#Railways
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 พ.ย. 2023
- On the 31st October 2023, the UK government performed an enormous, screeching about-turn on its policy of closing the majority of railway station ticket offices across (mostly) England.
I had a chat with Andrew Marr on @LBCOfficial about, among other things, how much of a win for direct democracy this is. A good thing happened!
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Well said Gareth, it's important to know that it's treasury dictating all of this, not the operators
Im sick of being on crowded trains with 4 carriages or less when there should be at least 8- 10 carriages. And this is not just a commuter thing. Regional and InterCity trains have train operators taking the piss with the number of carriages. You need to do a RailNatter on this.
Fuckin roscos
CrossCountry running 4 car trains on some of the busiest routes is absolutely ridiculous
Once I was on one of these trains which (of course) was standing room only, and the guard (or whoever it was) made an announcement literally saying "sorry for the crowding, this is because we only have four carriages". It wasn't exceptionally busy that day, the previous train hadn't been cancelled, there was no disruption of any kind, the train simply was not long enough, and this was a regular occurrence. There is simply no excuse for this and it must be stopped immediately.
@@MikeWillSee I went to University in Bournemouth so I know EXACTLY what you mean.
Cross Country is terrible. Can't they at least buy some new (wider) trains?
But also Chiltern trains to Marylebone routinely run on only 4 cars. Last month I was travelling the final train to B'Ham Moor St just b4 peak fares at 3pm had 4 cars & so it was extremely packed. Worse than that it was not even walkthrough as it was two, 2 car trains connected to each other.
This is where the ROSCOs (the rolling stock operating companies) have to be banished from the system.
With the Train Operating Companies getting paid to run a service, regardless of how bad it is, but having to rent trains, they have a financial incentive to run sardine tin services that maximise their income while minimising their operating costs.
If we switched to a system of having locally controlled rail authorities (siimilar to TfL and Merseytravel), and funded the purchase of accessible rolling stock (with features like level boarding) the government could require that all trains have weight-measuring equipment built into them, and walk through carriages.
On the individual trains, that would mean that passenger information displays could show that carriage 7 of 8 is less crowded and has seats free. But, on the DfT level, it would mean that overcrowding data would automatically be gathered by the train's black box computer and government could automatically be given information that shows where additional investment is needed.
When four car sardine trains are extended to eight car or ten car trains, we are going to see the improvement in service induce demand for additional passengers. So those trains would quickly fill up and we would be back to square one, unless we operate on the assumption that all passenger services require constant monitoring and a long term improvement program.
Thameslink operates a service on a once abandoned railway. It has constantly pulled in new passengers and now has to have partially automated trains to maximise the number of trains that can pass through the central section in London. And a station on a bridge over the Thames had to be rebuilt, to have a second entrance at the south bank. The North London Line was also once threatened with closure. But once London Overground was created and provided four trains per hour, it quickly got packed and extra carriages needed to be ordered. So we can not afford to have the government double the sizes of trains outside London and ignore things for the following 50 years. We need to start a new process that provides continuous improvements across Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Electrification makes trains accelerate out of stations faster. We need to have a rolling program of electrification not just to make journey times faster, but to make it possible to have more trains per hour. The Victoria Line was called "the 90 second railway" in a talk by a manager decades ago, who was talking about maxing out the frequency of that railway. That isn't going to be necessary everywhere, but "frequency is freedom". We need to increase frequencies, as well as train sizes.
Separation of services is another key thing. A new high speed rail network, could remove InterCity services from existing mainlines and allow commuter train frequencies to rise from 1 per hour to to 10 minutes or even 5 minutes apart. If a train is crowded, but the second or third train has seats free, some passengers will wait for the next train. And, if it's a train every ten minutes, you won't have an entire hour-worth of passengers waiting for the train anyway. Obviously this all needs to be balanced, as running 12 ten car trains, that are all mostly empty might not be the best thing to do. But mostly empty trains before and after the rush hour could help encourage companies to switch to flexible workiing hours.
Ultimately, we need democratic control of railways across the UK. It should not be a handful of devolved governments that have control of local transport. This needs to be a standard thing. There needs to be a locally elected government or mayor, in charge of buses and trains and they should be publishing plans to improve public transport, when they stand for election. (And they need to be backed up with central government funding, as we have a climate emergency and need to have a drastic modal shift from car and domestic flights to public transport.)
Effectively a 4-car Cross Country 220 has only 3 standard class carriages, the 4th vehicle being a barely used 1st class carriage. I've seen it more than once at Basingstoke, loads of passengers squeezing into a single 220.
It's the same in the North West. A single class 185 is two standard class carriages plus a few in the third vehicle. The rest being 1st class plus non passenger spaces.
It's not just passenger comfort, it also impacts train punctuality. I've seen it at Manchester Oxford Road and the Piccadilly through platforms (13 & 14). Extended station dwell times while passenger shuffle through the few available doors and then the mass gathered on the platform. Then those boarding are condensed on to a short stretch of the platform available to board their 2 or 3 car train. Some EMR services take ages to load (class 156 & 158) as many passengers have luggage and have to shuffle through the narrow aisle between the seats. Loading stops altogether when a passenger with luggage goes for a seat near the vestibule door.
Watch an SWR suburban service at Clapham Junction. It's a short dwell time as passengers can spread out along the length of the platform, and have 16 to 20 sets of doors to board the train.
I think operators and train designers need to realise the train design and train formation have an impact not just on passenger comfort, but also punctuality. In addition to that, staff rarely attempt a ticket inspection on packed trains, so a greater chance of lost revenue through fare evasion.
Heard this live on radio. Shocked me when he said Gareth Dennis!
Glad you got your point across because the way questions were asked suggests he was wanting a unions v gov debate which is emblematic of what's wrong with press. Not investigating the structural issues behind things
The lovely lady at Lockerbie ticket office yesterday not only got me a single to Edinburgh for less than half the price of Trainline but also recommended a good pub nearby. I’d like to see a machine do that!
Great video, we are lucky to have Gareth as a champion for our railways.
I cannot tell you how useful in-person ticket offices can be. Here in Southern California, USA, most in-person ticket offices at train stations have been closed due to staffing shortages and a lack of adequate funding.
I was once taking an Amtrak train from Anaheim, CA, USA to Solana Beach, which was supposed to arrive at its destination at 12:22 PM, after which I was supposed to go home and then attend an online meeting at 1:00 PM. The train was delayed by an hour, which necessitated my having to break my journey and get down at Oceanside, an intermediate stop 15 minutes away from Solana Beach, and attend my meeting in its ticket office. Normally, journey breaking isn't allowed here in the USA, but after my meeting I explained my situation to the ticket attendant and she personally escorted me to the next train and asked its manager to let me on as a will-carry.
With the Oceanside ticket office now closed (temporarily but indefinitely), I don't know what I'd have done.
Hooray for small victories! At least there's something to be happy about.
Wow something good
You look so happy in the thumbnail (and rightly so!)
There's definitely a lot more fighting to do but this is undoubtedly a win in the meantime and should be celebrated!
Use the N word Nationalise, Nationalise,Nationalise. There easy wasn’t it.
Nationalisation allowed the railways to be deliberately run down in the 1980s by Westminster's underfunding (while it simultaneously spent billions on roads: in capital costs, in maintenance costs and indirectly through externalities such as pollution). Nationalisation has produced privatisation before, and it will produce similar dynamics again. I'm not against nationalisation, especially in the rail sector, where subsidies exist anyway; where long-term, patient investment is essential (the government is bad at this, but private finance is worse); and where natural monopolies exist. But the government does not simply do what we want it to, or even what it wants to do. Perverse incentives and political-economic pressures see to that. To put it crudely: "Government control", in reality, means control by corporations and the wealthy because it is they who have the most political-economic power over governments; and they always will, while the state is legally bound to protect their interests and their right to control. "Public ownership", via the state, means simply that the state uses our resources in whatever way the governments' friends want. (And to a small extent, what voters, in our rather dysfunctional "representative" democracy, want. Governments also respond to grassroots political pressure and the threat of unrest, hence the ongoing legal and technological crackdown on civil liberties since 2001 and before.) Westminster-ownership is not "public ownership" because the public does not get to exercise the political power that comes with economic ownership of assets and systems in the same way that corporations do. True public ownership would make life difficult for future antisocialist governments. It would be irreversible in the same way that RtB was largely irreversible.
I don't have the answer, but we should be innovating new political-economic solutions to public ownership, and not only trying to resurrect the status quo of the 1970s (note: "not only"): a status quo which collapsed into neoliberalism. "The ends justify the means" is a false statement, because the "means" often determine the "ends" in the long run. Therefore, our choice of "means" should be informed by what eventual "ends" we wish to achieve: which muscles we wish to exercise, and which overdeveloped ones need to atrophy. (Overreliance on the big consultancies might be one example of a dependency which needs to be allowed to atrophy). "Westminster means" (i.e. the mechanisms of pure "representative democracy" and free markets, without the possibility of protests, pressure from unions, or other forms of militancy) cannot deliver radical change. The disaster of 1979 proved this: the labour movement, powerful, radical and militant, looked to Westminster for leadership and systemic change, and Westminster failed to provide it, failed to lead; the result was unproductivity and a very destructive paradigm shift. Today, the status quo is again unsustainable and the left is at risk of becoming reactionary and idealist.
Rail is one of the commanding heights of transport, and as such, the argument for top-down nationalisation is the strongest. In other areas, however, there is perhaps an opportunity to prefigure what might be, in the far future. The government should remove barriers and open up subsidies to entities which are not-for-profit and mass-owned. From village shops owned by community benefit societies (already a thing), to union-built housing (e.g. Red Vienna), to housing co-ops (already a thing), to consumer co-ops for operating rural bus services (able to access subsidies). The atrophied muscles of local self-governance need to be built up again, because the alternative is catastrophic over-centralisation and top-down control. Every one of us can begin to rebuilt these muscles locally in some way, however basic or trivial.
As an aside, there is an interesting case to be made the transport itself has eroded our ability to self-govern on a local level, by uprooting people from places and by breaking long-term connections. In nature, symbiosis takes a long time to develop. Old ecosystems are symbiotic and stable, new ecosystems are competitive and unstable.
To be clear, if there were a referendum on traditional nationalisation (versus a continuation of passenger franchising/concessions) tomorrow, I would vote for nationalisation.
I'm a big fan of Merseyrail. They aren't a franchise as they were removed from the franchise system in 2003 (see Merseyrail Electrics Network Order 2002)
As such, they have trains every 15 minutes during the day on all routes except for the Ellesmere Port branch. Even on summer Sundays on the Southport line it's a 15 minute frequency. Outside London, Merseyside is the only authority to offer free travel to those over 60, including rail up to the Merseyside boundary, but also into Cheshire and Lancashire on the Wirral and Northern Lines. Also, nearly every station is staffed from the first to last service of the day and they weren't going to be affected by this latest government initiative.