This is Somerset --
The 50th anniversary of the Great Train Robbery is not the most propitious moment to consider the state of our railways.
The first true robbery was the infamous Beeching Reports of the 1960s which reduced the rail system to a series of main lines isolated from the local feeder tracks so crucial to providing access. A few of these disused lines are agonisingly being restored to use by local enthusiasts.
This week's lamentable failure in Wiltshire of a prestigious main line express travelling from the West Country to London signals the ultimate failure of the hurried and botched privatisation forced on the country by the John Major government in its death throes. So obsessed were they with trying to ensure that the process could not be reversed by an incoming government that they broke up the system, ensuring dissipation of resources across the whole network and without introducing competition – the desperate rationale for any act of privatisation.
The result is an absence of integrated maintenance and back-up services, virtually no competition, high fares based on out-of-date formulae (whose rationale is unclear even to the most informed traveller), and antiquated rolling stock.
The train that ground to a standstill, inadvertently holding its passengers prisoner for over five hours, was built in the 1980s. It runs on polluting diesel fuel, labouring along with heavy fuel tanks, and its operators are sufficiently starved of resources that they cannot get prompt help – a situation that would bring the resignation of the transport minister of the day if it occurred in France or Germany where railways are run properly and reliably. Too few Britons travel on the modern European rail system for the public at large to realise just how squalid, expensive and overcrowded our trains are. The French TGVs are fast, comfortable and remarkably smooth running, as are their counterparts in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, to mention but a few of the countries that have modernised and upgraded their systems. And for the most part they are good value for money.
Two of our readers recently travelled the huge distance from London across France to Spain and back for just over £200 each, including a double-berth night sleeper with breakfast. Meanwhile, at Taunton and other stations in the West, the passenger is now subjected to yet more inconvenience as ticket barriers ("sheep dips") are introduced, limiting access to platforms and employing extra station staff. Across Europe, the well-designed tickets, each displaying departure, arrival times and seat reservations, are fed into a simple machine on the open and accessible platform which marks on them date and time, thus preventing illegal second use. Do UK tickets not give arrival times because they daren't?
In our relatively small country railways should provide the backbone of personal travel and freight haulage. They are almost infinitely safer than road travel.
But we leave the fate of our travellers in the hands of shareholders. We prefer to run a major West Country line on a mainly single track from Tisbury to Exeter, and operate clunky old unreliable diesel trains on the other major trunk route via Bristol. Why do we put up with it? Reported by This is 7 hours ago.
The 50th anniversary of the Great Train Robbery is not the most propitious moment to consider the state of our railways.
The first true robbery was the infamous Beeching Reports of the 1960s which reduced the rail system to a series of main lines isolated from the local feeder tracks so crucial to providing access. A few of these disused lines are agonisingly being restored to use by local enthusiasts.
This week's lamentable failure in Wiltshire of a prestigious main line express travelling from the West Country to London signals the ultimate failure of the hurried and botched privatisation forced on the country by the John Major government in its death throes. So obsessed were they with trying to ensure that the process could not be reversed by an incoming government that they broke up the system, ensuring dissipation of resources across the whole network and without introducing competition – the desperate rationale for any act of privatisation.
The result is an absence of integrated maintenance and back-up services, virtually no competition, high fares based on out-of-date formulae (whose rationale is unclear even to the most informed traveller), and antiquated rolling stock.
The train that ground to a standstill, inadvertently holding its passengers prisoner for over five hours, was built in the 1980s. It runs on polluting diesel fuel, labouring along with heavy fuel tanks, and its operators are sufficiently starved of resources that they cannot get prompt help – a situation that would bring the resignation of the transport minister of the day if it occurred in France or Germany where railways are run properly and reliably. Too few Britons travel on the modern European rail system for the public at large to realise just how squalid, expensive and overcrowded our trains are. The French TGVs are fast, comfortable and remarkably smooth running, as are their counterparts in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, to mention but a few of the countries that have modernised and upgraded their systems. And for the most part they are good value for money.
Two of our readers recently travelled the huge distance from London across France to Spain and back for just over £200 each, including a double-berth night sleeper with breakfast. Meanwhile, at Taunton and other stations in the West, the passenger is now subjected to yet more inconvenience as ticket barriers ("sheep dips") are introduced, limiting access to platforms and employing extra station staff. Across Europe, the well-designed tickets, each displaying departure, arrival times and seat reservations, are fed into a simple machine on the open and accessible platform which marks on them date and time, thus preventing illegal second use. Do UK tickets not give arrival times because they daren't?
In our relatively small country railways should provide the backbone of personal travel and freight haulage. They are almost infinitely safer than road travel.
But we leave the fate of our travellers in the hands of shareholders. We prefer to run a major West Country line on a mainly single track from Tisbury to Exeter, and operate clunky old unreliable diesel trains on the other major trunk route via Bristol. Why do we put up with it? Reported by This is 7 hours ago.