Robert Hampton

There has been lots of complaining in the press about higher train fares after it was revealed that ticket prices could go up by an average of 8% in January 2012, with some routes going up by nearer 13%. It has been suggested that the cumulative effect of these rises will see prices jump 30% on some routes over the next three years.

The Government says that this is necessary to reduce state subsidies and provide funds for investment in the railways. However, if the government was really serious about reducing the burden on the taxpayer, it would acknowledge the elephant in the room: British railway privatisation has failed.

When I say failed, I mean it has failed to deliver any of the wonderful benefits that we were promised. We were promised freedom from state control – in practice, Department for Transport civil servants now micromanage nearly every aspect of today’s railway. We were promised more value for the taxpayer – state subsidies for the railway have increased dramatically. We were promised better services – the results have been inconsistent at best, and the improvements that have taken place could have been achieved by British Rail, had the political will and funding been there.

What is so frustrating is that the Labour government could have easily fixed this. By the time Labour swept into power in May 1997, the privatisation process was almost complete. However, with their huge majority, Labour could have easily reversed the privatisation. The Government could have taken the drastic step of legislating to immediately renationalise, or it could have taken the easier option of letting each franchise run its course and renationalising each as it came to an end. Had they done this, by now most of the railway would have been back under state control.

Sadly, the Labour party desperately wanted to avoid being seen as an anti-business, socialist party, so the privatised railway structure remained largely intact with only some minor tweaking. Now the Tories are back in charge, and more wide-ranging reform will probably happen – reform that will almost certainly not benefit the average fare-paying passenger.

“…Appledore and Chasewater and Saffron Walden,
Midsomer Norton, Berry Brow, Swanbourne, Waterfoot, Templecombe,
Flax Bourton and Egremont and Adlestrop and Ashton-under-Wychwood,
Starcross and Sturminster Newton and Sampford Courtenay…”

The BBC Archive project has turned up a lot of gems, but this has to be one of the best so far, as Derek Hart reads a lyrical tribute to the stations axed by Beeching.

It’s not quite as depressing as this list makes out: a few of the stations named were actually reprieved and survive to this day. Bonus points if you can spot the two which are now part of Merseyrail.

What a year 2010 was! It had twelve months, each consisting of at least 28 days. On some of those days I made blog entries. Here are the highlights.

I began the year in January fretting about an alleged Crystal Maze remake starring Amanda Holden. This story fortunately turned out to be utter bollocks. Ginger people again proved that (yours truly excepted) they have no sense of humour or perspective. Britain experienced a deluge of snow, and Merseyrail impressed everyone by soldiering on throughout, a feat which they would surely repeat next time we experienced awful weather… right?

I finally joined the Wii owners’ club, just as the console stopped being cool. My rekindled love for video games did not result in me getting rickets. I also celebrated my first Twitterversary and cautiously welcomed the iPad.

I also took time to blog at length about a US comedian no-one has heard of over here, illustrating my post with YouTube clips which have now been removed for copyright infringement.

In more serious matters, the Haiti earthquake occupied people’s thoughts as a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded in the devastated country.

Read the rest of this post »

From BBC News Magazine comes a lovely tale for Christmas Eve, of how one act of kindness by an anonymous British Rail conductor changed a man’s life for ever.

Merseytravel seem quite pleased that new transport secretary Philip Hammond is to pay Liverpool a visit to speak at the National Rail Conference in a couple of weeks time.

Mr Hammond will reportedly deliver a speech on the cuts that are about to be imposed on the railway. Hopefully some of the other speakers at the conference will take the opportunity to school him about basic railway principles, including why trains get priority at level crossings.

The government is planning to slash the amount of subsidy directed at the railways. This has resulted in a swathe of projects being cancelled: the station improvement programme announced last year has been abandoned, with Liverpool Central’s refurbishment hanging on by the skin of its teeth. The Liverpool to Manchester electrification looks doomed as well.

Of course, you can only go so far with cuts, and it looks like the railways will need to find the money somewhere else. As is often the case, the long-suffering passenger will pay: the newspapers are full of warnings of steep fare rises.

It’s fair to complain about the amount of taxpayers money being swallowed up by the railways, but I’m annoyed that no-one ever mentions reforming the insane mess that is the privatised railway system. Privatisation promised a new era of efficiency; instead we got endless red tape and bureaucracy. A lot of the taxpayer’s money is being used to fund the profits of the private companies, rather than being invested in services.

But any meaningful reform seems to have been filed under “too hard”, so instead the government will screw the passengers and allow the gravy train to roll on. Nobody will benefit in the long run, except perhaps those with shares in Stagecoach, FirstGroup and Arriva.

Or as close to it as you can get, anyway. This late 80s advert for British Rail was usually only broadcast in a 60-second edited version. On a couple of special occasions, however, the full length two-and-a-half minute version was wheeled out, and here it is:-

It could be like this again. Renationalise!

Today was apparently railway night on BBC Four, with a documentary by Ian Hislop about Dr Beeching’s infamous railway cuts, followed by Victoria Wood’s Crewe to Crewe, an epic journey across northern England and Scotland on early-1990s, about-to-be-privatised British Rail.

Surely the most promising night of telly in ages… and I completely forgot about the whole thing while watching Buzzcocks and Beautiful People on BBC Two. Fortunately, these shows were also good! Everybody wins!

Looks like I have a date with iPlayer at the weekend (Great Railway Journeys is unavailable, but I taped it off UK Horizons ages ago, so that’s OK; you can come round and watch it with me if you want).

Someone has uploaded an old TV documentary to YouTube, all about the Beeching closures (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Worth watching, if only for the plentiful stock footage of 1980s British Rail.

Beeching has often been portrayed as an evil bogeyman figure for the rail industry. Helpfully the entire Beeching Report is now available online to review with the benefit of hindsight and an obsessive enthusiasm for rail transport.

History judges Dr Beeching harshly, so it’s only fair to mention some of the positives that came out of his proposals. He correctly identified that slow mixed goods trains shuttling from one freight yard to another (with endless coupling, uncoupling and shunting) would never be able to compete with the flexibility of road lorries. On the other hand, he realised the potential of block freight trains to move bulk goods around the country (coal to power stations, oil to refineries, containers to ports), and encouraged the creation of a network of high-speed passenger routes (what became the InterCity network from the 1970s onward).

It’s also true that his proposals were rooted in the prevailing climate of the time, where roads were king and the railways were seen as yesterday’s technology. And Beeching did correctly identify and prune away some lines which were unnecessary (e.g. where pre-nationalisation companies were competing for traffic, and built lines almost parallel to each other).

On the other hand, some of the routes proposed for closure are astonishing: for example, almost all of what is now Merseyrail was scheduled to go, although that short-sighted decision was fortunately reversed. Had the plan been carried out in full, Wales would have been almost totally devoid of railways. In the South West of England, the plan almost was carried out in full, and the system was ruthlessly cut.

Beeching has been accused of employing a flawed methodology: he picked out stations as “little-used” because of low ticket sales from them, ignoring the number of tickets from elsewhere to those stations. He also mistakenly believed that closing branch lines would not affect the main line services into which they fed — believing that intending passengers would drive to the main station and continue their journey by train. In practice, most people simply drove all the way.

He also failed to pick up on an interesting phenomenon of public transport: The People Who Will Not Use Buses. Car drivers can be quite easily tempted to get out of their vehicles and use a train or tram, but will not consider a bus under any circumstances. Hence the buses which replaced the closed railways went unused.

There was speculation that privatisation would usher in a new era of Beeching closures, but that hasn’t happened to a great extent. In fact, when the Department for Transport commissioned a “review” of the Northern franchise, some quarters were surprised when the report’s authors concluded that, although most train services operated at a loss, the franchise was efficiently run and cutting back services would not save money.

That said, the luckless inhabitants of Etruria (closed 2005) and Norton Bridge (all services replaced by buses since 2004) haven’t benefited too much.

Ironically, many of the routes closed under the Beeching axe would be invaluable transport links now. With fuel prices continuing to increase, it looks like the era of unfettered access to cars could be coming to an end, and the existence of a viable national public transport system could be vital to the long-term economic well-being of this country. However, considering the mess we’re in at the moment (with the Tory Government’s horrendously botched privatisations, and Labour actually managing to make things WORSE), don’t hold your breath. Because you’d DIE OF ASPHYXIATION.