Railway Franchising

[WillPS]

Just thought I'd gauge opinions on Metropol regarding the railway franchising system, which this week entered the spotlight after the competition for the WCML was cancelled, costing the treasury somewhere between £50-100m.

The entire railway franchising system has been postponed, which affects the majority of the Train Operating Companies in England:

Code: Select all

West Coast: December 2012
Essex Thamesside: May 2013
Greater Western: July 2013
South Central, Thameslink, Great Northern: September 2013
East Coast**: December 2013
Northern: March 2014
Kent: April 2014
Greater Anglia: September 2014
London Overground*: November 2014
Scotland*: November 2014
Transpennine: March 2015
East Midlands: April 2015
West Midlands: September 2015
CrossCountry: April 2016

*concessions awarded by Transport Scotland/TfL
**operated by "Directly Operated Railways"; nationalised

So, for the next year at the very least, no new franchises are going to be awarded. A handful of the above have extensions which could be given; but most of these have already been exhausted (supposedly while the government perfected its franchising process).

What are everybody's thoughts on the whole thing?

For me, it comes as no surprise that the franchising process itself is flawed. It doesn't take a genius to work out that it's been little other than a risk-free way for banks and transport companies to make ludicrous amounts of money.

I simply hope that more franchises end up in the hands of DOR, and it forms a key point of debate in the 2015 General Election.

[Alexia]

Gauge opinions? Well 4ft is less stable than 7ft.....

No government will renationalise due to, amongst other reasons, the hostile and belligerent nature of the modern day complain-culture and the wilful blindness of the public to the costs involved in providing the services they desire. You think it's bad now when they're complaining about fares? Imagine if a Miliband or a Cameron or a Hunt was in charge.

Similarly the private sector are too entrenched now to rip them out wholesale, each will have to be approached at the end of their franchises. This also poses a problem in that those which aren't due to lose their franchise for a while (like my own, ATW, in 2018), will not want to / will not have the inclination to hang around in a lame-duck capacity with what is effectively a death sentence imposed upon a company. Those that don't throw in the towel and tread water may not accept a fait accompli and sue the government. And as for placating shareholders... imagine 27 Railtracks going tits up.

Personally, I'm in favour of a nationwide TFL-style sectorisation -- centrally controlled by a government agency with private companies providing the service but not managing them. Take out train leasing companies and bring stock and track under public ownership -- give the punters something for their ticket dollar. Franchising is a falsity anyway - there's no real competition outside of some vastly disparate services sharing a couple the main lines -- if you're going to travel Cardiff - Portsmouth, it's FGW-way or no-way.

I know very little about freight operations so I won't go into that area.

Positives of franchising: the only thing I can think of is it makes it much easier to identify the trains for the punters at busy confusing interchanges -- telling them a Cardiff-bound train is green and a London train is red and silver leaves a lot of confusion at home.

[WillPS]

...but the government do control a good amount of the fares (and all the fares on the East Coast mainline). If we're to take the TfL model (which I don't think is a bad idea, btw), the government would control every aspect of fares, routes, timetables etc. and would simply contract a company to actually run the service and charge the fares.

I don't agree that there is clarity in terms of liveries either. One of the consequences of recent short franchises is that trains switch operators more often than they need a lick of paint, leading to tragedies of vinyl branding such as:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7681357@N02/3610565511/

[Alexia]

But the fares are proportional to the amount of money being wasted in non-rail areas. If fare takings was ploughed back into the railways and not used to turn profits for boardroom members, foreign rail companies like DB etc., and shareholders, fare increases wouldn't be so severe.

As for liveries -- granted there are current abominations (Greater Anglia I'm looking in your direction!) and even a great deal of our 158s were still, up until recently, in 4 different liveries (ATW WAG, ATW current, ATW old and W&W Silver), but the necessity to relivery every few years will also be eliminated with the elimination of the commercial interests of the companies.

Also it will eliminate atrocities like the FGW dynamic lines. The new 3-car reformed 150s look wonderfully retro and clean in plain purple.

[WillPS]

But the fares are proportional to the amount of money being wasted in non-rail areas. If fare takings was ploughed back into the railways and not used to turn profits for boardroom members, foreign rail companies like DB etc., and shareholders, fare increases wouldn't be so severe.

As for liveries -- granted there are current abominations (Greater Anglia I'm looking in your direction!) and even a great deal of our 158s were still, up until recently, in 4 different liveries (ATW WAG, ATW current, ATW old and W&W Silver), but the necessity to relivery every few years will also be eliminated with the elimination of the commercial interests of the companies.

Also it will eliminate atrocities like the FGW dynamic lines. The new 3-car reformed 150s look wonderfully retro and clean in plain purple.

We're on the same track of thinking. I just see it as unfortunate that you need to give a transport company a profit when there's no room for entrepreneurship.

If a private operator wants to make money from the railways, then it should be done through Open Access operators (and greater space should be made for such ventures).

[Alexia]

We're on the same track of thinking. I just see it as unfortunate that you need to give a transport company a profit when there's no room for entrepreneurship.

If a private operator wants to make money from the railways, then it should be done through Open Access operators (and greater space should be made for such ventures).

OAOs are on a hiding to nothing. The ATW OA operation for WAG is heavily subsidised and underused, GC needed rescuing by DB, Hull Trains has First as a fairy godmother and WSMR doesn't exist any more.

Let's face facts -- other countries can make railways work, yet somehow us, the country which invented them in the first place, somehow manage to balls it up. OK some of their networks aren't as complicated and crowded as ours, but the lack of coherent pax-focused thinking really does astonish.

And that's all even before you get onto the relatively minor details like age and condition of rolling stock etc.

[all new Phil]

I don't understand exactly how they work, but I LOVED the trains when I went to Italy. They appeared to be cheaper, punctual - they just worked. I understand this hasn't always been the case, I think there was some sort of German influence on them in recent years, but it just makes it hard to understand why ours are so expensive and complicated.

The TfL idea mentioned seems like a good one to me.

[bilky asko]

Let's face facts -- other countries can make railways work, yet somehow us, the country which invented them in the first place, somehow manage to balls it up.

I think you can extend that to our whole transport system. Our roads are awful, and our buses (partly due to the roads) are pretty bad too.