Anders Hanson

As someone who worked in the rail industry for a few years, I’ve always been quite opinionated on the state of the railways. I get frustrated by its failings, just like any other rail user, but I also get frustrated by some of the misconceptions and misleading statements that I read regularly on blogs or in newspapers and magazines.

I have been asked in the past if I would write an article on the state of the railways and where I feel they are going right or wrong. I really should have done it, but at the time I never had enough hours in the day and now I feel a little bit as though I don’t have the up to date knowledge needed. It is four years now since I worked for a train company and things change. Despite that, there are things I want to say, but I struggle to know where to start.

So the aim of this posting is to be the first of an intermittent series of postings that I will make on the state of the railways. Some will be opinions, some will be explanations and some will just be a collection of facts, statements and links that I hope will be a way of collecting ideas and at some point I might put them all together in one article.

The main prompt for me to do this is the Tory party’s new ideas on the railways, and reading a few comments from other bloggers on this. I’ve put links to some of these posts at the bottom. Today’s posting will have to be fairly brief, but it’s a start none the less.

To make amends for the unpopularity of their policies on the railways, the Tories have now put forward a number of proposals. One of these is the integration of the tracks with the trains in to large regional companies. The Tories are certainly not alone in proposing this, but I have a number of concerns with the idea:

• Many lines are used by more than one operator and so handing the tracks to one operator will lead to conflict on track access. Although the idea of very large regional companies has been mooted, this problem would remain in many cases. Perhaps the best example is Cross Country. Cross Country does not fit neatly in to any of the regions because of its very nature as a truly national operator. It is also arguably the operator with the biggest problems and is probably the most unpopular of all passenger franchises. Linking wheel and rail will not help operators like this and will arguable make things worse - negotiating with four or five track operators rather than one in the form of Network Rail.
• A much neglected aspect of the rail network is freight operators. These would end up being completely sidelined by uniting passenger operators with management of the track. There are also numerous freight only lines throughout the country and so who would operate these? If the suggestion is a freight operator, then we are already returning to having several operators in one geographical area again.
• Although you could unite the track and trains, it would not necessarily mean that the train operator would retain the job of maintaining the track within the company. For example, many train operators already give the job of maintaining their trains to another company and so why should they not do the same with the maintenance of the tracks. This would then put us back exactly to where we were before when we had companies like Balfour Beatty and Jarvis maintaining, and in some cases not maintaining, the infrastructure. You could stipulate a requirement for them to be retained in-house, but with private operators you will always get specialisms and there will always be conflict between the need to make money and the need to have the safest possible network. Keeping track and trains separate where one of them is privately owned is probably the best option in this case.
• Does it really make a big enough difference to the railways for it to be worth changing the structure yet again. The railways have had enough upheaval as it is and I can think of many other changes that would make a bigger difference than this to the state of our railways.

GUARDIAN - The Tories are starting to clear their clutter of inheritance

JONATHAN CALDER - How the Tories ruined our railways