What are the railways in this country for?

[furnessvale]

I think the literal answer is: to carry passengers plus a few bulk freight flows. Sixty years ago the answer would have been very different, and much longer.

Most freight today is not bulk but individual containers and it is growing.

 

[B&I]

On top of this - lightly loaded trains are still sensible for enabling a public-transport based life in the first place. As soon as you force people to own a car (by not providing decent public transport), you've lost much more environmentally than you would by running a lightly loaded train, because that person will now most likely use acar for a larger proportion of their journeys. Without a car they might typically use that lightly loaded train to get to a station where they change to a very heavily loaded "efficient" service. Yes, the first train is super inefficient for its short journey, but those other trains are more efficient since they can carry even more passengers.

This is the 'efficient network' fallacy that the modern-day Beeching acolytes still cling to, more than 40.years after it should have become apparent that lopping off the branches damaged the railway trunk

 

[B&I]

Yes there's an element of London centricity in the rail network, but then that's down to the fact that there's an element of that within the economy, government and the arts. (Not that makes it right).

Due to this being a issue that had been ongoing for a long time it results in it being a big problem to overcome and to a certain extent being self reinforcing.

As is being going on for a long time it had resulted in 2/3rds of rail passengers traveling within the South East (generally excluding Intercity services), which then means that there's a need for money where the passengers are. (Again not saying that it's right or not, just how it is)

Exactly. The purpose of the railways must be viewed in an overall geographical and econonic context. However, that can give rise to chicken and egg situations.

If economic developmwnt in this country waa not concentrated (idiotically and counterproductively) in the overcrowded and overpriced south east, the railway network there would work much more reliably, and better use could be made of underexploited regional lines. However, this would also require southeastern levels of investment to enable sufficiently attractive rail servicea to attract southeastern levels of users, and to deal with constraints around the big regional cities (though if we could avoid treating a handful of cities as mini-Londons, and instead encouraging more even development within the regions, it would help).

Another respect in which external factors affect the railways' basic function is local planning. It would be easier for railways (and trams, and buses) to.perform a useful transport function if we had developed our postwar urban areas at relatively high densities alongside railway lines and other main transport corridors, and continued to concentrate econonic activities in town and city centres. Instead, we have spent 70 years developing a sprawling, car dependent subtopia of low density suburbs, isolated industrial sites and office developments, pointless retail parks, and seas of car parks and useless open space, at the same time hollowing out central and inner city areas. It is not the railways' fault that this happened, but it is another difficulty they face today in competing with private road transport.

 

[snowball]

I'm sure that most motorists do a lot more than 7600 miles a year. I'm retired and don't travel nearly as much as I used to, but I do more than 7600 miles a year.

I think there are probably lots who do less. For example, in households with two cars, one of them may only be used locally.

 

[E759]

There is a sweet distance for rail tavel - providing there are railway stations nearby. I live eighteen minutes walk from Penzance railway station - or about six minutes on the M6 bus.
Penzance to Plymouth? I'd drive it.
Penzance to Bristol? Debatable
Penzance to London? Take the train.
I'm off to Horsham for a very quick visit on Tuesday. Definitely the morning day train there via Reading and Dorking and Dorking, back on the sleeper via Victoria and Padders.
What must be borne in mind for the car is that it's door to destination travel at a time to suit.

Anchor Tap in East Street for liquid refreshment. 10 minutes walk from the station.

 

[urbophile]

This is the 'efficient network' fallacy that the modern-day Beeching acolytes still cling to, more than 40.years after it should have become apparent that lopping off the branches damaged the railway trunk

In the same way that maintaining a frequent service on a line which might often have nearly empty trains outside peak hours, is still much better than concentrating the service into those hours. People are much more likely to use a train if they know they can turn up at more or less any time and catch one, rather than needing to trim their travel plans according to the exigences of a timetable.

 

[Warwick]

It has three main purposes IMO:

1. To take people to and from work or education quickly and more efficiently than road transport can.
2. To make rural communities more connected to the outside world.
3. To enable faster, cheaper and/or more convenient medium and long-distance journeys for leisure and business travellers.

I think the mere fact that there is a rail network encourages people to make certain journeys - and things like rural lines are in some cases vital to making a longer journey viable by rail, thus meaning that the Intercity services would otherwise have considerably fewer passengers if all branch and less important lines were closed. I think the system must be considered as a whole rather than as individual lines or companies.

As for why I use the railways -

1. I like travelling.
2. A car is completely unaffordable for me as it has high initial and annual costs even if I don't use it (although this of course depends very much on things like your age and driving experience - I'm referring to insurance as the main annual cost).
3. It's often quicker than any other means of transport.
4. You can do other things whilst you're travelling - work, free time, sleep etc. You can obviously do none of those whilst driving, I get motion sickness in buses if I look down and in a plane there's rarely WiFi or mobile internet signal!

Answer 1 How do you define efficiently?
Answer 2 That'll be the rural communities who's station was

Anchor Tap in East Street for liquid refreshment. 10 minutes walk from the station.

Eh?

 

[ChiefPlanner]

This is the 'efficient network' fallacy that the modern-day Beeching acolytes still cling to, more than 40.years after it should have become apparent that lopping off the branches damaged the railway trunk

Railways are basically volume hungry - so without triggering more upgrades (which in some places is neccessary) - the more you do , the lower the unit costs per journey / ton etc - very basic , but true.

 

[ChiefPlanner]

Most freight today is not bulk but individual containers and it is growing.

Deep sea container traffic has slowed a bit , domestic intermodal showing reasonable growth , most bulks fairly steady. Not bad really considering the catastrophic decline of coal in the last 5 years.

 

[The Ham]

I'm sure that most motorists do a lot more than 7600 miles a year. I'm retired and don't travel nearly as much as I used to, but I do more than 7600 miles a year.

There's an element of if you own a car then you'll use it. I would also question how much you pay in your purchase costs for your car, add if it's more than £1,000 a year then the 7,600 miles goes up significantly.


For instance if you drive 10 miles each way to and from work that equates to about 4,500 a year for work.


Therefore if someone is doing 7,600 miles a year total when they work 10 miles from home then their social milage of 3,100 is costing them £1,000. For some that could be good value, however for others a lot of those miles could be"lazy" miles and not worth the extra cost.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

There's an element of if you own a car then you'll use it. I would also question how much you pay in your purchase costs for your car, add if it's more than £1,000 a year then the 7,600 miles goes up significantly.


For instance if you drive 10 miles each way to and from work that equates to about 4,500 a year for work.


Therefore if someone is doing 7,600 miles a year total when they work 10 miles from home then their social milage of 3,100 is costing them £1,000. For some that could be good value, however for others a lot of those miles could be"lazy" miles and not worth the extra cost.

You seem to be assuming that all motorists calculate their costs down to the last penny. Most motorists I know have decided that whatever the cost may be, they want to own a car. They'll hunt for a bargain, but once they've bought the car and secured a second bargain on the insurance, they don't fret about saving every penny on every journey.

 

[The Ham]

You seem to be assuming that all motorists calculate their costs down to the last penny. Most motorists I know have decided that whatever the cost may be, they want to own a car. They'll hunt for a bargain, but once they've bought the car and secured a second bargain on the insurance, they don't fret about saving every penny on every journey.

No, I don't think that motorists calculate their costs to the last penny.

I think that motorists never calculate the total cost of their cars and just see them as a series is small costs, each of which they pay without thinking about the total amount that they pay. However when they think about rail travel and they see an annual cost of a season ticket at £1,500 they baulk at the amount and say "I can drive it for less".

Even though for many, epically those that pay more than £500 a year in insurance and £1,000 a year in purchase costs then they would, even with some fairly high milage driving, could be better off not having a car.

As an example those that lease a car for £120 a month would be paying £1,440 a year.

Alternatively, if you buy a £12,000 car and sell it 3 years later for £7,000 (bearing in mind most vehicles depreciate at about 50% every 3 years) is £1,667 a year.

If you have finance to purchase the car than that would push your costs up higher. In the above example, let's assume that you sold your last car for £7,000 and you have saved £1,000, with an interest rate of 5% on the remaining £4,000 you would pay a further £100 a year in interest of paid back over three years, circa £120 a month in repayments

Therefore, it could easily be that you could be paying:

£1,800 a year in purchase costs (+£800 on my previous numbers)

£800 in insurance (+£300 on my previous numbers)

Which would push the total costs to £3,000 per year before you drive anywhere. Therefore to get to a point where you're paying 35p per mile then you'd need to travel 12,000 miles.

However, even 35p a mile is still quite expensive for mileage costs. As an example Basingstoke to Guildford by car is 25 miles (11,300 miles a year to and from work). A season ticket on the trains is £3,672. Which gives you a mileage cost of 32.5p per mile.

2.5p a mile doesn't sound like much difference however to get your driving costs down to that you would need to do a further 2,000 miles.

That's on a rail journey where it's further to travel by rail than car and where it's also possible to save a further £200 by having a Woking to Reading season ticket (which is valid Reading to Basingstoke and then to Woking and valid Reading to Guildford and then to Woking, such means, although technically not what it's designed for you have a valid ticket when using services between Basingstoke and Woking and Woking and Guildford).

Yes, after that you would then only be paying fuel costs, however most people live and work fairly small distances (i.e. Less than 25 miles apart) and the smaller the distance you travel the higher your cost per mile rate is and the more likely it is that you'd be better off not owning a car. Especially if you have to regularly pay for car parking (just £3 a week would add a further £150 to your motoring costs a year, or a further 650 miles a year to keep your milage costs down at 35p a mile).

The really crazy thing to do is to own a car to drive less than 5 miles each way to a station, and pay for parking, to then travel to London by train.

If you can use buses then often the season tickets are significantly cheaper, especially in urban areas, where chances are you could get a bus season ticket for the town you live in for less than your insurance, failing that most of the rest could achieve it for less than their insurance and servicing costs.

 

[DarloRich]

what is the purpose of the railways?

To move massive amounts of people and stuff around the country safely & at high speed.

 

[HowardGWR]

To move massive amounts of people and stuff around the country safely & at high speed.

What I was about to write but you wrote it. Whatever prompted this thread?

 

[DarloRich]

What I was about to write but you wrote it. Whatever prompted this thread?

no idea. i suspect it is an attempt to debate public good v corporate need.

 

[Senex]

To move massive amounts of people and stuff around the country safely & at high speed.

... and, in doing so, to play their part in meeting the need for easy and affordable mobility in a modern society.

 

[DarloRich]

... and, in doing so, to play their part in meeting the need for easy and affordable mobility in a modern society.

Easy and affordable mobility doesn't come into it. It is a semi commercial operation.

 

[WelshBluebird]

We see it a lot on rail threads too - for example, if a Sprinter can do a couple of miles per gallon then a lightly loaded train carrying a couple of dozen passengers on a quiet line (however "socially necessary") isn't the environmentally friendly alternative to those people driving - it'd actually be better for the environment if those people drove (as long as they were doing so in relatively modern cars - doesn't have to be electric/hybrid, just relatively modern).

Of course, the problem with that logic is that for people making longer journeys, having those branch lines means that those people can access mainline rail services. If they didn't exist, people would not only drive the distance to the nearest mainline station, they'd drive the whole journey. You saw that with the Beeching cuts, branch lines not only cut off local traffic on those branchlines, but cut off those potential passengers from long distance train travel too.

 

[al78]

The really crazy thing to do is to own a car to drive less than 5 miles each way to a station, and pay for parking, to then travel to London by train.

True, that is an easy cycling distance, unfortunately the mindset of the public in general is that cycling is too dangerous (not true if you look at the real world evidence), too much like hard work (not true unless you think you have to go at time trial pace), weather is too bad (the majority of the time the weather is ok for cycling), insert other standard excuse here for not doing it.

 

[InOban]

Most people along these branch lines would be likely to drive even to the local station. That's why we have parkway and park and ride stations.
For a train service to be an attractive proposition it has to be

1. Frequent (Frequency required depends on the journey length)

2. Reliable

3. A reasonable cost

And, I would suggest, in that order.

 

[al78]

There's an element of if you own a car then you'll use it. I would also question how much you pay in your purchase costs for your car, add if it's more than £1,000 a year then the 7,600 miles goes up significantly.


For instance if you drive 10 miles each way to and from work that equates to about 4,500 a year for work.


Therefore if someone is doing 7,600 miles a year total when they work 10 miles from home then their social milage of 3,100 is costing them £1,000. For some that could be good value, however for others a lot of those miles could be"lazy" miles and not worth the extra cost.

The value of something cannot always be expressed in terms of monetary value. There is convenience and quality of life to consider as well. Even if owning a car is more expensive than using public transport, not owning a car does require sacrifices (I know because I had voluntarily been car free for three years before I had a near fatal accident on my bicycle). For example, I cannot transport 200kg of manure to my allotment on my bicycle or public transport, and my allotment site is not ideal for bulk deliveries. If I want to go on a group walk 25 miles away in a remote area a car is the only practical way of getting to the walk. If owning a car allows someone to partake in hobbies and interests, then that will enhance their quality of life, and thus be worth the monetary cost for them.

 

[Senex]

Easy and affordable mobility doesn't come into it. It is a semi commercial operation.

I was ignoring the "in this country" part of the thread-title and thinking rather of railways as they are in much of the rest of Europe.

 

[DarloRich]

I was ignoring the "in this country" part of the thread-title and thinking rather of railways as they are in much of the rest of Europe.

that is a different question

 

[HSTEd]

Most freight today is not bulk but individual containers and it is growing.

Well containers could be considered a bulk flow - in that if you put every piece of cargo in containers you could probably optimise carriage on the railway to be much cheaper than it is today.
Automatic container handling etc etc.

 

[Dai Corner]

The value of something cannot always be expressed in terms of monetary value. There is convenience and quality of life to consider as well. Even if owning a car is more expensive than using public transport, not owning a car does require sacrifices (I know because I had voluntarily been car free for three years before I had a near fatal accident on my bicycle). For example, I cannot transport 200kg of manure to my allotment on my bicycle or public transport, and my allotment site is not ideal for bulk deliveries. If I want to go on a group walk 25 miles away in a remote area a car is the only practical way of getting to the walk. If owning a car allows someone to partake in hobbies and interests, then that will enhance their quality of life, and thus be worth the monetary cost for them.

And some of us really enjoy driving. I go for road trips (as well as railway trips) purely for pleasure.

 

[BluePenguin]

To keep me in a very generously paid position with excellent working conditions considering I was far too lazy to study or partake in a single exam before leaving school with no intention whatsoever of entering into further education

What is considered "generous pay" and what are "excellent working conditions"? We need something to use as a bench mark for comparison. Without knowing what job you do or even how much holiday it is difficult to tell

It's refreshing to hear from someone that it is possible to have a job and earn a decent living without having to put yourself through that torture of the education system and get into lots of debt for no reason.

 

[Rail Blues]

I

I think there are probably lots who do less. For example, in households with two cars, one of them may only be used locally.

I suspect this may be a generational thing. My parents (retirees also) do a far higher mileage than me. To them and a lot of their friends (baby boomers who moved to the suburbs) driving is the first choice and they're aghast that I managed quite happily for many years without a car. They turn their noses up at free bus transport as 'that's for poor people' and are generally stuck in that mentality that car is king.

To me driving is the last resort when other methods are too costly or time consuming.

 

[underbank]

The value of something cannot always be expressed in terms of monetary value. There is convenience and quality of life to consider as well.

Which feeds back into whether you're living in a place with lots of local amenities that you don't need transport for (i.e. shops, pubs, restaurants within walking distance) or living in a city with excellent public transport such as trams, underground, regular buses, etc. I'd imagine living in a big city like London or Manchester, you don't actually "need" a car because you have so much on your doorstop or by a cheap/easy/regular public transport system. But there are lots of towns and smaller cities where a car is pretty much essential, even moreso in smaller towns, villages, etc. There's so much more to consider than simply the cost of having a car.

 

[Indigo Soup]

Of course, it's not just comparing mpg. There are some rail journeys which are a lot shorter than a comparable road journey, i.e. a bridge over an estuary or a tunnel under a hill can mean the rail journey is only a fraction of the road journey and an awful lot quicker. MPG is only useful if the distances/times are comparable.

And equally some road journeys where rail would never be a viable option. I can't imagine anyone ever travelling from Tain to Golspie by rail - £14.40 for a 56 minute journey, which could be done in half the time - 33 minutes - by bus, though the fare isn't online. And it gives you the option of going to Dornoch, which is cut off from the rail network.

True, that is an easy cycling distance, unfortunately the mindset of the public in general is that cycling is too dangerous (not true if you look at the real world evidence), too much like hard work (not true unless you think you have to go at time trial pace), weather is too bad (the majority of the time the weather is ok for cycling), insert other standard excuse here for not doing it.

Fundamentally, people see cycling as an alternative to driving rather than an alternative to walking. Since every human being (as opposed to accounting robot) treats the cost of owning a car as a sunk cost and decides whether to drive based on the cost of fuel (and parking/tolls if applicable), driving five miles to the station makes sense because it's quicker, less effort, and hardly costs any more than cycling.

Realistically, you are not going to persuade people to give up their cars entirely. The flexibility is just too great, and once you've paid the sunk costs (it costs £500/month in finance and insurance whether you drive 2,000 miles or leave it parked) the incremental cost for short-medium distance journeys is easily acceptable for most people. The most that public transport can do is persuade people that the second car isn't necessary, and maybe keep some marginal cases from buying one in the first place.

 

[underbank]

And equally some road journeys where rail would never be a viable option. I can't imagine anyone ever travelling from Tain to Golspie by rail - £14.40 for a 56 minute journey, which could be done in half the time - 33 minutes - by bus, though the fare isn't online. And it gives you the option of going to Dornoch, which is cut off from the rail network.

Indeed, it very much depends on the geography. Grange over Sands is an ideal case in point. You'd definitely use the train to go between Grange over Sands and Arnside because of the viaduct avoiding a very long round trip by road (14 miles, taking 27 minutes) whereas the train is just a couple of miles and takes less than 5 minutes. But, you'd be crazy to go from Grange over Sands to Kendal by train as it can take as long as 2 hours and cost £14, as opposed to a £3.70 bus journey of 40 minutes or a 25 minute (13 mile) journey by road. So, for those living in Grange Over Sands (and presumably lots of similar places) ideally you need a mix of trains, buses and a car to optimise your travelling where there can be very significant differences in time/convenience and cost between different modes of transport.