar are very good at maximising their profits. They know exactly how many passengers they are carrying as it is a pre-book service only (no walk-ons) and they can tailor the fares to guarantee maximum profit. From a passengers perspective, half full would be more comfortable but that doubles the operating cost. Eurostar could double the number of services as there is capacity to do so.

[Big Boobs and FIRE!]

https://www.railwaygazette.com/uk/a-.../64236.article


A consequence of this is that as part of TUPE, employees can leave the original business without notice. The fact that the government cant agree a deal with passenger operators means that there is currently a ban on overtime and rest day work (this is what has killed TPE, though this was only ever a mitigation for other issues). Freight operators are outside these restrictions and are always a good source of overtime, so are now very attractive to drivers. Drivers would normally have a six month notice period but this has allowed a phalanx of drivers to leave without notice, amd further expose TPE.

Most prevalent requirement for freight drivers are the West Coast and East Coast main lines.

Therefore, the previous comment from one of the Middlesbrough tribe about cancellations, on the Monday after the change of ownership, York depot alone was short of 7 drivers.

I'm sure Burnham, Bramham et al were fully conversant with the impact when they made their demands.

[Paul S]

I've always said that privatisation was the best thing that happened to the railways. The unions rubbed their hands together and without going on strike look what the drivers have got. People who believe socialisam and nationalism brings untold worker benefits need to look at this long and hard and realise what the workers have got by being able to transfer their labour from one organisation to another, sometimes by accident rather than by design.

[Fussbudget]

Thanks BB&F, interesting insight. FWIW when we went to Saltburn on Sunday all the morning TPEs had been cancelled/disappeared from the timetable, though at least they're not the only operator on that route

The Railway Gazette really aren't fans of trade unions are they?

Rail Business UK can report that it has had access to communication from a small cabal of union leaders promising a concerted campaign over several months to ‘bring down TPE’.

whereas

Nevertheless, its implementation was still hampered by industrial disputes, in particular the difficulty TPE faced in reaching a revised Rest Day Working agreement with the two main rail unions. DfT itself is reported to have blocked a number of TPE’s proposals, principally on cost grounds

Not "a small cabal of civil servants/ministers" on that side of the equation then? It sounds like the lack of resolution is at least as much down to the government as it is the unions

[Toby Gymshorts]

I'll have my first experience of Avanti West Coast on Friday, having paid £145 for an off-peak return. £145 which doesn't get you a seat reservation, so I am sharpening my elbows as we speak.

[Lang Spoon]

I've always said that privatisation was the best thing that happened to the railways. The unions rubbed their hands together and without going on strike look what the drivers have got. People who believe socialisam and nationalism brings untold worker benefits need to look at this long and hard and realise what the workers have got by being able to transfer their labour from one organisation to another, sometimes by accident rather than by design.

Personally I'm agnostic on nationalising the rail companies as a cure all (I doubt the U.K. treasury will ever subsidise to Proper Europe levels, so the current plan of Gouge the Customer would likely continue), but there's a lot to unpack in your thinking the current shitshow in England is a desirable state of affairs, or sustainable.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Personally I'm agnostic on nationalising the rail companies as a cure all (I doubt the U.K. treasury will ever subsidise to Proper Europe levels, so the current plan of Gouge the Customer would likely continue), but there's a lot to unpack in your thinking the current shitshow in England is a desirable state of affairs, or sustainable.

Yeah. I'd be in favour of nationalising the railways just on principle (you can't get around a natural monopoly by breaking it up into lots of little unconnected monopolies) but people need to be honest about what nationalising it will achieve, what problems it will solve and more importantly what problems it won't solve.

It will enable proper integration across the full network, allow for economies of scale, and it will stop companies from borrowing to pay out dividends. But the amount of money taken out in profits is small beside the amount of money that needs to be invested, and we still haven't gone anywhere near ticket pricing policies.

Nationalising the rail service could effectively costless if you wait out the contracts. But the amount of state money you would need to pump in to fix various problems is absolutely fucking enormous. It's worth doing but people have to be honest about it.

[Nefertiti2]

What are the odds, I wonder?

https://twitter.com/RMTunion/status/1673971898806312961?s=20

meanwhile they are planning to make stations unstaffed from now on

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/abcommuters/status/1676208515969425411?s=61&t=xvOireV8JOIS_CpbTtDBow

Ministers reportedly want 1000 ticket offices closed by Christmas

https://abcommuters.com/2023/07/04/e...fice-closures/

[Gangster Octopus]

They really hate both the railways and people having jobs.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Travelling back from France by Eurostar on Sunday august 27th was stunned to find 'no fares available' to Newcastle from London.
Turns out there is a major line closure (on a bank holiday weekend, at the end of the school holidays) requiring either going via Chesterfield from St Pancras, making it a 5 hour trip, or taking a replacement bus to Peterbro or Grantham.

Chose the former after a bizarre online chat conversation with LNER about cancelled trains/no they're not/yes they are/no, the fares are available from 7 July/you mean for a bus- national express have those, much cheaper/but is their service reliable? (!!!!)

[Sam]

Might as well dip my toe in the water of this thread now. We'll be in the UK for a couple of months starting in late August. We'll be staying with my parents near Bristol and I'd like to attend an editors' conference in Glasgow in early September, and we'd much prefer to take the train than to fly. I'm all for workers getting what they want, but from an entirely me-and-my-girlfriend-planning-this perspective, how likely are the rail strikes to fuck us? The dates we're looking at are heading up on Thursday 7 September and heading back on perhaps Thursday 14 or Friday 15 (the conference is only three days but we're hoping to catch up with a mate who lives there and get a bit out of town to do a bit of walking afterwards).

The routes I'm seeing are Bristol Temple Meads–Birmingham New Street–Manchester Piccadilly–Glasgow. The return sometimes has a direct one from Manchester straight through to Bristol, depending which time we book it for. Are any/all of these routes likely to be affected by strikes? When I look on thetrainline.com it just pops up a notification telling me this or that leg of the journey might not run due to disruption on services in and out of London Euston, which advice is as much use a chocolate fireguard given we're not going within a hundred miles of London at any point in the journey and one of the legs it mentions this for is a train that appears to originate in Manchester and terminate in Glasgow. Obviously we've not exactly been keeping right up to the minute on strike news, so any advice is welcome. I really don't want to have to book an EasyJet return.

[Ginger Yellow]

Impossible to say this far out. Anything more than a few weeks out could be affected by strikes (also true of airports of course, though the disruption would probably be less for an internal flight).

[Ginger Yellow]

https://twitter.com/abcommuters/status/1676208515969425411?s=61&t=xvOireV8JOIS_CpbTtDBow

Ministers reportedly want 1000 ticket offices closed by Christmas

https://abcommuters.com/2023/07/04/e...fice-closures/

To nobody's surprise, the entire Greenwich branch* of Southeastern is losing its ticket offices. Supposedly, Deptford at least will now be staffed 24 hours, but that's very much "I'll believe it when I see it". Also to nobody's surprise, the initial proposals fuck over London and spare the suburbs.

* Edit: Seems I misread the map and Greenwich itself was spared. Still, the only ticket offices between Cannon Street and Dartford on that line not being closed (immediately) are Greenwich, Abbey Wood and Woolwich Arsenal. The Lewisham branch also suffers a fair bit although it's interesting to note that apart from Lewisham itself the stations that aren't affected are all in the more Tory bits of the borough.

[Nefertiti2]

https://twitter.com/seatsixtyone/status/1676532430415511552?s=20

Extent of cuts becoming clear: LNER state that it won't be possible to buy a railcard or season ticket, reserve a seat or get a refund at stations as big as Durham, Berwick, Grantham, Darlington, Wakefield...


As other countries expand their rail for climate and other reasons the Uk runs theirs into the grpund/

[Fussbudget]

Is there a list of all the ticket offices they're proposing to close?

That stat they're bandying about of only 12% of all tickets being bought at a staffed ticket office is doing my head in: 1) that's still a huge number of tickets 2) what proportion of tickets are bought online but collected at a counter? (something I do regularly as the only machine for collection at our station is regularly out of order) 3) what proportion of railcards/season tickets are bought at a counter? 4) how many passenger queries do ticket offices field?

Also rail vouchers you get from delay repay claims can only be used at staffed ticket offices, amazingly

[Ginger Yellow]

Southeastern, at least, are "solving" this problem by creating so-called "Travel Centres" at larger stations. Which in practice probably means rebranding existing ticket offices, which in my experience already have long queues at those stations.

[Fussbudget]

Yeah our local ticket office is always busy as well.

The consultation on this is open until 26 July by the way (not that I imagine it'll make any difference but you never know):
www.londontravelwatch.org.uk for London-based folk
www.transportfocus.org.uk for the rest of the UK

[ursus arctos]

The Man from Seat 61 has been (unsurprisingly) excellent on this.

He noted yesterday that the introduction of ticket machines in the UK did not cannibalise Ticket Office sales to anywhere near the extent predicted, at least in part because of the ridiculous complexity of UK fares.

[Fussbudget]

A vaguely-related anecdote: my first memory of visiting England, as a kid coming with my parents in the Eurostar. On arrival, my dad went to buy tube tickets for all of us. The ticket office had massive queues so he used one of the machines. Now my dad is both well-travelled and a fluent English speaker, but the sheer number of different tickets available completely flummoxed him. After spending a while studying the network maps and all the possible options he buys tickets, confident he's picked the right ones.

We get on the tube, gates open, no problem. We try to exit at the other end and the gates beep and refuse to open. Some tube staff arrive, my dad shows them the tickets, they accuse him of trying to underpay and threaten us with a fine. A heated discussion ensues and we're eventually allowed to leave without a fine but with a flea in our ears. Welcome to England!

Of course something like this wouldn't happen these days because the ticketing system in Britain is a lot less complex now [/s]

[ursus arctos]

The rail companies look to have done a half-baked mashup of the ticketing "systems" used by TfL and predatory airlines.

[Capybara]

A vaguely-related anecdote: my first memory of visiting England, as a kid coming with my parents in the Eurostar.

That sentence doesn't half make me feel old. Anyway, the rest of the post makes the point. Most passengers don't know the system and there must be thousands who pay more than they need to, or less than they should and end up with a fine, which is probably what the rail companies want.

And nothing says "Welcome to England!" better than the rip-off Heathrow Express.

[DCI Harry Batt]

Part of the whole silly nonsense is that that London page tells you to choose a train company. There are a number of stations I might go to. I neither know nor care which train company they might relate to.

[Ginger Yellow]

And nothing says "Welcome to England!" better than the rip-off Heathrow Express.

To be fair, Crossrail has pretty much rendered that moot.