arabiandisco wrote:the 50k commuters have been travelling in 50 year old mark 1 trains, that proved their flimsiness at clapham, and have been due for replacement for nearly 20 years now. Voyagers are new, and though they're pretty pants (In terms of fit-for-purpose, at least, I reckon they'd be good on different duties), improving/replacing them is not going to be a top priority whilst there are still mark 1 trains rattling around.
Thanks to the EU, Vertical Integration is now Illegal. What the hell that's about, I do not know, but there's some ridiculous directive that states that VI is forbidden.
Otherwise I agree, The railways have been run on a shoestring for far too long, and the sellotape will only last for so long.
Vertical Integration is NOT illegal. All the EU Open Access directive states is that the operating accounts should be kept and managed seperately from the Infrastructure accounts so that any open access operators can be seen to be charged a fair rate for access and not disadvantaged by the "in-house" operator. Most railways across Europe have set up seperate organisations to comply with this, but for example neither NIR or IE in Ireland have, or are likely to, but comply with the Directive by keeping the accounts seperate. In any case, the Netherlands, which has a semi-detached Infrastructure organisation, doesn't have any of the problems we seem to have with seperate operators and track companies - in fact open access is far moe extensive across there. It's the UK's contractual system at fault and vertical integration is not the answer everyone thinks it is.
I also think the SRA should tie in their strategy more closely with that of Government. The Government wants to reduce car use and increase rail use. Fine. That means that money should be targeted at areas where people can use cars without congestion, and chose to do so, which means outside London and the South East. I can understand why the SE feels it should get the most money, as it is a larger rail market than the whole of North America combined, but given the numbers of people using the network in the South East, and the effective lack of choice, if the rail funding situation wasn't such a mess it ought to be largely self funding - some of the Network SouthEast routes were breaking even before privatisation. Also, is it really strategic thinking to spend millions on upgrading the power supply so trains with less capacity than at present, and fewer services following "reliability" cuts, can consume more electricity? Again, set against Government policy on energy consumption this is contrary to Government policy.
The replacement of Mk1 stock should not be a Government funded issue. The rail operating companies knew about the deadline before privatisation, and the whole point of the privatisation exercise was to remove rolling stock funding from the Treasury and move it to the private sector. The TOCs in the South East have a captive audience paying the highest fares in the world, which is exactly the kind of funding stream Banks love. Replacing stock in the South East should be entirely privately funded given the rules we are playing to in the rail industry. Of course the stock needs replacing, but it should be funded by others, and the SRA money used to really tackle the growth in car use for optional journeys in provincial areas where people, if the rail product is lousy, will just get into their car as the levels of congestion are generally not as bad as they are in the south, where no-one would think of driving to work in London, - or for that matter to shop. That is still not the case even in Birmingham and Manchester where over half the commuters, and nearly three-quarters of leisure journeys are made by car.
Unless the SRA thinks it is not about meeting Government targets, in which case it can do without Government funding.
