Some thoughts on railways, and how I propose we fix them
After the conclusion of business in Glasgow on Thursday, I walked through the rainy streets to Queen Street station and took a train to Edinburgh to meet up with our friend Colin. We had a curry and then visited a couple of pubs before I took the Sleeper back to London.
The Sleeper is always a great experience. Because there was some uncertainty over strike action, the train was very quiet and I had the compartment to myself. Sleepers restore my faith in the railways - given the cutbacks and problems all over the network, it's a wonder that such a labour-intensive service survives. Elsewhere, though, the story is not so rosy, and given the financial chaos engulfing the world, it'll be interesting to see how long it is before a train operating company goes to the wall. It's already happened once, of course, with GNER unable to pay the agreed premiums to the government. They refused to renegotiate the terms of the franchise, and promptly relet it to National Express East Coast - on even more stringent terms. Not really all that sustainable...
I always knew that the railways were a complex mess since 1994, but until I left the Underground and took up my current job, I hadn't seen it from the inside. It's really quite shocking that we're still trying to make a fundamentally unsustainable system work, and the amount of money and intervention it's taking is incredibly wasteful. The idea behind privatisation was to give the railway companies more freedom, make them more efficient and make them more able to invest. On those criteria, possibly only one of them has been much of a success.
British Rail really struggled under the burden of harsh government targets, but generally the running of the system was left to professionals who really knew what they were doing, including people like Chris Green who created both the ScotRail and Network SouthEast brands. Nowadays, the franchise terms for train operating companies are incredibly interventionist, and only let for very short periods, giving the owners very little freedom to innovate or do anything that requires a long-term strategy. The government now interferes constantly with the everyday running of the system, possibly because if they didn't do so, it would all fall to pieces because it's so ill-conceived.
Efficiency has disappeared as well, because the system has been carved up into so many pieces, all of whom are trying to make money. Train operating companies own next to nothing. They have to lease trains, from a limited range of companies who have been investigated for abusing their position and charging too much. They have to pay huge sums of money to Network Rail, who are again a monopoly and one that gets a lot of stick, often justifiably. All these different parties have different priorities and the system does nothing to encourage them to work together very well. There's no overall responsibility for how the whole railway network runs, no strategic overview, and no single company can control how the whole network functions. Customers are often the victims of failures along the whole complex chain, but the train operating companies are the ones left to deal with it, and they're often powerless to do very much. Even the Conservatives, who came up with the whole sorry mess in the first place, admit it was a massive mistake to separate operations and infrastructure in such a radical way.
I'm not ideologically opposed to private involvement in running the railway, but the fragmentation is the biggest problem. I always thought that, right from the start. Back in 1993, when the Railways Act was passed, I thought that we'd end up with a decent railway in spite of privatisation, rather than because of it, and I stand by that view fifteen years later. Parts of the railway are now excellent, the Pendolino I travelled on to Glasgow on Thursday being a good example. But...parts of it are now turning into a mess, and the biggest problem on the system now is one of enormous inconsistency. There's now a lot of variation between Anglo-Scottish services on NXEC and Virgin. NXEC offers wi-fi, Virgin doesn't. Virgin offers generous free food to first class passengers, NXEC charges a lot for it, and also offers restaurant facilities to standard class, which Virgin doesn't. CrossCountry, previously run by Virgin, are massively cutting back on on-board catering, despite the fact that they run some trains with a journey time of 10+ hours! Also, the InterCity brand has disappeared, one of the best indicators of quality in the Old World. If you saw "IC" at the top of a timetable column, it meant you knew what to expect in terms of on-board facilities and comfort. Now all that has gone, and the variations in service on the old IC routes are enormous.
This is one of the worst side-effects of privatisation. InterCity was one of the most recognised brands in the country, with something like 90% of the population realising that it was long-distance, high-speed trains. This has been the massive weakness in the franchising model - allowing freedom to deviate from quality standards that were previously very high, and introduce massive inconsistency.
The franchising model used on the railways hasn't worked because it's removed all the things that defined a national network. There's other ways of doing it, and the London Buses model works quite well. The network is run by a large number of private companies, but Transport for London makes the commercial decisions and markets the service. Operators' brand names appear on the vehicles, but they have to be painted red and carry the TfL logo. The bus network in London is therefore run as a single whole, despite all the different parties involved. Also, there's things going on with the trains which are good. Transport Scotland has extended the First ScotRail franchise, but in return the company has had to adopt a new ScotRail brand and livery, without FirstGroup's beloved logo on it. This is the way forward - I think the InterCity operators should have to adopt a common livery and standards, using the InterCity brand, in return for a longer franchise so they can invest more. Ditto with the old Network SouthEast area - this was always intended to be a common commuter railway for London. Now it's been carved up into almost a dozen bits, all run differently and with completely different fares and policies.
Of course, the new London Overground concession is interesting, as it's run by TfL in the same way that they run buses - i.e. they decide the livery, fares and marketing, and they've made it very similar to the way that the Underground works in terms of standards and the user experience. I think there's a lot of potential for this to expand to the other inner-London suburban routes. Given that almost all the ex-NSE companies have dedicated suburban fleets of trains that operate short-distance services around London, handing these over to London Overground, or at least adopting their standards and branding, would be a very positive move.
Well, I should begin to conclude this because it's very long and probably not of vast interest to a lot of people, but as a matter of urgency, the railway needs to be more integrated, run by less individual companies, and branded as a more coherent network, or collection of networks. I despair over what a mess it all is, and how unresilient it's going to be when the financial shit hits the fan. This government inherited a terrible mess from the Tories, but could easily have done a lot to change it, but instead they've just tinkered and interfered. It's so frustrating, as there's so many people out there who know how to run it better, but they're all ignored. As it happens, it feels like it's run by a bunch of amateurs who are just muddling through as best they can. Terrible.
