The Railways . Why ?

[squizzler]

The railways need billions of pounds in subsidy but around 95% of people barely use them, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to occasionally ask the question about what the UK taxpayers are getting for their money (without getting emotional about the straw-man idea of killing tens of millions of people, or trying to balance it out by the economic benefits of purchasing a couple of pints or justifying the subsidy on the grounds that coach seats aren't as comfortable)

Whist it is generally a pleasure to read your posts, I fear that you are sorely mistaken about rail usage. 8% of English people use the train once or more a week, with 61% - a clear majority of the population - using the train more than once a year (source).

Perhaps you are thinking of aviation? 7% of the English use the plane once or more per year, with the remaining 93% using it less than yearly or never.

So with that said, and most people using a train, any speculation as to whether the train is needed is for the birds.

But let's not pretend that it's the best solution for every market that it currently serves or that heavy rail is sacred - the fact that some people seem so squeamish about giving proper justifications suggests that they know that some lines are a busted flush and are scared of attention being focussed on them...

Possibly, but the real reason we won't focus attention to marginal branch lines here because they are a minuscule proportion to income and outgoings and thus irrelevant to the argument at hand.

 

[Dr Hoo]

The situation in the early 2000s is fundamentally different to that which prevailed in 2019?

I'm talking about "all else being equal"

Also have those figures been inflation adjusted?

I fully agree that the early 2000s are very different to the late teenies.

'All else being equal' is an almost meaningless phrase in this discussion. No macro-economist has the luxury of working in a hermetically sealed control bubble.

I am well aware that the nature of the organisation and funding of Network Rail; governance by the DfT, SRA, ORR and HSE; the 2008 credit crunch; devolution to different administrations; fare policies; inflation; competition; lumpy investment (like WCML, HS1, Crossrail and HS2) and so forth have changed over the years. Even the method of reporting by ORR has changed in recent years - as explained in various methodology reports available on their website (too detailed and lengthy to quote meaningfully). It seems to me that earlier figures have been adjusted for inflation but the massive extent of the increase in government funding seems obvious to me with or without it.

(The 'go to' Bank of England inflation calculator suggests inflation of 60% from 2002 to 2018.)

ORR figures have shown government funding of around £2,000,000,000 in 2001-2 to £6,700,000,000 in 2017-18. That is obviously much more than doubling whichever way you cut it.

So I repeat my question, "when do you feel that the more-than-doubling of benefits will be evident to the average passenger (let alone taxpayer)?"

 

[HSTEd]

'All else being equal' is an almost meaningless phrase in this discussion.

Then the entire discussion is meaningless, since that is basically what all these discussions boil down to - because a society without a railway would operate dramatically different from the current one.

In the same way that the railway of the early 2000s is very different from the railway of 2019.

We have to say "all else being equal" or we can't really make any statements whatsoever.

So I repeat my question, "when do you feel that the more-than-doubling of benefits will be evident to the average passenger (let alone taxpayer)?"

You can't really compare systems 15 years apart with entirely different corporate structures and organisation, with a fundamentally different safety environment, and operating in an entirely different economic environment, directly?

Just because the railway has bloated to an ever greater extent over the last 15 years does not mean that there are still not dramatic economies of scale in railways that operate at higher volumes.

If we spent twice as much on the railway today we would get more than double the benefit from it. Assuming this money was not squandered opening random branch lines to nowhere.

 

[D365]

A tramway rather than a railway, Blackpool's trams run today due to the illuminations. The future of the tramway was discussed a while back and it was realised that the extra traffic generated due to withdrawing the trams would be unsustainable.

Which is exactly the same reason as why the railways, fundamentally, can never be removed.

 

[JamesT]

Whist it is generally a pleasure to read your posts, I fear that you are sorely mistaken about rail usage. 8% of English people use the train once or more a week, with 61% - a clear majority of the population - using the train more than once a year (source).

Perhaps you are thinking of aviation? 7% of the English use the plane once or more per year, with the remaining 93% using it less than yearly or never.

So with that said, and most people using a train, any speculation as to whether the train is needed is for the birds.

Although @tbtc 's numbers may not have been exact, the general gist of his point isn't particularly refuted by those statistics. The average number of trips per year per person is 22. Your daily commuter (who will be in the 8%) is going to be doing around 200 return trips. That counterbalances quite a few people going rarely or never on the train to get down to the average. 38% are in the at least once a year, but less than once a month. I think it's fair to categorise those people as barely using the railways, the 39% who use it even less even more so. 77% of the population use it less frequently than monthly.

Speculation on why people use the railways is entirely relevant for a discussion on what the purpose of the railways is. It's been noted in other threads that at one extreme, those very frequent users are responsible for significant costs, e.g. additional and lengthened rolling stock and infrastructure to cope with the daily peaks of commuters. But on the flip side, are there costs within the industry to provide the service to someone who makes a single trip home for Christmas every year? Could that travel be done in some other mode that would produce an equally good outcome to society?

Possibly, but the real reason we won't focus attention to marginal branch lines here because they are a minuscule proportion to income and outgoings and thus irrelevant to the argument at hand.

Can we really say that? Given the way finances tend to get bundled together into regions or franchises is it possible to say they're a miniscule proportion, or that the likely disproportionate cost of running them is hidden within the whole?

 

[yorkie]

So if the question is "justify the Railways", how do you answer?

The case for some branch lines is probably very marginal but the trains I caught today could not be replaced by any other mode of transport; in cities like London the alternative would be gridlock, while for York to London, the choice would be going to Leeds Bradford Airport to fly into a London airport, which would take much longer, or face a slow coach journey.

If rail did not exist you would create a huge market for domestic flights (not great!) and there would be loads of coaches clogging up the roads too. There is no viable alternative to the train for a journey like York to London.

 

[NoRoute]

If we spent twice as much on the railway today we would get more than double the benefit from it. Assuming this money was not squandered opening random branch lines to nowhere.

Generally non-linear returns are diminishing, they work the work other way round, the first bit of spending delivers the most bang for your buck, with returns steadily reducing. Pretty logical really as the earlier spending is targetted at the projects or services with the biggest impact, the later stuff is more marginal.

Take London to Birmingham, the first bit of spending is keeping the existing WCML or Chiltern Lines open and running, that bit of spending let's you travel between London and Birmingham, very valuable, lot of retur n for your spending. The next bit of spending is the money going into HS2 to build a new line, which let's you do the same but a bit quicker, at very high price for some marginal benefit, the return is significantly diminished.

 

[BayPaul]

So isn't the subsidy of the railways paid by taxation exactly the same ?

Not really. Roads are more than paid for by direct taxes on users - if you don't own a car then you don't contribute to their upkeep. Railways are not fully paid for by their users, they need to be subsidised by general taxation.

I'm not saying this isn't entirely reasonable, just that any comparison between the financial costs of road and rail isn't likely to look great for rail! The environmental costs are very different of course.

 

[Ianno87]

Not really. Roads are more than paid for by direct taxes on users - if you don't own a car then you don't contribute to their upkeep.

No. Roads are funded out of general taxation. There is no such thing as "Road Tax".

 

[BayPaul]

A specific motorway can't be directly profitable unless it is tolled (this doesn't include "shadow tolling" arrangements where a private provider is paid a usage fee). It might be possible to prove that it caused enough people to buy cars or to drive further, generating enough tax to pay for the motorway. But this would be difficult to assess, and incidentally would also demonstrate that the project was grossly contrary to environmental objectives.

As to motoring taxes paying for the cost of roads, that may be so but do they pay for externalities such as policing, health service costs relating to accidents, and the indirect effects of pollution and other environmental damage?

I don't agree with your first paragraph. You can surely come up with a pretty decent estimate that is good enough to show whether a road is profitable or loss making even without exact figures.

For example, the M3 j2-4a carries 130,000 vehicles per day. Let's say they averaged 10 miles distance, and spent 10p per mile on fuel, of which about 6p is tax. The upgrade to this section cost £175M. Let's assume it increased the number of vehicles using it by 20%. That's about £6M per year additional fuel tax revenue-enough to pay for the work in 30 years, without taking account of additional car tax, and other benefits. All made up figures, but with access to decent numbers a real calculation could be done. Again, I'm not arguing that this was a sensible way of spending tax money from an environmental point of view, just that it's pretty easy to argue in favour of it financially.

I agree that with your second paragraph that the wider costs are more difficult to judge. Motorways are pretty safe places, so the costs of deaths and injuries, and of policing the roads are probably covered within the 'profit' side - in my opinion the pollution element of the cost, both to the environment and to human health very much isn't. With a move to electric cars, however, it's a much finer balance.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 24 Jul 2021 ==

No. Roads are funded out of general taxation. There is no such thing as "Road Tax".

OK, but taxes on car ownership and use put more money into general tax than roadbuilding takes out of it

 

[yorksrob]

Although @tbtc 's numbers may not have been exact, the general gist of his point isn't particularly refuted by those statistics. The average number of trips per year per person is 22. Your daily commuter (who will be in the 8%) is going to be doing around 200 return trips. That counterbalances quite a few people going rarely or never on the train to get down to the average. 38% are in the at least once a year, but less than once a month. I think it's fair to categorise those people as barely using the railways, the 39% who use it even less even more so. 77% of the population use it less frequently than monthly.

Speculation on why people use the railways is entirely relevant for a discussion on what the purpose of the railways is. It's been noted in other threads that at one extreme, those very frequent users are responsible for significant costs, e.g. additional and lengthened rolling stock and infrastructure to cope with the daily peaks of commuters. But on the flip side, are there costs within the industry to provide the service to someone who makes a single trip home for Christmas every year? Could that travel be done in some other mode that would produce an equally good outcome to society?



Can we really say that? Given the way finances tend to get bundled together into regions or franchises is it possible to say they're a miniscule proportion, or that the likely disproportionate cost of running them is hidden within the whole?

I don't think its fair to characterise less frequent travellers as "barely using the railway". They might well consider those 22 or so journeys as being important ones and a useful option in specific circumstsnces.

 

[Falcon1200]

Roads are more than paid for by direct taxes on users - if you don't own a car then you don't contribute to their upkeep.

That is surely not correct ? My local council, in its 2020/1 Budget Statement, stated:

• 30 roads resurfaced in first year of a £15m programme of investment in maintaining and improving roads and pavements.

You do not have to own a car in order to pay Council Tax !

 

[NoRoute]

That is surely not correct ? My local council, in its 2020/1 Budget Statement, stated:

• 30 roads resurfaced in first year of a £15m programme of investment in maintaining and improving roads and pavements.

You do not have to own a car in order to pay Council Tax !

The majority of council funding is from their central government grant, which comes from the Treasury which receives VED and fuel duty and fuel VAT. The lack of hypothecation and any traceability of tax revenue flow through to public spending prevents any demonstration of 'road users have paid for X' type discussion, but given the mismatch between road taxes and roads spending, in aggregate the road users of your town or city aren't just paying for the road repairs, they're chipping into the schools, adult social care and lots of other public services.

 

[BayPaul]

The majority of council funding is from their central government grant, which comes from the Treasury which receives VED and fuel duty and fuel VAT. The lack of hypothecation and any traceability of tax revenue flow through to public spending prevents any demonstration of 'road users have paid for X' type discussion, but given the mismatch between road taxes and roads spending, in aggregate the road users of your town or city aren't just paying for the road repairs, they're chipping into the schools, adult social care and lots of other public services.

Exactly!

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 24 Jul 2021 ==

That is surely not correct ? My local council, in its 2020/1 Budget Statement, stated:

• 30 roads resurfaced in first year of a £15m programme of investment in maintaining and improving roads and pavements.

You do not have to own a car in order to pay Council Tax !

NoRoute summed it up perfectly.

 

[edwin_m]

That is surely not correct ? My local council, in its 2020/1 Budget Statement, stated:

• 30 roads resurfaced in first year of a £15m programme of investment in maintaining and improving roads and pavements.

You do not have to own a car in order to pay Council Tax !

Local roads are essential even for those that don't drive, as they enable essential services such as waste collection as well as active travel, buses and taxis that people might be using to access a train. But long-distance roads would be pretty useless if nobody could access them via local roads, so there's clearly an unavoidable element of cross-subsidy there. Some of the maintenance costs would be incurred anyway even if the local roads only carried essential traffic, but much of them are attributable to the useage by people who could perhaps have done their journeys by other means.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Generally non-linear returns are diminishing, they work the work other way round, the first bit of spending delivers the most bang for your buck, with returns steadily reducing. Pretty logical really as the earlier spending is targetted at the projects or services with the biggest impact, the later stuff is more marginal.

Take London to Birmingham, the first bit of spending is keeping the existing WCML or Chiltern Lines open and running, that bit of spending let's you travel between London and Birmingham, very valuable, lot of retur n for your spending. The next bit of spending is the money going into HS2 to build a new line, which let's you do the same but a bit quicker, at very high price for some marginal benefit, the return is significantly diminished.

Go do some reading on why HS2 is being built. The primary driver is capacity, not speed - it is in essence 6 tracking the WCML but on a new formation as that is cheaper.

 

[NoRoute]

Go do some reading on why HS2 is being built. The primary driver is capacity, not speed - it is in essence 6 tracking the WCML but on a new formation as that is cheaper.

Doesn't matter, the benefit from adding extra capacity and extra speed is still far smaller than the benefit of simply having the existing railway.

The example of diminishing returns holds true, the bit of spending we make to keep the existing railways running gives towns and cities a railway service between them and down to London at a modest cost for significant benefit, the ratio of benefit to spending is high, lots of benefit from relatively little spending.

Adding some extra capacity and a higher speed, gives some additional benefit but it isn't transformational, you could already make all those journeys already, it may allow some additional journeys but those are relatively less important than the existing ones, the ratio of additional benefit to cost is much smaller, there is dimishing returns.

 

[tbtc]

If you want railways, you need to be able to justify them to the 95% who don't use them very often

As soon as you said 95% don't use the railways I stopped reading, how out of touch some people are.

It's a shame that you stopped reading, since my very next words were "....very often" (I'm not saying that 95% of people never use trains, just that the vast majority of people in this country don't use trains very often - as @JamesT states on this thread, over three quarters of people use trains less than once a month

Given the way that a lot of rail's use comes from people who rely on it to get to work each day (or get to school each day), there are some people who make hundreds of single journeys each year - a figure further skewed by the way that you can get best part of a thousand people on a Thameslink train through London where there's no other realistic way of absorbing several hundred people on other modes of transport - but conversely, for every person who *needs* trains for their essential daily journeys, there are significantly more people for whom the railway is only something for an annual trip to the airport, a way of visiting your parents at Christmas or an occasional means of getting to London (e.g. I'm sure that there are lots of people in provincial cities like the one I live in who never use *local* public transport but would use a train to get to London a couple of times a year)

That's the problem with any specialist forum - people on here like trains, people on here use trains more often than average, some people on here forget that they aren't representative of "typical" people and that the railway which we base our lives around is an irrelevance for tens of millions of people - we've seen it with Corbynites and Remainers - people who spend a lot of time hearing only what they want to hear and therefore painfully surprised when they realise that they are in a minority - I'm sure that there are people who follow other "minority" things who assume that everyone in the country is keeping up with K-Pop or Golf or Veganism just because they spend their time online discussing this topic and forget that other most people really don't care.

That's obviously not to say that railways are A Bad Thing or that we should close all of them or that there's any problem with the people who do rely on trains, but I think some people on this thread need a bit more perspective about the railway's place in national priorities. It's obviously increasingly easy these days to fall down a rabbit hole (now we can select new feeds that agree with what we want to hear) where you only read about things that you are interested in and only focus on stories that confirm your existing bias, but it's good to remember occasionally that these can be minority pursuits

(I guess you won't have read any of this though and will have switched off after the first couple of words)

Whist it is generally a pleasure to read your posts, I fear that you are sorely mistaken about rail usage. 8% of English people use the train once or more a week, with 61% - a clear majority of the population - using the train more than once a year (source).

Perhaps you are thinking of aviation? 7% of the English use the plane once or more per year, with the remaining 93% using it less than yearly or never.

So with that said, and most people using a train, any speculation as to whether the train is needed is for the birds

Apologies, 92% of people don't use trains very often (although I'd guess that the figures for train travel would be slightly different outside of England, given how much London skews that, given that there are no realistic ways of getting high volumes of people through London otherwise, whereas e.g. Glasgow has two motorways a stone's throw from the city centre)

But (whilst I'm not disputing your figures) I don't think that we can put a great deal of significance on the people who only make one return journey a year on average - one of the justifications on here for heavy rail is that it's a vital public service which people couldn't cope without - I just feel that if people only use it once a year then they are coping without it pretty well

Don't get me wrong, I like the railway, I want the railway to succeed at doing what it does best but I think we need to find better ways of justifying it

Then the entire discussion is meaningless, since that is basically what all these discussions boil down to - because a society without a railway would operate dramatically different from the current one

In London and maybe a few other cities, yes

Speculation on why people use the railways is entirely relevant for a discussion on what the purpose of the railways is. It's been noted in other threads that at one extreme, those very frequent users are responsible for significant costs, e.g. additional and lengthened rolling stock and infrastructure to cope with the daily peaks of commuters. But on the flip side, are there costs within the industry to provide the service to someone who makes a single trip home for Christmas every year? Could that travel be done in some other mode that would produce an equally good outcome to society?

This is something I'd be interested to discuss more.

On one hand, the commuters into big cities seem to be heavily subsidised (given that their fares are discounted by buying annual season tickets, the railway is spending a lot of money on carriages that are only required on two journeys a day, we have spent money on infrastructure to accommodate twelve coach trains at platforms that certainly don't need that amount of capacity outside of peak times)...

...but at least that's a stable demand, it's reliable, it's something that the railway can base revenue expectations around. Whereas things like ensuring extra resources are available for things like the Cheltenham Festival or Glastonbury or summer holiday jaunts to Cornwall or the rush at Christmas to visit relatives means we may be spending a lot of money relative to the "once a year" tickets that get sold

If you need to have an EMU to carry several hundred people into central London and back fifty plus weeks a year then those costs are spread over a lot of people making a lot of journeys - but the people doing one or two journeys a year aren't paying a true cost relative to the capacity that is under-utilised the rest of the year

I don't think its fair to characterise less frequent travellers as "barely using the railway". They might well consider those 22 or so journeys as being important ones and a useful option in specific circumstsnces.

I don't think that there are many people who make twenty two journeys a year

We may have an average of twenty two (single?) journeys a year but that's skewed by a lot of people who do hundreds of single journeys a year commuting whilst a lot of people will make either a couple of single journeys a year or none whatsoever

Certainly on here, we will have some enthusiasts who use the train for hundreds of single journeys a year, but these kind of people skew the mean average (the mode average will presumably be be zero single journeys a year, with two the second most common number)

Again though, we come to the @yorksrob "useful" - that slippery way of justifying unquantifiable things

 

[yorksrob]

It's a shame that you stopped reading, since my very next words were "....very often" (I'm not saying that 95% of people never use trains, just that the vast majority of people in this country don't use trains very often - as @JamesT states on this thread, over three quarters of people use trains less than once a month

Given the way that a lot of rail's use comes from people who rely on it to get to work each day (or get to school each day), there are some people who make hundreds of single journeys each year - a figure further skewed by the way that you can get best part of a thousand people on a Thameslink train through London where there's no other realistic way of absorbing several hundred people on other modes of transport - but conversely, for every person who *needs* trains for their essential daily journeys, there are significantly more people for whom the railway is only something for an annual trip to the airport, a way of visiting your parents at Christmas or an occasional means of getting to London (e.g. I'm sure that there are lots of people in provincial cities like the one I live in who never use *local* public transport but would use a train to get to London a couple of times a year)

That's the problem with any specialist forum - people on here like trains, people on here use trains more often than average, some people on here forget that they aren't representative of "typical" people and that the railway which we base our lives around is an irrelevance for tens of millions of people - we've seen it with Corbynites and Remainers - people who spend a lot of time hearing only what they want to hear and therefore painfully surprised when they realise that they are in a minority - I'm sure that there are people who follow other "minority" things who assume that everyone in the country is keeping up with K-Pop or Golf or Veganism just because they spend their time online discussing this topic and forget that other most people really don't care.

That's obviously not to say that railways are A Bad Thing or that we should close all of them or that there's any problem with the people who do rely on trains, but I think some people on this thread need a bit more perspective about the railway's place in national priorities. It's obviously increasingly easy these days to fall down a rabbit hole (now we can select new feeds that agree with what we want to hear) where you only read about things that you are interested in and only focus on stories that confirm your existing bias, but it's good to remember occasionally that these can be minority pursuits

(I guess you won't have read any of this though and will have switched off after the first couple of words)



Apologies, 92% of people don't use trains very often (although I'd guess that the figures for train travel would be slightly different outside of England, given how much London skews that, given that there are no realistic ways of getting high volumes of people through London otherwise, whereas e.g. Glasgow has two motorways a stone's throw from the city centre)

But (whilst I'm not disputing your figures) I don't think that we can put a great deal of significance on the people who only make one return journey a year on average - one of the justifications on here for heavy rail is that it's a vital public service which people couldn't cope without - I just feel that if people only use it once a year then they are coping without it pretty well

Don't get me wrong, I like the railway, I want the railway to succeed at doing what it does best but I think we need to find better ways of justifying it



In London and maybe a few other cities, yes



This is something I'd be interested to discuss more.

On one hand, the commuters into big cities seem to be heavily subsidised (given that their fares are discounted by buying annual season tickets, the railway is spending a lot of money on carriages that are only required on two journeys a day, we have spent money on infrastructure to accommodate twelve coach trains at platforms that certainly don't need that amount of capacity outside of peak times)...

...but at least that's a stable demand, it's reliable, it's something that the railway can base revenue expectations around. Whereas things like ensuring extra resources are available for things like the Cheltenham Festival or Glastonbury or summer holiday jaunts to Cornwall or the rush at Christmas to visit relatives means we may be spending a lot of money relative to the "once a year" tickets that get sold

If you need to have an EMU to carry several hundred people into central London and back fifty plus weeks a year then those costs are spread over a lot of people making a lot of journeys - but the people doing one or two journeys a year aren't paying a true cost relative to the capacity that is under-utilised the rest of the year



I don't think that there are many people who make twenty two journeys a year

We may have an average of twenty two (single?) journeys a year but that's skewed by a lot of people who do hundreds of single journeys a year commuting whilst a lot of people will make either a couple of single journeys a year or none whatsoever

Certainly on here, we will have some enthusiasts who use the train for hundreds of single journeys a year, but these kind of people skew the mean average (the mode average will presumably be be zero single journeys a year, with two the second most common number)

Again though, we come to the @yorksrob "useful" - that slippery way of justifying unquantifiable things

One quantifies the term "useful" by the millions of miles travelled by train over a normal year.

 

[Meerkat]

Tomorrow I will be traveling by rail to a football match. I will visit a couple of pubs, buy some food, buy my match ticket. All of these will contribute to the economy, including through direct taxation, which will likely outweigh any subsidy on the rail fare. Without the rail service none of my spending tomorrow would be possible.

You’d still have that money and would almost certainly spend it anyway, contributing to the economy.

 

[HSTEd]

Generally non-linear returns are diminishing, they work the work other way round, the first bit of spending delivers the most bang for your buck, with returns steadily reducing. Pretty logical really as the earlier spending is targetted at the projects or services with the biggest impact, the later stuff is more marginal.

Take London to Birmingham, the first bit of spending is keeping the existing WCML or Chiltern Lines open and running, that bit of spending let's you travel between London and Birmingham, very valuable, lot of retur n for your spending. The next bit of spending is the money going into HS2 to build a new line, which let's you do the same but a bit quicker, at very high price for some marginal benefit, the return is significantly diminished.

The obvious counterexample is a short train.

Doubling the length of the train doubles capacity with less than a doubling of cost.

Ultimately I believe the best way to make the railway more cost effective is to pursue volume above all else.
Attempt to pile it high and sell it cheap

 

[yorksrob]

The obvious counterexample is a short train.

Doubling the length of the train doubles capacity with less than a doubling of cost.

Ultimately I believe the best way to make the railway more cost effective is to pursue volume above all else.
Attempt to pile it high and sell it cheap

This is spot on. More bums on more seats.

Unfortunately I think the way rolling stock is leased mitigates against expanding capacity in this way.

 

[NoRoute]

The obvious counterexample is a short train.

Doubling the length of the train doubles capacity with less than a doubling of cost.

But it doesn't double the number of passengers willing to buy full price fares, as the train gets longer and longer, you need to lower fares further and further to entice more people to travel and fill the train.

That's the classic situation for most products and services, they start with small volumes and high prices selling to buyers willing to pay the most, over time supply expands and prices need to fall to attract more customers and continue falling until the cost of increasing supply reaches the point that the cost exceeds what the extra customers are willing to pay.

Ultimately I believe the best way to make the railway more cost effective is to pursue volume above all else.
Attempt to pile it high and sell it cheap

Probably not one answer, varying for different routes and services, it seems like there's some services and routes where rail could be more competitive and get a bigger share of the market if it had lower fares, longer trains etc.

 

[HSTEd]

But it doesn't double the number of passengers willing to buy full price fares, as the train gets longer and longer, you need to lower fares further and further to entice more people to travel and fill the train.

And?

Cutting fares to drive increased volume is an entirely reasonable strategy?

It doesn't even matter if the financial position of the railway is nominally worse if society gets more for every pound it spends - in fares, subsidies and externalities

 

[NoRoute]

And?

Cutting fares to drive increased volume is an entirely reasonable strategy?

Yes, but your original point was that doubling spending delivers more than double the benefits, but as you expand it further the extra services you provide are not more valuable, they are steadily declining in values. There's diminishing returns at work, you expand by attracting passengers and freight flows for whom the rail service is less useful or valuable and who need lower pricing to be enticed to use it.

It doesn't even matter if the financial position of the railway is nominally worse if society gets more for every pound it spends - in fares, subsidies and externalities

Of course it matters, it's only possible if society, I.e. tax payers are will to step in and provide the subsidy needed to fund the deteriorating financial position, which at the moment given the huge deficit seems unlikely.

 

[HSTEd]

Of course it matters, it's only possible if society, I.e. tax payers are will to step in and provide the subsidy needed to fund the deteriorating financial position, which at the moment given the huge deficit seems unlikely.

That depends on how much the railway can offer for the money?

 

[yorksrob]

Indeed. The railway has a huge sunk cost, so if you spend a small proportion more to enhance capacity, the overall cost per journey facilitated goes down.

 

[Dr Hoo]

The 'longer trains' (still only needing one driver and often one guard) argument seems quite seductive but it is often a lot more complicated than that.

For example the original Thameslink concept was developed around 8-car trains, which fitted quite nicely in existing depots at Bedford and elsewhere, along with platforms along various parts of the route.

Going to 12-cars has meant eye-watering investment in things like re-building Blackfriars station, re-building Farringdon, re-building St Pancras Thameslink platforms, new depots at Cricklewood and Three Bridges, power supply upgrades, etc.. The increased number of passengers has also triggered the needs for enhancements at places like East Croydon, St Albans, Gatwick Airport and so on.

As a general rule 'intervening' on existing sites is massively disruptive with stage-works, engineering possessions, replacement buses... (This often depresses revenue in the short term as well.)

Hence the fact that it is often cheaper to build a brand new high-capacity line from scratch to modern standards.

 

[Falcon1200]

The majority of council funding is from their central government grant, which comes from the Treasury which receives VED and fuel duty and fuel VAT.

True, although the Treasury receives its income from far more sources than just road users, and road building and maintenance are by no means the only costs incurred by the road transport industry. Which also does not alter the fact that a proportion of Council Tax income, which too is raised from motorists and non-motorists alike, is spent on roads.

 

[BrianW]

The question is a fair one

We can have discussions about abolishing the monarchy, about leaving/joining the EU, about Scottish independence or Irish unification and about all sorts of other things that affect the future of the UK, but it's preposterous to discuss the future of heavy rail?

The railways need billions of pounds in subsidy but around 95% of people barely use them, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to occasionally ask the question about what the UK taxpayers are getting for their money (without getting emotional about the straw-man idea of killing tens of millions of people, or trying to balance it out by the economic benefits of purchasing a couple of pints or justifying the subsidy on the grounds that coach seats aren't as comfortable)

Heavy rail does a number of things very well, there's a sweet spot of time/distance where it's cheap/ efficient/ convenient/ popular (and there are enough people travelling between the same two places, or on the same corridor) - you generally wouldn't wait on a train for journeys of under a mile but there aren't a lot of non-London flows of over a hundred miles where there are enough people going between two places to make a service viable (sometimes a service works okay because it's lots of different flows tied together - e.g. there aren't a lot of Portsmouth - Cardiff passengers but a direct service serves a few significant places so there are enough overlapping flows)

If you want railways, you need to be able to justify them to the 95% who don't use them very often (or don't use them at all) - we live in a country that has closed large numbers of libraries/ sports pitches/ hospital wards/ Sure Starts etc - we can't guarantee the lightly used branch lines will carry on being subsidised long term - we need to be able to come up with good reasons (how much more efficient it is to move five hundred people between two cities fifty miles apart compared to putting those people in cars/ buses/ planes)

Look at how BR managed to close stations pretty much every year in their final fifteen years whilst also growing the overall market (nowadays we'd have squeals that "closing Sinfin Central will significantly deplete passengers connecting onto InterCity services through Derby and the long distance trains through Derby rely on passengers changing from the Sinfin branch to keep them viable" - whereas BR realised that you could trim back certain branches whilst keeping the main network viable and growing)

But let's not pretend that it's the best solution for every market that it currently serves or that heavy rail is sacred - the fact that some people seem so squeamish about giving proper justifications suggests that they know that some lines are a busted flush and are scared of attention being focussed on them...

I agree- the question is not only fair but necessary.
Few of us has enough money to do all we would like- let alone what others would like- same for government, who are trying to please everyone!(or at least please enough of those they represent).
People want a holiday (or two) and a health service that will meet their individual need ... and a train to their Gran's at Christmas.
Which came first, the cut of 'holiday trains' or the 'demise' of such as Bude, Padstow and Perranporth. Most 'resorts' are indeed still going and still served by train.
I'm hopeful that Covid will have wrought changes many of which will be long-lasting and beneficial- more services will be more regular, more reliable and more comfortable with shallower 'peaks'.
Road transport has huge changes ahead with electrification and autonomous vehicles and offers point-to-point at the desired time- rail can't compete with that.
Beeching identified what rail was best for. He was a prophet, hated in his day and for decades since. InterCity, Parkways, Linertrains, ... Messenger to be shot!
tbtc puts it well, if uncomfortably for some. Laurels to Reston?