Printable View
How do you qualify this?Quote:
Originally Posted by BDunnell
My recollection may be wrong but huge amounts of cash were pumped into BR but the service was shocking. I remember trains going late, early, just about any time apart from when they were supposed to.
Now, ocassionally we have delayed trains but I know it's 4 minutes walk from my house to the train station so if I leave 5 mins before it's supposed to depart, I can pretty much guarentee to walk on the train.
I think the key phrase is "is its latter days". BR was a national joke at one point, that's for sure, with clapped-out rolling stock and ruled by unions who would call a strike if someone was 30 seconds late getting a tea break. But towards the end of its existence it started to become punctual, well managed, and benefited from decent investment. A cynic might say it was being fattened up for privatisation, but I couldn't possibly comment.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knock-on
I think since privatisation, the Rail Network has improved significantly but it is still hugely subsidised. Pre-privatisation, there was some investment but due to some significant factors, (Hatfield, Network Rail) that investment has increased.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave B
Interesting read:
Factcheck: Does the taxpayer subsidise the rail network more now than it did when it was nationalised? | Full Fact
A common recollection, but I think collective memory has caused a false impression. By the end of its days BR was actually a hugely efficient operation, much more punctual and requiring increasingly less subsidy. Indeed, had it been given a few more years it would, if memory serves, most likely have turned a profit. This it managed by adopting a more commercially-driven approach. I am in no doubt that the positive trend would have continued.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knock-on
Dr Richard Beeching went from making zippers at ICI to running British Rail. He was a time-and-motion man who knew nothing of the business he was set to run and his first and second reports suggested closing almost 2500 stations and destroying more than 5000 miles of railway line.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave B
Dr Richard Beeching at the stroke of a pen single-handedly destroyed one of the greatest legacies that Victorian Britain could have left the 21st Century. He was a short-sighted nitwit who after wholescale destruction of British Rail returned to his pathetic role at ICI making zippers. He was then made a life peer for his efforts.
Incidentally, he almost ran Lloyds Bank into the dirt not less than three years after leaving British Rail.
Really? My impression was not formed by 'collective memory' but personal recollection. The Unions held the service to ransome and the service was a disgrace. The restructuring onto vertical business streams was a huge improvement but overall it was an appalling example of a privately held White Elephant.Quote:
Originally Posted by BDunnell
Again, I am drawing on personal recollection but as I understood it, there was a huge amount of investment needed after privatisation, in track and stock, because of gradual neglect.Quote:
By the end of its days BR was actually a hugely efficient operation, much more punctual and requiring increasingly less subsidy. Indeed, had it been given a few more years it would, if memory serves, most likely have turned a profit. This it managed by adopting a more commercially-driven approach. I am in no doubt that the positive trend would have continued.
Again I ask, can you provide referencable information on the punctiality pre and post Privatisation and that BR would have become self funding in public hands?
I use the term 'collective memory' because I think, in this instance, it's highly relevant — not just to your views but those of others. People remember BR as being crap because, for a long time, it was. That was its image, and that's what sticks in the mind. The fact that, by the end of its life, it had changed hugely goes almost entirely forgotten.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knock-on
Neglect that, had BR remained in public hands, would have been reversed as a result of its increasingly good financial performance. As it was, it took an awfully long time for that investment to happen post-privatisation, and even then it has always been funded to a significant extent out of the public purse as a result of the subsidies the private operators receive from the Government.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knock-on
Not immediately, but the detail on the financial position is in rail expert Christian Wolmar's book 'Broken Rails', which I would recommend (though it's a few years out of date now). If I remember rightly, he describes BR as, at the end of the 1980s, 'the world's most efficient railway' in terms of the percentage of GDP it required in government subsidy. Then, this was all thrown away for partly ideological reasons, and partly because of John Major's absurd personal nostalgia for the inter-war years.Quote:
Originally Posted by Knock-on
You can hardly claim Christian Wolmar as independant and objective. He's as Left Wing as they come and famous for opposing privatisation. I knew his nme would pop up and dealt with it in post 122.
Next we will be asking Nigel Farage for a balanced opinion on Europe!!
I would suggest, respectfully, that he knows more about the railways than do you or I. Have you ever considered that he might have opposed, and opposes, privatisation on the basis of a quite deep-seated knowledge of the subject?Quote:
Originally Posted by Knock-on
You often go on about the need to 'attack the post, not the poster'. In that case, maybe you should practice what you preach with regard to Wolmar, and criticise the basis of what he says rather than coming to a view based solely on his political views (which are not that left-wing).
Perhaps other, smaller countries can make a go of it, but in the U.S. it would be run inefficiently:Quote:
Originally Posted by Rollo
generally:
1) people would receive worse health-care
2) students wouldn't receive as effective of an education