Reorganisation of railways (NSFW)

iaitch said:

Oggy Red said:

stevexreeve said:

Wheresmeticket? said:

Hopefully one day it will be cheaper to get a train from London to Cornwall than to fly from London to Marrakech.

June 22nd fares are     Paddington to Penzance         £70.90   
                                   BA Heathrow to Marrakech     £118.00 

Rail fare could be cheaper but doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Remember, it takes 5 and a half hours by train from Paddington to Penzance.

Quicker to fly from London to Marrakech. Bargain!

But you've booked a cottage in Cornwall!!

Not me. I bleddy live there, me 'ansum!

stevexreeve said:

Wheresmeticket? said:

Hopefully one day it will be cheaper to get a train from London to Cornwall than to fly from London to Marrakech.

June 22nd fares are     Paddington to Penzance         £70.90   
                                   BA Heathrow to Marrakech     £118.00 

Rail fare could be cheaper but doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Is that one way?  

BTW

stevexreeve said:

Wheresmeticket? said:

Hopefully one day it will be cheaper to get a train from London to Cornwall than to fly from London to Marrakech.

June 22nd fares are     Paddington to Penzance         £70.90   
                                   BA Heathrow to Marrakech     £118.00 

Rail fare could be cheaper but doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Look to see how much it costs tomorrow.  It'll be a lot more I imagine.

**edit 
Just looked, £150

A few years ago I went to Edinburgh for the weekend. The shortness of the trip took car out of the equation as realistically I'd have needed to stop overnight on route both ways.

The options were:
Coach - £28pp
Plane - £45pp (plus parking at Stansted and Dartford toll)
Train - £110pp

So we chose the overnight coach because at the time we worked in London so already had season tickets that made getting to Victoria essentially free. Regretted it, because whilst the overnight coach gave us the most time in Edinburgh, I didn't get much sleep so ended the weekend so exhausted I needed another break to recover.

The point is of course that those price differentials are ridiculous. Nobody in their right mind is going to choose the train unless they're travelling along, really need to travel city centre to city centre, and can use the journey to get some work done, i.e. lone business travellers who are probably expensing the rail fare anyway. Leisure travellers are always going to drive or fly. If the UK is serious about it's environmental goals then they urgently need to fix this, and not buy penalising the airlines and their passengers.

If I want to get the train from Sittingbourne to St Pancras, I'm looking at pretty much that airfare from above to travel just 450 miles. 

EDIT: Just checked the rail fares for Sittingbourne to St Pancras. If I want to travel before 9am then it's £53.80, how the fuck can that be justified for journey of just over an hour and just over 50 miles?

The bit I'm always in is how they brand it, see there keeping the double arrows and Rail Alphabet font, but always interested in what the trains will look like, the uniforms etc etc

addick1956 said:

stevexreeve said:

Wheresmeticket? said:

Hopefully one day it will be cheaper to get a train from London to Cornwall than to fly from London to Marrakech.

June 22nd fares are     Paddington to Penzance         £70.90   
                                   BA Heathrow to Marrakech     £118.00 

Rail fare could be cheaper but doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Is this an admission that the current  system is crap. On the continent train fares are more reasonable. 

I don't believe the comparisons between air fares and train fares are typically fair.

Off-peak savers offer an hourly service and you turn up whenever you like and get on any train - even if it's "full". (Off-peak of course!).

Airlines rarely offer that sort of deal unless you pay hundreds of pounds.

When you compare "advanced against advanced" I don't think there's usually that much difference. 

@randy andy one thing I would disagree with in your otherwise sound post, is that (we) air travellers are benefitting from a global scam,namely the fact that kerosene isnt taxed. That has to be fixed and fast, but the trouble is no one country can go it alone. 

PragueAddick said:

Never forget that while she hated trains, it wasnt Thatcher that sold them off. Presumably she realised it was a can of worms. But then again...water...

It was on her agenda.

Thatcher never got round to privatising the railway because beforehand, she got stabbed in the back by her own party.

PragueAddick said:

Leroy Ambrose said:

The biggest con trick that's ever been pulled on people is privatisation of the railways to increase 'competition'. What are we going to do - take the track next to it that starts and arrives at the same place?

It was an absolute disgrace from start to finish - irrespective of your political persuasion. 

Well basically I agree with you, been slagging the UK version off since it happened. But certainly in Europe it can work. The big State operator might be blind to new markets (i.e new routes). Last year the Czech private operator RegioJet had a brilliant success with a night sleeper service to Rijeka on the Croatian coast. 500+ capacity, rammed solid. Lo and behold, this year both the Czech and Austrian state operators are trying to grab a bit of the action. But it took RegioJet to spot the market opportunity. The whole night sleeper thing is taking off again, led by the Austrian state operator to be fair to them, but now you've got some private guys out of Amsterdam looking to start up, with their first service connecting Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam and Brussels. And for years when Deutsche Bahn ran a sleeper from Cologne to Prague, I was using it, but silently screaming, send it on to Brussels, there's a market there. But instead DB decided they wouldn't do any more sleepers, period. I cursed them. But thanks to the private operator I'll be able to do Ebbsfleet-Prague with one easy change in Brussels. Whether that sort of potential exists in the UK is less obvious, there was Hull Trains, who I think went bankrupt.

But then the real competition is with the car and the plane, and for the railways to smash the competition you need increased speed, and that means infrastructure like HS2 and only the State can do that.

Speed is certainly one element
But I think you'll find that passengers are also looking at:
Price
Comfort 
Ease of connections
Food & drink
Connectivity as in Wifi

In today's world many of us might choose to spend travel time on here, watching Netflix or skimming the news and social media, as well as the odd call or even video call

And many of us find long drives unattractive. One thing lockdown and working from home has shown us is that time, comfort and quality of life are fairly important to help one both relax and think straight.

PragueAddick said:

@seriously_red sure, but speed is what causes “modal shift” from air to rail. The TGVs have wiped out whole airlines in France, such as Air Inter. Eurostar has seriously eroded the air travel from London to Paris and Brussels, etc. The other things you list are important but not game changing.

Domestic flights within England are a fraction of what they used to be (aided by air passenger duty) and the improvement in rail services. Token flights operate from London to the likes of Manchester or Newcastle that only really exist for connection passengers, while several regional airports have closed down and FlyBe went broke.

For all the failings of privatisation, passenger numbers have gone up massively, basically doubling , and this has been across all types of journey, so you can't say the policy was a complete failure.

stevexreeve said:

addick1956 said:

stevexreeve said:

Wheresmeticket? said:

Hopefully one day it will be cheaper to get a train from London to Cornwall than to fly from London to Marrakech.

June 22nd fares are     Paddington to Penzance         £70.90   
                                   BA Heathrow to Marrakech     £118.00 

Rail fare could be cheaper but doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Is this an admission that the current  system is crap. On the continent train fares are more reasonable. 

I don't believe the comparisons between air fares and train fares are typically fair.

Off-peak savers offer an hourly service and you turn up whenever you like and get on any train - even if it's "full". (Off-peak of course!).

Airlines rarely offer that sort of deal unless you pay hundreds of pounds.

When you compare "advanced against advanced" I don't think there's usually that much difference. 

Agreed. It's unfair to compare the Easyjet/Ryanair ticket bought months in advance with a walk on rail fare. 

PragueAddick said:

@killerandflash
It always makes me laugh when i hear the passenger growth numbers trotted out, usually by Tories with no real business experience, to justify privatisation. I dont include you in that lot, but before assuming this as proof, you need to consider the huge population increase since the mid 90s. We need to know whether rail has significantly increased share of long distance journeys vs air, car, and coach in that time. The Ministry certainly has the data, but I have never seen them published, let alone brandished in triumph, which makes me suspect the share hasnt increased that much. And even if it has, how much was positive choice? I mean the motorways seem choked all the time now. Cause and effect...

Well the UK population hasn't doubled during that period. And while the number don't justify privatisation, it's equally a nonsense to also say that it's been a complete failure, when bums on seats is a tried and tested method of judging success, whether in transport, leisure activities, religion or football clubs...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/761352/rail-factsheet-2018.pdf

jams said:

@PragueAddick perhaps NTS0317 here? https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/nts03-modal-comparisons#long-distance-trips

Cheers, yes that would be the data. Unfortunately the download doesnt  seem to open on this little iPad but I will take a look on the Mac tomorrow. I hope the data goes back far enough. 

killerandflash said:

PragueAddick said:

@killerandflash
It always makes me laugh when i hear the passenger growth numbers trotted out, usually by Tories with no real business experience, to justify privatisation. I dont include you in that lot, but before assuming this as proof, you need to consider the huge population increase since the mid 90s. We need to know whether rail has significantly increased share of long distance journeys vs air, car, and coach in that time. The Ministry certainly has the data, but I have never seen them published, let alone brandished in triumph, which makes me suspect the share hasnt increased that much. And even if it has, how much was positive choice? I mean the motorways seem choked all the time now. Cause and effect...

Well the UK population hasn't doubled during that period. And while the number don't justify privatisation, it's equally a nonsense to also say that it's been a complete failure, when bums on seats is a tried and tested method of judging success, whether in transport, leisure activities, religion or football clubs...

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/761352/rail-factsheet-2018.pdf

Thanks for that link. As a marketing professional, I have to say that your last point wouldnt last five seconds in a review of the performance of businesses under the marketeer’s care. It certainly looks that more recently, rail is gaining share. But then you have to prove that this happened *because of* privatisation. Its telling that the document refers to Germany, where the State has essentially retained control, and invested heavily in the high speed infrastructure. The UK could have taken that path too but did not. What would the figures have been, had the UK govt from mid 80s been committed to rail as Germany was? For a start you’d have had that APT running at 140mph and keeping British factories busy long before Branson came along and started importing Pendolinos. We will never know. But no, “bums on seats” just doesnt cut it. 

PragueAddick said:

The_Organiser said:

PragueAddick said:

Well, its a step in the right direction. 

However as yet I’m not really seeing an answer to the big headache of the private railway which nobody has so far addressed. 

Privatisation makes sense if it encourages competition, which benefits customers. How’s your choice of water supplier working out?

The UK system split the railway up into 20+ private monopolies. Now, I can certainly see that you can introduce competition on long distance routes, so long as you have a body that controls the timetables and fares, which GBR would do. So lets say you have two operators running high speed London- Manchester. You might be the sort that chooses one operator for the free coffee. But others just want to know that every half hour, on the same minute, there’s a train on that route. GBR would organise that. But will it be of interest to private operators compared to the old monopoly that Virgin enjoyed for years? Not sure. I am sure that you cant do this anyway on the commuter services. Better to hand it all to TfL, effectively the return of Network South East. But then it is all State owned, so where’s the pressure to deliver? Dunno.
Across Europe they run the Open Access system on these routes, which works better, but private operators say it is still unfair because they go up against a strong State operator such as Deutsche Bahn. Fact is though that you could get from Brussels to Prague for €29, — albeit you need the Man in Seat 61 to guide you through buying the tickets. So we aint got it sorted either. 

Never forget that while she hated trains, it wasnt Thatcher that sold them off. Presumably she realised it was a can of worms. But then again...water...

Water is due to be opened up to competition for households over the coming years, it has already happened for business and i’d argue the margins are so small that unless you’re a huge nationwide company like Tesco and would benefit from consolidating all your retail element over the country into one supplier, then there is very little benefit to be gained. And I think it will be the same for households, but where you might be able to realise benefit for non-financial reasons.

I’d argue your average measured water bill of approx £1-2 a day is astonishing value compared to most other services. And most measured customers could do a lot to bring their own costs down. 

Well, while it's diverting from the topic a little, I'm really interested in this. Can you tell me more about exactly what the nature of the competition is here?
There's the reservoir. There are the pipes from the reservoir, which I presume are owned by Thames Water for many Lifers. The pipes go down your street and into your house. The water coms out of your tap. You pay Thames Water. They say thank you and shove your prices up next year in gratitude. So how exactly will a "competitor" be inserted into that flow? Not having a dig at you mate, by all means just send me a link to something about it; I'm really surprised I haven't picked this up before, as the water privatisation does my head in, and it's all over Europe thanks to the Brits pushing it in the early 90s. 

https://www.waterindustryjournal.co.uk/competition-good-customers