Railtrack - The Railway's Darkest Hour
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 พ.ค. 2021
- Hello again! :D
Returning to the British railway network, we look at the initial period following the privatisation of British Rail in 1994, and the formation of Railtrack, a company that was tasked with operating and maintaining the infrastructure behind the UK's railway system, but due to poor management and a lack of suitable funding, resulted in several fatal train crashes and the near collapse of the entire British rail network.
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References:
- Railtrack, 1994-2002 - House of Commons Library (and his respective sources)
- Wikipedia (and its respective references) - ยานยนต์และพาหนะ
If the government had put as much money into BR as it has since privatisation, BR could have been the envy of the world.
The Tories hated BR and played the politics of fear against Corbyn in 2019 just to force through Brexit. Wrinkly sandwiches?
It wasn’t love or hate. It was a vote winner. No political party gives a damn about the product.it’s all about how many votes it’s worth at the election.
@@blueberrypirate3601 and Labour were in power how long - and didn’t do one thing about renationalisation.
@@xr6lad those costs would have been beyond crazy. The financing of Network rail to purchase Rail track's assets and debt would pale in comparison to paying off the franchise owners & roscos. It'd be equivalent to purchasing a whole railway at once while paying a lost profit premium to do so.
@@capnskiddies Indeed. Re-nationalisation if it fully happens will happen slowly. The government would simply wait until the private operator deems they cannot make money and so hands the franchise back, as was the case with LNER, or just wait until the franchise ends and take control, then simply not renew the franchise nor request new bidders. There would still be costs involved, and it would take longer, but rather that than trying to buy out the private companies mid franchise.
07:43 As the guy holding the meter, I must note this is a very old training vid clip, given I am now retired!!
I remember that video from a PTS course
@@Northernlightshow it was indeed. The video makers had been using our installation staff as actors but wanted 2 new faces for that scene, myself and another Pto were rounded up from the office and told to improvise!!
@@Russell_G And now you're on the TH-cams! Did you ever think your career would ever reach this high point? :)
@@Jablicek my life is complete!
You have now been seen in Australia, world famous no less!
I started working on the railway in the Railtrack years and it was an utter free for all.
It was the wild west in the engineering world and I saw some shocking things from sub-contractors both in terms of quality of job and worker attitude.
I started my rail career on West Coast Route Modernisation and all I can say is no wonder it nearly bankrupted the industry as the financial controls were sometimes non-existent.
Things have been professionalised under NR but my 2nd job in the industry was with a privatised track renewals operator that had kept pretty much intact since privatisation and they were very professional and such a difference than my 1st job working for a subcontractor, who subcontracted again their safety critical staff and I’ll end by saying I didn’t really enjoying waking up an unconsciously drunk Engineering Supervisor to take the worksite.
Your second sentence sums it up. Deregulation can kill.
I remember watching a TV movie following a bunch of rail workers after privatisation and they were doing stuff that would've been unthinkable prior, and in todays safety climate. For example it depicted workers told to move rail sleeper across tracks, without the signalman's permission, to save time.
In one scene one of their colleagues was left alone to do some work on a track in the middle of the night only for them to come back and find that a passing traction unit knocked him to the side by the cess, where he'd been killed instantly. They had to move his body up to the quiet country road on by the bridge and make out he was hit by a car. They knew full well that their absent work gang manager wouldn't have got the blame.
Following renationalisation of the railway, there was much stronger regulation and a reduction of fragmentation, which helped lead the railway into a steady, safer and more professional state. Until you explained what what you saw, I could never understand why the WCML costs ran so out of control and various opening dates missed. You must have seen some crazy shit going down..
@@EdgyNumber1 that film is “The Navigators” and pretty accurate.
On my first stint on WCRM I was threatened by notorious bully boy COSS as I reported nearly getting bowled over in the night by an item of on track plant. My reply was if he hits me, he’s going to get locked up.
I saw it all and was pleasantly with the positive experienced safety culture when I moved to Carillion (they weren’t all bad).
Moving to my 3rd WCRM project it was back to silly season but this time with cost...stretch limo on permanent hire for directors, gates left open so the masses of scrap rail removed could vanish in the night... well above my humble pay grade I add.
I’m so pleased that the industry, through some harsh lessons has come under far more control.
To end, back to Railtrack, and my only defence was that much of the infrastructure they inherited and we worked on and saw was from the 1950’s that had had a bit of an upgrade for the APT, so it was knackered. However, no organisation could have efficiently resolved this in those crazy days of the late 1990’s.
Worked on railways since early 1986 seen privatization and Railtrack come n go ,the railways is a unique infrastructure in my opinion lessons learned from many past mistakes . Problem is outside contractors see many of our safety systems unnecessary encumbrance's , major incidents on railways are often caused by chain of events that one supposedly unnecessary check would have prevented . I do think profits for privatization have eroded safety in some areas things are done now (or not done) that would have my father turning in his grave ( ex driver) . Small things like collar on signal lever its not needed is it ? but makes signaller think and check before pulling off a signal
@@andymath1523 a reminder appliance on a signal has kept me from a prison sentence more than once. The cheapest bit of safety kit in a signal box or on a panel. Costs pennies, saves millions
@@EdgyNumber1 I believe a lot of bowled over incidents, have been hushed. The safety committee was changed during railtrack, so no records, can't find the gang killed at Waterloo due to the lookout on drugs (one member was away, came back !! ..... found out from him, recently. My work station at the time was 22miles away)
As a professional accountant I wouldn't trust E&Y to run a brothel yet alone a major UK system
Seeing this comment after reading the news about WireCard
Yes Earnst & Young is a scummy company just like Goldman Sachs or HSBC, they should’ve been avoided at all costs but they probably lobbied the government to require business with them…
@@wclifton968gameplaystutorials HSBC Rail made a million punds ut of leasing 1938 tube stock to the IoW, crooks.
Oh, I don't know... if E&Y are involved, everyone else is getting screwed.
I remember another take on the safety issues surrounding Railtrack following the Hatfield disaster: there had been a fundamental change in assessing safety of track in particular under Railtrack. Previously, rail maintenance and replacement was done on the basis of "Absolute Safety" where work was undertaken with the intention of never having a significant failure that would lead to an accident. As part of Railtrack's new mission of maximizing shareholder value, the whole concept was changed over to a more theoretical, statistical model that indicated when replacements were required. So, instead of 'We have to replace this rail because it is likely to break', the decision was 'We don't have to replace this rail because there is only a 1 in xxxx probability that it will break'. It's all a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure Private Eye magazine had a long report about the public enquiry into Hatfield. Thanks for the excellent video and analysis of one of the most egregious privatizations ever undertaken.
I remember sing a flowchart for maintenance under B.R. and a flow chart for privatized rail maintenance as an example of over complexity. B.R's went like this-
"Problem? -> Fix it."
Essentially as they were track owner, user and maintenance contractor it was all done as one project and 'in house' as much as possible. And getting everyone to agree to scheduling changes is easier.
Under privatization it goes something like this
"Problem?->
1 Consult engineers ->
2 Check cost with accountants (if value above threshold- return to step 1 ) ->
3 Contact affected passenger & freight carrying franchise & arrange suitable work schedule (If value above threshold return to step 1) ->
4 Put works out to tender ->
5 Can works contractor do works on budget? (if value over threshold - return to step 2) ->
6 Can works be done on time? (If value greater than threshold, return to step 3) ->
7 Can works pass Q/C or regulatory standards? (if 'no' return to step 1) ->
-8 what about the passengers?-
9 Have we genuinely thought this through? I mean really? (If no return to step1)
It's oversimplified but the example I saw was a real life plan - There was always some franchise operator or another that objected to works impacting their services. And it was nightmarish in it's complexity.
The criminal prosecutions should have included the politicians, financiers and consultants who where ultimately accountable for privatising a safety related industry without adequate safeguards for the public.
RIP all those who lost their lives or were severely injured though lack of scruples and foresight of those who put money before safety.
Ladbroke Grove, Potters Bar, and Hatfield all happened under Railtrack's watch. People died in a of these rail tragedies, yet Railtrack escaped suitable punishment. Top managers from it should have gone to prison for each of these disasters.
@@robtyman4281 Back when there was a proper monarch there was usually a suitable consequence for such belligerent incompetence.
I couldn’t agree more, 👍the buck should have stopped (including imprisonment)with the politicians, consultants and lawyers who, for political dogma and profit privatised safety related systems and drafted performance related contracts with inadequate monitoring and safeguards.
The Health and Safety at Work Act should have been invoked to its fullest extent.
Should've been criminal prosecutions for those shorts at 4:30!
Another problem with Railtrack was that very few of its board of directors had any engineering background or experience.
Amen to that. All bankers (you can take that as rhyming slang if you like) or financiers or whatever.
Yes, Sir Bob Reid identified this prior to privatisation, even having a senior engineer lined up for Railtrack, but he was ignored
A bit like how Dr Beeching was from ICI. He hadn't a clue how the Railways worked.
It was all about the money, especially the money going into the pockets of already wealthy Tory Party donors.
Back in 1986,I met Sir Robert,at a NMRA convention in Boston(US),and I had a photo 📷, literally go round the world! Thank you,BR,and that's a fond memory 😊! The engineers,according to the bankers,and mandarins are beneath contempt,as they are mere MECHANICS,but they want all the benefits of civilization,without giving the rightful due,to the creators! Sad,but true!! Thanks again for your time and effort 👍!!
2:24 Note, the EU directives did not necessarily mean the state was not allowed to run the railway - nor did it prevent nationalisation of the railway. The point was to separate rail management from TOC management to ensure that there was _open access_ to the railways, something that gave an advantage to many heritage stock operators, including steam trains excursions.
Indeed, Network Rail is a renationalised entity - a government business unit, not a government department for the exchequer to pilfer from. Of course East Coast Trains is a good example of renationalisation of a TOC, again, operating it as _an actual business unit._
Heritage Steam ! first thing that went was the water supply.
A very well done and informative video. One thing worth noting though, The Swedish state railways where not privatised.
They where merely split into two different government bodies, the Swedish railway administration (Banverket) responsible for maintinence, and the Swedish state railways (Statens Järnvägar or SJ for short) responsible for traffic.
SJ was then transformed into two companies responsible for freight (green cargo) and pasanger service (SJ AB, or SJ ltd. In English) in 2001 respectivly, but SJ AB retained it's monopoly on profitable long distance traffic until about 2010 and both companies are still 100% owned by the Swedish state.
This doesn't however detract from your point that what happened in Sweden was an inspiration for those wanting to privatise BR and it would have been very hard to give an accurate description without going into twenty plus years of Swedish transport politics.
Unfortunately there is still the issue of insufficient fundings, an overloaded rail network and lacking maintenance.
@@57thorns Yeah, but what does that have to do with what I said in my comment?
I was going to comment to a similar effect. The EU would not legislate to force a privatisation, that would be outside of their remit. They can legislate to harmonise markets, though, so creating a level playing field for train operators can be achieved any way you like.
i think the basic idea of splitting up the infrastructure and traffic divisions was a good idea, but then the good ol' EU got involved and made it a Directive to split up the state railways into cargo, passenger divisions and so on and so forth. feels a bit inflexible for me, especially when it comes to things such as the allocation of locomotives and so on. in other words, the EU didnt care so much about the reality on the ground as it cared about implementing neo-liberal programs on the rails starting in the 1990s, which were then picked up by non-member states with ambitions to join the EU (the most recent one to do this split was Serbia around 2017). and this even happens to countries where theres no realistic competition in the transport sector from private companies.
A good amount of the clips that are from "Unknown" came from Railtrack training videos (like SPAD Risk), in case you were wondering.
A lot of those clips were filmed by SPA films for BR, Railtrack and Network Rail.
I was on the first Up service through Potters Bar from Hull - the driver slowed to a crawl and bent the horn on fully as we went through the platforms. It was a very cold feeling for everybody onboard.
Must have been terrifying
You know a privatisation is a bad idea when even Thatcher is skeptical.
Privatisation was by far the worst thing to ever happen to the railways in this country.
I remember growing up in the 90s - early 2000s. It seemed like there were loads of accidents and then just like that, they all stopped. It’s crazy to think about tbh
you forgot to mention the issues they found after railtrack and the amount of speed cuts across the country as they found more and more issues
these videos are documentary quality, awesome work man!
Very Interesting! I'm a signalman from germany and the Railtrack Era and the Beeching Axe are the best negative example which damage privatisation could do to railway systems. I'm so glad the Deutsche Bahn was never sold but in the time they try to do so the bosses did a lot of "money saving" actions like selling most of regional station buildings or buildings with signal boxes, only to rent them back!
The Beeching Axe had nothing to do with privatisation, it took place when the railways were owned by the state. The same applies to the Modernisation Plan.
@@gymnasiast90 You're right!
But what was the plan with the beeching axe? To spend less money for railways! So they close hundreds to thousands of kilometers of railway tracks!
The same with the railtrack era: Lower the Costs as much as you can and don't spend (to much) money for safety!
@@KlingelTimi. Rail closures were happening pre Beeching. I volunteer at a preserved line which is on a route that closed in 1958. The reason the Beeching plan happened was BR was losing money hand over fist.
@Amtsf I understand what you are saying and agree that the Beeching report didn't take the social cost into account, though it wasn't within his remit to consider that. I suspect some of the lines would have closed anyway if the report hadn't been written. I also agree about Marples, didn't he allegedly sell the shares in the road building company to his wife?
As a Railwayman, a high value supervisor, the basic maintenance contract thrown together was based on "you have a good record, we trust you contract" the close working relationship was destroyed, helped by legal hawks/vultures that flooding in along with private training, and sub-contract normality.
BTP should have greater prosecution of bad habits in the law courts, we were far too soft with previous colleagues.
I worked for BR from 1981 and then for the Inter City sector of the sectorisation and in my opinion this was the best system. The conservative govt just wanted to privatise the railway irrespective as to the results and sadly the loss of lives in the 3 crashes. I saw an excellent play a while ago - The Permanenf Way which covered the whole saga of Railtrack and the privatisation
Fascinating work, presented in an unfussy, highly professional manner. Thank you.
Nationalisation is mostly done for idealistic purposes. Privatisation is, too: the idea that the government shouldn't pour money into X. The problem is that railways generally cost money to run, and you run them for the same reason why you have national insurance: because it's good for society as a whole. It gives benefits, even financial benefits, that are harder to quantify than a profit/loss statement of one company.
In my opinion, the problem is, and has always been, underinvestment and the desire to ever reduce the amount of taxpayers' money towards the railways. You can run the railways as a government, or have it done by a foreign-owned company, but if you're not willing to put in the money, it's going to go badly wrong.
With the exception of the Eschede rail disaster, which was indirectly caused by cost-cutting exercises, and excluding terrorist attacks like those in Italy, many major rail crashes in Europe in living memory were the result of poor maintenance and underinvestment.
i worked for Amey Rail as subbie - got the track safety training and PTS card. They openly addmitted to 'budget' cutting whenever possible, meaning actual track work was pared down to the
minimum. After that i ended my rail days as an RO2, and i remembered 'batting out' that ill fated Ladbroke Grove HST from the station i worked at.
Love seeing that class 50 at Waterloo. Yes, MU's are so efficient, but man, locos were so much more interesting.
A good summary documentary, thanks. Indeed an utterly depressing time to work for the railway:
+ lots of 'I-told-you-sos' from us with experience
+ one missed opportunity after another
+ costs and timescales for even simple stuff escalating out of control
+ insufficient numbers of 'informed buyers' on the RT payroll (too many of the good guys creamed off by the TOCs and contractors), leading to bad decision-making or worse, no-decision dithering
+ dreadful internal as well as external communication
+squaring up the increasing mounds of safety paperwork became more important than actually working more safely
+pitching former colleagues against each other where one person moved to RT and one to a contractor - 'lobbing bricks over the contractual fence'
+ growth of cowboy sub-contractors
The high-speed SPAD and collision at Southall East Jn in September 1997, killing seven and injuring 139 can in part be attributed to the dysfunctional rail industry structure. For many years Automatic Train Protection (ATP) had been in 'trial' status, and until Southall happened neither RT and First GW had prioritised the importance of ironing out the technical and operational problems so that ATP could become mandatory to use. ATP would almost certainly have prevented the collision even if not also the SPAD, regardless of AWS being isolated.
Just when British Rail had evolved into an efficient, business led organisation, with continuing improvements to passenger service, the dogma that everything was better in the private sector reared its ugly head and hence Railtrack.
If shareholders are supposed to ensure that the directors run a company safely, then that did not happen, so there should have been no compensation to them- it doesn't happen with other companies that fail, so the taxpayers have not only lost out with the assets originally being sold off at a fraction of their worth, but have then had to pay out to buy them back again.
The failure of Railtrack wasn't the only problem the railway had at this time. The idea behind splitting the running of the trains from the maintenance of the infrastructure was to reduce costs, but instead, it created a blame culture where the same money that was intended to be saved was instead spared no expense by the TOC and Railtrack hiring lawyers to establish who was to blame when work on maintenance overran. The ones in the middle, seeing no benefit was the customers
They had to renationalise the railways because the system was being too fragmented. Works cost, quality and safety controls were pretty much non-existent (deregulation can go too far) and you were taking your life into your own hands whilst travelling or working on the railway. Safety first, last and always.
What we got was a more professionally run organisation with a far better handle of what goes on at its sites these days.
Excellent video , as usual, your content is well researched and professionally presented.
In my opinion we should have gone back to the big 4, full privatised. Splitting up the railways into operators, train ownership and track ownership was and still is a big mistake.
There was a BBC Drama called “Derailed” which chronicled Railtracks part in the cause of the Ladbroke Grove collision and the aftermath. I wish I could find it but I haven’t been able to.
I saw it as well but can't find it now, try watching Panorama The Wrong Track 2001 with John Ware, it covers much of the same cultural practices at railtrack, however focusing in particular on the maintenance neglect that caused the Hatfield crash rather than the previous accidents at Southall and Ladbroke, because they were of a different nature i.e signal sightings, driver error, spad....etc. It also goes into the chaotic service disruption in the aftermath that continued into spring 2001, at time of filming I believe, as well as reflecting New Labours broken promises on opposing privatisation back in 1995.
Another wonderful documentary on a very under covered period in rail history in the UK.
Its quite odd to see John Major in color
other than grey!
Want to be worried? Network Rail is about to have a massive reorganisation, with funding and staff numbers being cut under the unironic title of "Modernisation" - we are about to find ourselves back in the 1990s once again.
Modernization = making old accidents new again. Thank you Thatcher, very cool.
Great stuff, looking forward to next year when you cover the class 80X metal fatigue issues currently unfolding...
I think this debacle is a very good example of what happens when you let accountants and property speculators run an engineering operation.
Excellent new video! Happy Saturday all, and thank you Rory, superb as always.
As usual. Highly detailed, very informative and professional. Well done
A blast from the past seeing John Major. It was always amusing when spitting images modeld his puppet with a green face at the dining table highlighting his love of mushy peas.
It was a grey face and regular peas!
Great video and fascinating to hear what was going on during those dark days of RailTrack.
Author's inclusion of detail is superb. One didn't have much time to think about major train policy changes because they had to be all fit in a desired length. Definately a vid I will have to watch twice to get a good feel.
I've watched quite a few of your vids. This is a masterpiece of delivering the sordid and sick facts of the criminal actions of a venal few. The detail is beyond praise. If only there were youtube awards...
The problem is those who are in charge of the department of transport never take public transport
its as if we're going back into those days as derailment are somehow becoming more common now
Not really. Carmont was horrible, but there hadn’t been another significant accident since Grayrigg over 10 years earlier.
Sure, there are minor derailments, but they often happen off duty in depots, and they are no more common now than they ever have been, if anything much rarer.
most of todays derailments are minor, goods train derailments have always been fairly common, as the other guy said, the stonehaven derailment was the first accident in which a passanger was killed since 2007, and the first where multiple train occupants were killed since 2004 - more than 15 years. the stonehaven death toll was also pretty small compared to accidents in the railtrack era like ladbroke, although that was, of course, because not many people were on the train. britians railways today are far safer passanger wise than at any other point in history, pre privatisation there was an accident where a passanger was killed once every 5 years at most, we just went about 13 years without a passanger fatality
Don't get me started on the number of broken rail left till convenient, over long & beyond recommended fix time even for clamping. At the start of Railtrack, you'd count the number of white clay splashes on the rails.
Still some of the safest trains in Europe if not the safest in Europe and maybe even the world except for maybe the JR Shinkansen 🚅…
Literally another company out of track. 👍 great video as usual. 😊 thank you.
Worked as a signaller in the Stockport area the before and during the inception of Railtrack the job became very demoralising with management only interested in covering there asses fiddling while Rome burned.
The same useless creeps got promoted who had zero experience or knowledge and commercial companies took over previous in-house maintenance (or didn’t) resulting in many thousands of minutes of delay for no good reason .
Happy to leave the job after 21 years in 2001 and never looked back.
Most manager were only there for 2 years experience and the moved on to another industry.
We all just nodded our heads !
Track work was sub-contracted out to unemployed Cornish men who after one days “training” were bundled into mini buses, taken 500km to work often on the dangerous 3rd rail system in south London. They were expected to sleep in the mini bus. No doubt this practice was repeated else in the U.K. & the sub contractor would’ve got paid handsomely, on the back of the workers.
Cecil Parkinson, a very unpleasant man, ugh.
Great video. Love that I have watched all the BR saftey videos that the clips in this video are from.
Railtrack. A property company with a hobby of running a railway. Before nationalisation post WW2 the railway companies operated both track and trains. That worked.
But it didn’t. The big 4 were virtually bankrupt on the eve of WW2 and the guaranteed government payments for network use during the war actually kept them afloat. That’s why there was little resistance to nationalisation after the war by the railway companies.
@@xr6lad iirc the great western protested quite bitterly. But yes the big 4 were broke after the Great Depression but the model of companies owning track and trains seemed to work for all the Victorian and Edwardian eras
@@xr6lad Not as I have read the history. Clearly the 1930's depression affected their revenue as it did for all commercial enterprises in the UK. But the Big Four were working - reasonably successfully - on recovery when when WW2 started. They ended WW2 bankrupt and with their assets severely written down. So rather than dogma inspired full nationalisation a better idea would have been to pay them a one off reparation for their war work and let them get on with rebuilding and growing their businesses. Instead we had nationalisation, which failed.
@@xr6lad Disagree. GWR, LMS and Southern were profitable. Southern more than the other 2 as they had the benefit of a largely electrified commuter network. LMS and GWR were just profitable. LNER were not in a good way though. After the war the infrastructure and rolling stock were not in a good way and that nearly bankrupted all 4 companies.
@@cjmillsnun You mean the outdated stock Thompson was actively in the process of replacing? This is not my area of expertise but other companies have made it through very rough times, and the LNER was doing the best it could to rebuild. I don't believe they were as badly off as say Conrail was over here. This might not be profitable at the time but from what I understand they were definitely still afloat. The biggest obstacle to rebuilding at the time was their common carrier status forcing them to accept any and all traffic no matter how inefficient at published prices.
Thanks for this excellent explanation. The sheer incompetence of the Conservative government is staggering. For them it was more important to get the thing done quickly rather than getting it done right. Umm, where else have we experienced this?
They knew their days were counted for so they made some mates rich and sold critical infrastructure for cents on the dollar. Bloody criminals all of those upper class nitwits
Why are voters handing Labour seats to Boris then? Starmers not said anything about renationalisation.
@@blueberrypirate3601 I don’t know. Maybe because it’s 40 years later and BoJo sold them some Brexit lies and Scotland votes SNP now
A gift to the lawyers too. They bound the contracts up so tightly that they were like Gordian knots - designed not to be unpicked.
Southall in 1997 was another crash that happened on Railtrack's watch. I would have also said the Selby/Great Heck crash too but that was due to a motorist falling asleep at the wheel and driving onto the track.
You would think that companies like Balfour Beatty and Amie would have collapsed through association with Railtrack, really, considering how scathing the report was about contractors as well. And yet here we are, with them still involved in major infrastructure projects in the UK.
Incredible how the UK in opposition to other EU countries implemented the track access and train operation seperation...
France, Germany and Netherlands for example created a operaters company and a infrastructure owner (SNCF Resseau and SNCF, DB Fernverkehr/Regio and DB Netz, N.S. and ProRail).
If I could make this video compulsory viewing to the whole British Civil Service and all governments I would. Brilliant, clear analysis with no angle. Congrats!
I really like your videos. They're like really nice documentaries.
Railtrack: a cautionary tale. Its absurd, redundant name says it all. It's like naming something 'Roundcircle'. Whomever thought up the name obviously did it in a hurry with little thought and virtually no imagination. It almost seems as if it were made to fail. It is one of the many failed actions of the British rail services since at least the second world war.
Yet despite all that, the railways of the UK have provided better service overall than many, if not most nations in the world. This holds true especially regarding passenger service.
Great vlog as always!
Right from the start, Major and Co. did NOT follow the Swedish or the Swiss setups. As was mentioned here, the trains in Sweden ran under "SJ" and, in Switzerland, all the Private Train Operators had to operate under the guise and control of "Swiss Federal Railways". By using Railtrack and a number of Private TOCs, the system was light years away from the Swedes and the Swiss resulting in more and more TOCs, ROSCOs (Rolling Stock providers to the TOCs) and all sorts of track access agreements that increased the number of parts of the railway to epic proportions. Railtrack's "legacy" was overgrown trackwork, rationalisation of tracks that, in some cases, were a direct consequence of the accidents, and run down infrastructure. Today's "Network Rail" may well appear to be renationalised but the last time I checked was responsible for well over 100 PRIVATE Companies - hardly a Nationalised Industry!
Great video! I remember some of those accidents but never knew the incompetence of RailTrak
I remember the media and comedians bashing RailTrack at every oppotunity; though of course that's hardly an accurate measure of how good or bad something is.
@@jimtaylor294 It wasn't helped the TOC's on their station gave a lot of guff on the Tannoy, as to the reason for traffic delays. Done that, waiting for a train that was delayed due to a door failure, when I'd called 'Traffic' before hand, so I seethed but quietly....
Excellent,enjoyable,interesting,informative and well put together piece.Railtrack was truly a disgrace.......
Serco are such a useless company.
Subb'd a couple of weeks ago. Quality channel. WD
Looking forward to seeing how you deal with Network Rail. What a joy they are.
Network Rail is stuck with using contractors at every level from track work to major project management. It's little wonder a lot of the major infrastructure projects are so expensive, from conceptional design to track laying and signaling, there are contractors leaching money off the project driving up costs to bolster their own profit margins.
Excellent video! 👍🏻👌🏻👏🏻
Thank you.
You teach me things i didn't know i needed to know!:-) 👍 🖖
So investors got money back after the demise? Odd way to be bankrupt.
They had to pay investers ages after nationalisation 1948? a constant theme.
You really hit the nail on the head and spoke the absolute truth about the contractors around the 2001 mark. I was there, it was that bad that I've felt guilty to admit what actually went on.
More great work, thanks
Spot on assessment thanks
Railway privatisation is an example of what happens when political dogma and short term Treasury influence over-ride the practicalities of life.
As former BR chairman Peter Parker observed; "Everyone knows how to run a railway, but there are 56000 of us doing it".
14:47 Network Rail's logo
Amtrak: Am i a joke to you?
Amtrack is US?
@@timothymeyer3210 yus
Lol but they are slightly different
@@dodge2322 but the gaps and formatting are quite similar.
They were designed two years apart, Amtrak in 2000 and Network Rail in 2002. Amtrak‘s old logo was more impactful
Interesting video, thank you.
It was about making money not about good engineering or safety
True - but Railtrack were incompetent there too. Simply on the basis that if you have multiple contractors and subcontractors, you multiply the administration costs of each individual employed by the number of contractors and subcontractors involved the overheads must have been horrendous - and that's on top of the inherent inefficiency of having so many companies involved.
In the old big four private railway day everything was in-house from building their own locomotives and stations to running ferry boats. GWR ran bus services and owned aircraft
@@likklej8 Pretty much; though seperate rail builders that served the big 4 existed back then too, such as Brush Traction, Metro Cammel (albeit differently named I think), and Vulcan Foundry.
@@jimtaylor294 you are right Jim I was trying to make a point about businesses doing in house rather than farming out. As young man I went to India in the early 70s and saw North British steam locomotives which were sold by the old LNER after Nigel Gresley became their chief engineer
Why is it that rail needs to be "self-sufficient" and "profitable" but roads, bridges, and motorways not? Why are car drivers entitled to free infrastructure but other commuters not?
You make it sounds like drivers dont have to pays road tax and congesting charges....
@@jonathanma2741 at least here in the U.S, for the most part, we don’t
Who'd have thought that privatising the rail network would have led to more money going into the pockets of shareholders than upgrading the tracks? At the time of privatisation, I wrote a 20 page dossier pointing out problems that would arise and sent it to two-Jags, two-shags Prescott, the shadow transport secretary. I never got a reply. This was the most ill-thought-out privatisation in the history of the UK and was a disaster waiting to happen.Still, the Tories, like all good fortune tellers, had there hands well and truly covered in silver and gold.
Private corporations will always prioritise increasing profits and for a rail infrastructure company that means cutting corners.
I worked for rail track 1994-1997 , we just carried on as it it was still BR , a lot of staff still were rebels and continued to wear their BR uniform . Railtrack sadly inherited a lot of old and aging infrastructure that they couldn’t really manage , now Network rail have inherited the the same leftovers . BR was the best on all aspects . 😉
BR was the best on all aspects; particularly withdrawal of service and closure...
I guess you did not see as much blame management as I (E.C.R.O.) but toothless.
Sadly. Safety would have been better with more recourse to the BTP, particularly around 02:30.
Yes I won't defend privatisation but BR did have serious long term problems that would have needed fixing and still do.
What do you expect from the deregulation of a safety critical industry. Yet another wonderful legacy of lady Thatcher.
There is no easy answer. Privatisation and nationalisation have their pitfalls, and we have decades of data to show the problems that occur. One thing that seems to remain constant is the horridness of government - you could argue that the government in its desire to rid itself of BR at break-neck speed, not only got a bad deal for the taxpayer, but more critically in terms of safety, neglected to properly ensure that Railtrack used qualified workers to maintain the infrastructure. This was a terrible failure of regulation. That's government.
great info
It was impossible for BR to exist as it was required to be broken up into two or more companies by EU law, so the minimum would have been a track operating company and a train operating company.
The government decided on private Railtrack and TOC operators. Today both entities are nearly gone with the state ownership of the passenger TOC companies over the next few years, for example ScotRail will be owned by the Scottish Government from next year.
Freight/Goods train operations (DB, Colas, GBRF and so on) still remain in private hands except DRS. Also you have the heritage operations now with LSL and West Coast Railway.
I suspect the present status will remain from now on and BR will never return, so from now on it is Network Rail running the tracks, nationalised passenger train operators kept as non profit companies and private freight operators. Open access for other operators of steam and heritage diesels to use all the available lines when possible.
To add. Network Rail is a state owned company which is registered with Companies House as a "Private company limited by guarantee without share capital". 100% of its shares are owned by the "Secretary Of State For Transport". It is not a nationalisation as in the sense of British Rail.
@@johnclarke2997 its done that way so that Network Rails debt is not on the Government books.
Damb EU Law yet again .......
"Railtrack contracted companies, and those companies contracted other companies"
I’ve heard the problem with UK rail privatization is it was a really restrictive halfway measure between full privatization and nationalization. Really I think both the 1948 nationalization and privatization were both bad ideas. They broke something that at the time still worked reasonably well.
The same thing happened with British Leyland - sold off, but the government kept a "golden share" and used it to restrict what the new owners could do. For example; salary levels were capped, so the company couldn't attract management and design staff experienced in the motor industry. It doesn't take Einstein to work out the results.
Except that the railway companies in 1948 were broke and could not afford the cost of all of the repairs that were needed after the reduced maintenance of WW2.
The big 4 were bankrupt by WW2, which actually kept them afloat due to guaranteed government payments during the war, so by 1947 they were falling over themselves to have the government buy them. So no it wasn’t working.
I've read that the problems the big 4 had were because of WW2, all the heavy usage, bombing damage, and deferred maintenance as well as continuing on now outdated run down equipment. Nationalization was a way to consolidate the damaged rail network, but it was partly a political move too. I find it hard to believe that the Big 4 were as starved for money as BR quickly became. I'm no expert, and I don't know how things would have turned out, but I think it might have been better.
There an old documentary where the last CEO of BR John Welsby said many at BR were not against the concept of privatisation but they were never asked how to run a railway when the DoT was setting up the new framework.
Super video!
I thought we were having a rough time with Boris and his hangers-on. Then this video pops up and I can relive the dismal days of Thatcher and Major. Thanks, I think...
What a cross to bear for those two. If it weren't for them the UK would have become just another "workers paradise" and the EU's very own Cuba off their coast. Damn shame that!
@@peterhaan9068 Yeah, we're so lucky that they decided to sell off the nation's assets at knockdown prices. And, in the case of Railtrack, have to pay far more to buy them back again, just to stop them killing people and destroying trains. Brilliant!
@@nkt1 yes...it was a pity people like yourself thought it was a great idea by voting them in to allow it when they had telegraphed their intentions. But blame shifting is a wonderful human trait anyway so full marks.
@@xr6lad I wasn't old enough to vote until 1994. Like the majority of Scots, I have never voted Conservative in my life and never will.
Never touched my Railtrack Shares, they dissipated, care not a bit.......
I'm an idiot from America who is having trouble understanding this. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that BR collapsed due to the debts (and the Beeching Axe, aka "Who needs trains?"), and RailTrack was created to try and bring back profits. RailTrack subcontracted most of the work. The government, wanting to reduce delays, offered incentives, but RailTrack was not keeping a close eye on the subcontractors. As such, when the government started fining RailTrack over delays, RailTrack started having corners cut by the subcontractors, which in turn led to disaster.
Did I get that correctly, or did I overshoot the station and plow into a corn field?
I hate private Railways and Railroads... Here in North America, Amtrak, VIA Rail and GO Transit have to wait their turn for the corporations who own the track, that just doesn't seem right. The track should be owned by the Government, by the People, especially when that track serves small towns, even some towns with no other transportation access. I wish we had BR here, especially with some really cool liveries on our trains like Network SouthEast and Intercity's liveries
Agreed. Imagine how would people feel if trucking companies owned our roadways.
@@souvikrc4499 And there would be redlights at off ramps to let their trucks through
The problem whith private
railoperators is that there are to manny and few free railnetworks.
This is how the Swedish rail network looks like late fall 2021.
Thanks for uploading this video.
👍👍👍👍👍🇸🇪
Certainly has to be up there as one of the most costly (lives and money) and stupid things done to Britain’s railways.
And ooh boy there are a lot of things on that list....
In lives: No (far worse stuff happend under BR & prior)
In money: Definitely
If only the privatization plan had followed the Japanese example, instead of whatever whacky idea the EEC/EU had that week.
(one would have thought that we'd have learned from a certain NATO directive that produced the hopeless L60 ""multifuel"" engine for the Chieftain Tank... that such directives are best ignored)
@@jimtaylor294 To be fair, most EU members didn't privatise their networks, what happened in Britain was propably more to do with the tories agenda at the time than with what the EU wanted.
@@axelhejnebo9142 Yeh the tories used the directive as an excuse to do what they already wanted to do. Virtually no EU country did it the way we did and for good reason.
Had it been handled sensibly, one company operating and another handling the infrastructure, it would have worked but the way Railtrack kept subcontracting was unsustainable.
Don't get me started on the fares either.
Very interesting video. All those train operators midland mainline etc All gone now . I believe the original Eurostar trains for the Channel tunnel have been scraped ? Time goes by so quickly it's easy to forget thay were 30years old.
"Asset Stewardship" is just a polite way of saying "private investors making profit off essential infrastructure that was built with public funds".
working for railtrack was money for old rope. bureaucracy keeping people from actually doing work for weeks on end. the best comment i heard was was "if you work without the propper cost code for access to the computer network, you will be sacked". 8 weeks at £500 per day doing nothing.
Excellent video. I remember watching a sceptical Panorama episode on BBC 1 prior to Rail Privatisation in the UK. I seem to think it was very good, though cast many doubts ahead of the Big Bang. I wonder if anyone has a link to it as it would be good to watch now, all these years later, and see what, and what not, came to pass?
This man clearly loves all form of transport.
All the right people got rich, it's OK.
That whole episode was disgusting. The railways should be renationalised.
Interresting to again note how safety and business are not going hand in hand.
Great video. Those were certainly not the UK rail industry's finest years. Quick question: Why does the entire video show "credit unknown"? Where did you source the footage from?
Little bit of SNCF and I'm thinking 'Were the French involved too?' Thnx. As was often said 'Railtrack a property management company with some railway lines on the side'
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I don't live there an really don't know but it seems like there was a hole bunch of chifes an not enough Indians.. good video 👍👍👍👍
Would be great to see something on the west coast modernisation plan