Outcry?
Do people not get that rolling stock is privately owned and that the ROSCOs take the risk of whether they are re-leased or not?
I understand that, but many people probably don’t. If the Daily Mail or something similar chooses to make an issue of it, what’s going to stick in peoples’ minds is that trains that could have run for many more years are standing unused or being scrapped. It looks like waste. I wouldn't like to be a senior railway figure trying to explain it to an audience of people who have to stand every day on the way to work.
This is after 20 years of easy money where practically every vehicle on their books has earned then a nice profit at negligible risk.
“20 years of easy money” doesn’t make it all OK then. We need to take a wider view.
There is no public money at stake. In fact the DfT has been trying to engineer a stock surplus to generate a more competitive market.
If the DfT has been trying to engineer a stock surplus this must be their most spectacular success. But for it to lead to a more competitive market, operators must have a real choice about what they lease. Abellio in GA and West Midlands, and First/MTR in South Western have all signed contracts for new trains, and there seems a strong chance that the bidders for South Eastern will do the same. They can’t now take 321s, 323s, 350/2s, 360s, 365s, 379s, 458s, 707s etc.. however much cheaper those may become as a result of the decisions they took not to lease them. And there’s not much point having lots of cheap EMUs in readiness for franchises that can’t use them, like most of those to be awarded in the next five years – Wales and Borders, East Midlands, West Coast, East Coast, Cross Country, Chiltern.
So what will happen to these trains? If 800 carriages go into storage they’ll need at least 10 miles of sidings. If they’re not looked after and regularly taken out for a run they’ll deteriorate. They’ll be several years older and much less attractive the next time Thameslink + Southern, Greater Anglia, West Midlands, etc. come round, and the bidders aren’t going to choose them (if they’re still there and useable) over the large fleets of newer trains that will be only five years old or less. I reckon this more competitive market is an illusion.
Without a rolling stock surplus that can actually be used there’ll be no incentive to the new trains’ ROSCOs to keep leasing costs down, and the probably depreciated pound after Brexit won’t encourage yet more new trains to be introduced. Will all three of the original ROSCOs survive? Lease costs may even go up, as the new trains' owners look ahead to the time when they'll need refurbishments, and the expenditure of public money will be a relevant consideration.
In the case of DMUs things may be different: if a high proportion of those that will become surplus were taken up by other TOCs, a moderate surplus remaining may help to keep leasing costs lower, and diesels have a wider potential usefulness.
It’s also possible that a small number of surplus EMUs will go to supplement existing operations, as Scotrail for example is taking a few 321s (or 75% of them) to provide additional stock. But there are several reasons why most of the stock becoming surplus won’t get re-used in that kind of way.
Is there an outcry when Ryanair dumps 50 nearly-new Boeing 737s out of its fleet and buys 50 brand new ones with lower operating costs?
No, there isn’t an outcry when Ryanair dumps 50 nearly new Boeings, because most people don’t hear anything about it, Ryanair isn’t an essential British public service operation, most people are happy to get cheap fares (not generally thought to be a feature of the British railway system) and don’t care how Ryanair achieves that, there’s a world-wide market for planes (though variable, I agree), the planes are designed to be useable throughout the world unlike UK trains, many of which aren’t useable throughout Britain, and it’s a completely different situation.
