Do branch lines contribute much financially to the greater network?

[Failed Unit]

I must admit it is a hard one to answer. Back in the days of GNER they definitely viewed the branch lines as a problem and decided to run buses to places like Bradford / Lincoln. Neither lasted long but they had no interest in the 50 or so passengers (in the case of Lincoln) that used the train to get to Newark wanting them to drive instead so they pay parking at Newark.

i don’t think that if all branches closed it would make any difference to the larger network. People would drive to the nearest railhead. That said would people from Manchester bother doing a day trip to Windermere if the branch closed? Possibly not if traffic / parking was bad but that is Windermere that has lost rather than the railway.

Most regional services will never make a profit. As many managers have said once you cover the fixed costs it is hard to make a profit even if you manage to fill your 2 car DMU every trip. Alan Williams (modern railways) often asks why engineering standards can’t be lowered on a branch line. Lighter trains etc. BR tried this with the pacers, but comfort lost (sure it didn’t need to be that way)

I don’t think that branches help the inter-city (or larger rail networks) but they do help the community they serve. Does Nottingham- Worksop make a profit (maybe not). However I am sure the people living, appreciate it. We spend x on subsidies to these services but if they go will we spend as much on regeneration for these communities?

 

[Dr Day]

The railway industry has had sophisticated means of allocating revenue (and journeys) for over 30 years, so on that side those with access to the data (derived from ticket sales) can easily establish the contribution made by each station-to-station section of track anywhere on the network. Several 'insiders' on this forum will therefore be able to answer this question on the passenger demand side, but I'm not aware this has ever been put in the public domain as it would be considered confidential. On the cost side TOC and Infrastructure operational and maintenance costs are less easy to allocate with more overheads and lumpy elements such as major renewals. Bringing the 'value' of freight into the mix is also complex.

I'd be amazed if DfT/TS are not at least trying to get their heads around where taxpayers' money is going and whether they are getting value for money. Rural branch lines would appear to be an obvious place to start looking, as in general they serve fewer people in absolute terms and with lower density catchments are less likely to be competitive relative to lower cost modes for the door-to-door journeys people actually make to/from and within the areas they serve.

Different branches perform different roles - some are primarily used for journeys wholly on the branch (eg St Ives, with the P&R or Falmouth with high numbers of students) and others do act more as feeders for longer distance trips (eg Newquay in the summer) so do make a bigger contribution per passenger carried to the wider network.

 

[AndrewE]

The railway industry has had sophisticated means of allocating revenue (and journeys) for over 30 years,

Management accounting again! You have to look behind the results, you need to see who paid the designers, and the objectives given to the poeple who drew up the methodology

I'd be amazed if DfT/TS are not at least trying to get their heads around where taxpayers' money is going and whether they are getting value for money.

My (personal) experience of the civil service is that they have had their numbers cut so drastically and are so demoralised that they can't do a proper job on anything like this wher edetail matters nowadays. I would be amazed if they can do anything more than a quick look-see.
They might know that they (at least) ought to try, but deadlines and staffing are such that the politically-driven "special advisors" tell them the [party] line which has to be justified.
I heard that a colleague was asked to find some "policy-based evidence" (when legitimate government makes evidence-based policy!)

 

[Dr Day]

Management accounting again! You have to look behind the results, you need to see who paid the designers, and the objectives given to the poeple who drew up the methodology

This would have been well pre-privatisation (late 1980s?), by in-house personnel (external consultants other than academics weren't nearly such a big thing back then) hence presumably funded by the British Railways Board themselves as a means of understanding their business and being able to make decisions on a more data-driven basis than Beeching et al a couple of decades or so earlier. The fact that the same methodology remains in use today for inter-available tickets where you can't tell which train has been used may indicate it wasn't actually that bad.

 

[simonw]

Management accounting is at the root of this problem. Invented to help companies maximise their "bottom line" and - by turning everything into an apparent financial outcome - allowed, justified or encouraged lots of businesses to walk away from their social obligations, or dump small parts of their operations. Also completely ignored the reliability value of managing your own supply chain.

It completely ignores the bigger picture, and in the public policy world (e.g. assessing constituent parts of the railway network) it has proved to be a catastrophe.

Why have we in the UK got fewer hospital beds per head than anywhere else in Europe, or less intensive care provision relative to the number hospital beds? (That was a good idea wasn't it?) Ask the accountants! They truly know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Good job the railways were still publicly accountable when Beeching did his work, or else we would be far worse off now. (Just my opinion!)

I don't think you understand what management accounting is.

 

[Bald Rick]

My (personal) experience of the civil service is that they have had their numbers cut so drastically and are so demoralised that they can't do a proper job on anything like this wher edetail matters nowadays. I would be amazed if they can do anything more than a quick look-see.

TOCs have this data and will know the answers already. It is part of their core business to know costs and revenue in granular detail.

And one thing the DfT is not short of is economists.

 

[muddythefish]

I must admit it is a hard one to answer. Back in the days of GNER they definitely viewed the branch lines as a problem and decided to run buses to places like Bradford / Lincoln.

I'm sure Bradfordians would be amused/astonished/annoyed to hear that as a city of 350,000 plus people they live at the end of a branch line

 

[quantinghome]

Branch lines started to be closed in the 1930s and closures carried on long after Beeching, so it's pretty obvious there is some sound economics underpinning it. A similar process happened in other countries, although not to the same extent as their networks tended to be planned on a more sound basis than Britain's "build whatever you want, mate" in the heyday of railway construction.

Beeching's mistake was to think that by closing the most uneconomic lines the railway as a whole could return to profit. That was never going to happen given the decline in freight, which was the only thing the railway really made money on.

Ultimately though, even if many branch lines were economic basket cases, given the relatively small sums involved compared to the overall network, closing them was never going to help that much.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 7 Jan 2022 ==

I'm sure Bradfordians would be amused/astonished/annoyed to hear that as a city of 350,000 plus people they live at the end of a branch line

The amusing/astonishing/annoying thing is that it's essentially a correct description, as least as far as Intercity services go.

 

[Failed Unit]

I'm sure Bradfordians would be amused/astonished/annoyed to hear that as a city of 350,000 plus people they live at the end of a branch line

As far as GNER were concerned they were, Lincoln although smaller wasn't impressed either. But Bradford really did highlight the contempt that GNER showed to the rest of the network as at the time if I recall most of the day it had at least 4tph from Leeds so they could have very easily worked with RRNE to offer something better. But hey that was GNER - good in some things, but absolutely no interest in an integrated rail network. Although they never got off the ground they wanted to build 3x park and ride stations to help people avoid needing to use local services. I suspect if they had opened they would have reduced calls at other stations, such as Doncaster would have seen a significant drop in calls if the M18 parkway had opened.

 

[The exile]

Beeching was interviewed many years later and said he didn't have any regrets , even going as far as questioning the need to have the line from.Newcastle to Edinburgh kept as it only benefits the residents of Berwick on Tweed!

This demonstrating the blinkered mentality that is / was half the problem- only end-to-end traffic counts!

 

[A0]

This demonstrating the blinkered mentality that is / was half the problem- only end-to-end traffic counts!

A bad example to make such a point - between Newcastle and Edinburgh there really isn't anywhere significant en route.

Even now Morpeth (the biggest place along there) is only 14,000 people. The whole of Northumberland only has a population of 320k even today. Cumbria has almost 500k by comparison.

Back then Edinburgh - London trains could have been diverted via the Carlisle and the WCML with a minimal time penalty - looking at Timetable world, the 1963 Eastern Region timetable shows London - Edinburgh services took ~6 hours Glasgow - Euston ~ 7 hours. Carlisle - Euston in ~ 5 hours - so a via Carlisle, Edinburgh service would have been 6 - 6.5 hours.

 

[swt_passenger]

A bad example to make such a point - between Newcastle and Edinburgh there really isn't anywhere significant en route.

Even now Morpeth (the biggest place along there) is only 14,000 people. The whole of Northumberland only has a population of 320k even today. Cumbria has almost 500k by comparison...

Yeah, but Northumberland had a huge proportion removed in order to create Tyne and Wear. I suspect the addition of North Tyneside and Gosforth etc would move the goalposts a bit..

 

[MattRat]

Depends on the branch line. Some suffer becuase of the focus on cars over trains, while others suffer becuase they make no sense, like Ormskirk to Preston, where really the line should be a direct route between Preston and Liverpool, instead of having to either go on a sightseeing tour, or waiting for ages at either Preston or Ormskirk. But, when managed properly, branch lines support the network by funneling passengers onto the mainline. And I think that's the key. Branch lines on their own aren't bad per se, but mismanagement of them is. So, we should focus on managing them better.

 

[simonw]

Depends on the branch line. Some suffer becuase of the focus on cars over trains, while others suffer becuase they make no sense, like Ormskirk to Preston, where really the line should be a direct route between Preston and Liverpool, instead of having to either go on a sightseeing tour, or waiting for ages at either Preston or Ormskirk. But, when managed properly, branch lines support the network by funneling passengers onto the mainline. And I think that's the key. Branch lines on their own aren't bad per se, but mismanagement of them is. So, we should focus on managing them better.

Genuine question, do you have financial evidence that branch lines funnel passengers on to the submission enough numbers to cover their costs?

 

[tbtc]

Depends on the branch line. Some suffer becuase of the focus on cars over trains, while others suffer becuase they make no sense, like Ormskirk to Preston, where really the line should be a direct route between Preston and Liverpool, instead of having to either go on a sightseeing tour, or waiting for ages at either Preston or Ormskirk

I appreciate that Liverpool - Ormskirk - Preston is a straighter line than the current direct trains take (via Wigan), but Liverpool Moorfields to Ormskirk is just over half an hour and Ormskirk to Preston is just over half an hour, whereas the current Liverpool Lime Street to Preston service takes fifty one minutes (despite not going as the crow flies), so any service via the more "direct" route is going to struggle to compete with a "sightseeing tour" of Wigan

You could run "express" services to shave off a few minutes but the number of services through Sandhills is going to make that difficult... even if you skip all fourteen intermediate stations and reduce the journey time by fourteen minutes then you're probably looking at being five minutes faster than the Wigan route, at best (?)

(I'm using Moorfields rather than Central to give the Ormskirk line a fighting chance, although Central is probably more use for the city centre - if we use Central instead then the Ormskirk route is even less competitive)

 

[A0]

Yeah, but Northumberland had a huge proportion removed in order to create Tyne and Wear. I suspect the addition of North Tyneside and Gosforth etc would move the goalposts a bit..

None of which are directly served by the ECML - which was the point. The ECML between Newcastle & Edinburgh really doesn't serve anywhere significant even today.

 

[RT4038]

Depends on the branch line. Some suffer becuase of the focus on cars over trains, while others suffer becuase they make no sense, like Ormskirk to Preston, where really the line should be a direct route between Preston and Liverpool, instead of having to either go on a sightseeing tour, or waiting for ages at either Preston or Ormskirk. But, when managed properly, branch lines support the network by funneling passengers onto the mainline. And I think that's the key. Branch lines on their own aren't bad per se, but mismanagement of them is. So, we should focus on managing them better.

Of course it depends on the branch line. The Torbay branch no doubt funnels worthwhile numbers of passengers onto the main line to cover its costs of operation and contribute to the overall financial wellbeing of the main line. The next branch going west (Plymouth-Gunnislake) undoubtedly does not. Nothing to do with mismanagement - all to do with demographics/population density and geography.

I do not agree with your assessment of Preston-Ormskirk (-Liverpool). The cost of upgrading and operating this line to main line operation (so trains can run fast enough to shave a significant time off the current route via Wigan) would far exceed the likely benefits. The current situation appears to be quite the opposite of mismanagement.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I think @MattRat may also be overestimating the end to end Preston<->Liverpool demand a bit. There will be some commuting, but in either city if it doesn't have the facility you want you are much more likely to look towards Manchester or even Birmingham and London. Liverpool does lack services to Scotland but you can change at Wigan onto those, most won't choose to sit on a rattly 319 for another three stops. The demand on both routes will more be people going from suburbs or nearby small/medium towns (e.g. Ormskirk, St Helens etc) to somewhere bigger (i.e. Liverpool or Preston) for work or leisure purposes.

 

[davetheguard]

A bad example to make such a point - between Newcastle and Edinburgh there really isn't anywhere significant en route.

Even now Morpeth (the biggest place along there) is only 14,000 people. The whole of Northumberland only has a population of 320k even today. Cumbria has almost 500k by comparison.

Back then Edinburgh - London trains could have been diverted via the Carlisle and the WCML with a minimal time penalty - looking at Timetable world, the 1963 Eastern Region timetable shows London - Edinburgh services took ~6 hours Glasgow - Euston ~ 7 hours. Carlisle - Euston in ~ 5 hours - so a via Carlisle, Edinburgh service would have been 6 - 6.5 hours.

But what about the people who live in the large city of Newcastle and want to go to Edinburgh, or Edinburgh to Newcastle? Do we want a national network (I do!); or just a series of radial spokes that allow people to travel to/from London?

 

[deltic]

The railway industry has had sophisticated means of allocating revenue (and journeys) for over 30 years, so on that side those with access to the data (derived from ticket sales) can easily establish the contribution made by each station-to-station section of track anywhere on the network. Several 'insiders' on this forum will therefore be able to answer this question on the passenger demand side, but I'm not aware this has ever been put in the public domain as it would be considered confidential. On the cost side TOC and Infrastructure operational and maintenance costs are less easy to allocate with more overheads and lumpy elements such as major renewals. Bringing the 'value' of freight into the mix is also complex.

I'd be amazed if DfT/TS are not at least trying to get their heads around where taxpayers' money is going and whether they are getting value for money. Rural branch lines would appear to be an obvious place to start looking, as in general they serve fewer people in absolute terms and with lower density catchments are less likely to be competitive relative to lower cost modes for the door-to-door journeys people actually make to/from and within the areas they serve.

Different branches perform different roles - some are primarily used for journeys wholly on the branch (eg St Ives, with the P&R or Falmouth with high numbers of students) and others do act more as feeders for longer distance trips (eg Newquay in the summer) so do make a bigger contribution per passenger carried to the wider network.

For me this is the biggest flaw with the railways that there is so little information in the public domain about the level of subsidy or profit made by any particular route. The TOCs should know but DfT don't seem to. There is no reason why any of this information should be confidential.

 

[Mcr Warrior]

None of which are directly served by the ECML - which was the point. The ECML between Newcastle & Edinburgh really doesn't serve anywhere significant even today.

Depends how you define 'significant'.

Berwick-upon-Tweed has a population of c. 13,500+.

 

[A0]

Depends how you define 'significant'.

Berwick-upon-Tweed has a population of c. 13,500+.

At least 25,000.

"Average" middle England market towns, so not county towns or anything like that, such as Banbury, Kettering, Macclesfield, Burton on Trent are all bigger than that by quite a margin.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 8 Jan 2022 ==

But what about the people who live in the large city of Newcastle and want to go to Edinburgh, or Edinburgh to Newcastle? Do we want a national network (I do!); or just a series of radial spokes that allow people to travel to/from London?

The option would no doubt have been the same as is used when the Berwick line is closed i.e. via Carlisle.

And Newcastle on its own isn't a large city - you're no doubtblooking at Tyneside, but is there *that much* demand for travel between Newcastle and Edinburgh? Back in the 60s the service was pretty sparse.

 

[swt_passenger]

None of which are directly served by the ECML - which was the point. The ECML between Newcastle & Edinburgh really doesn't serve anywhere significant even today.

True.

 

[MattRat]

Do we want a national network (I do!); or just a series of radial spokes that allow people to travel to/from London?

I think we know what London wants.....

 

[RT4038]

But what about the people who live in the large city of Newcastle and want to go to Edinburgh, or Edinburgh to Newcastle? Do we want a national network (I do!); or just a series of radial spokes that allow people to travel to/from London?

I think that this has to be looked at in the context of the perceived situation of 1963. The railways were losing traffic fast, everybody wanted cars and many fewer long distance passenger journeys were being made than today. In your example, people could travel by train from Edinburgh to Newcastle via Carlisle, or they could have travelled via Berwick by a splendid motor omnibus. The brief was a profitable railway rather than a national network, and on that basis having two lines travelling quite some distance through sparsely inhabited countryside was indeed wasteful.

This is not the thread to discuss whether this brief was right or wrong!

 

[tbtc]

But what about the people who live in the large city of Newcastle and want to go to Edinburgh, or Edinburgh to Newcastle? Do we want a national network (I do!); or just a series of radial spokes that allow people to travel to/from London?

Newcastle on its own isn't a large city - you're no doubtblooking at Tyneside, but is there *that much* demand for travel between Newcastle and Edinburgh? Back in the 60s the service was pretty sparse.

I think that this has to be looked at in the context of the perceived situation of 1963. The railways were losing traffic fast, everybody wanted cars and many fewer long distance passenger journeys were being made than today. In your example, people could travel by train from Edinburgh to Newcastle via Carlisle, or they could have travelled via Berwick by a splendid motor omnibus. The brief was a profitable railway rather than a national network, and on that basis having two lines travelling quite some distance through sparsely inhabited countryside was indeed wasteful.

This is not the thread to discuss whether this brief was right or wrong!

As a Scot living in Yorkshire, I know that the line from Edinburgh to Newcastle can be very busy

Less so in 1963 though.

And if you removed the "Edinburgh to London" passengers by putting them on the WCML (Carlisle is east of Edinburgh, remember) then would the numbers have been enough to warrant much more than a two coach DMU every couple of hours? This was a different era

Then again, it's the same with the WCML - if the Glasgow to London passengers were to use the ECML instead then would the low population density between Motherwell and Lancaster warrant retaining the current route? (maybe you'd retain the GSW and the Cumbrian Coast though)

For me this is the biggest flaw with the railways that there is so little information in the public domain about the level of subsidy or profit made by any particular route. The TOCs should know but DfT don't seem to. There is no reason why any of this information should be confidential.

I think we're in "Be Careful What You Wish For" territory here - I'm sure that the Government know what subsidy is required - they are the ones with access to LENNON etc and who know how much subsidy each TOC requires - but do you really want it to be public knowledge?

Put it this way, the figures a few years ago were that Wales'n'Borders and Northern both needed an average subsidy of 40p per passenger mile (I think ScotRail and Merseyrail were higher, but not disclosed) - some four coach services in rush hour might require very minimal subsidy (or even return a slight profit) but that just means that some services require pounds worth of subsidy per passenger mile (e.g. the services where the combined number of passengers barely pays the cost of the couple of gallons per mile fuel bill yet alone the wages for the driver/guard or any of the other costs... do you really want a world where the Taxpayers Alliance types can latch onto the "ten pounds per mile" that some passengers are effectively subsidised, the headlines about how it'd be cheaper to hire limousines for passengers etc?

PTEs do publish figures on the subsidy per passenger required for some tendered bus services, and it can be eye-watering - and that's just for a minibus with one member of staff on board and no signalling/ track access charges etc to worry about

 

[PTR 444]

But what about the people who live in the large city of Newcastle and want to go to Edinburgh, or Edinburgh to Newcastle? Do we want a national network (I do!); or just a series of radial spokes that allow people to travel to/from London?

Newcastle to Edinburgh had (and still has) an alternative route via Carlisle. The ultimate question is whether it would have been much quicker than going via Berwick.

 

[davetheguard]

Newcastle to Edinburgh had (and still has) an alternative route via Carlisle. The ultimate question is whether it would have been much quicker than going via Berwick.

It's an alternative route alright - but it's like going round two sides of a triangle instead of one. It'll just about do when there's engineering work, but how much market share would rail keep if it was the only route day in, day out?

Of course all this is off topic, but this discussion in a way mirrors what happened under Beeching. The branch lines were closed under part one of the report, but the railways still lost money, so part two closed so-called duplicate main lines, forgetting that they also served intermediate towns (or dismissing them as too small like Berwick on Tweed up thread).

People will of course say "ah with the benefit of hindsight..." and they're right that helps a lot. What I don't really understand is why, with benefit of hindsight, some people still think further cuts to the network is a good idea.

 

[Bald Rick]

For me this is the biggest flaw with the railways that there is so little information in the public domain about the level of subsidy or profit made by any particular route. The TOCs should know but DfT don't seem to. There is no reason why any of this information should be confidential.

DfT do know.

I speculate here that the reason it is kept out of the public eye is because if it was, there would be many people calling for closures.

 

[Railwaysceptic]

Branch lines started to be closed in the 1930s and closures carried on long after Beeching, so it's pretty obvious there is some sound economics underpinning it. A similar process happened in other countries, although not to the same extent as their networks tended to be planned on a more sound basis than Britain's "build whatever you want, mate" in the heyday of railway construction.

Beeching's mistake was to think that by closing the most uneconomic lines the railway as a whole could return to profit. That was never going to happen given the decline in freight, which was the only thing the railway really made money on.

Dr. Beeching did not believe that closing loss-making branch lines would on its own make B.R. profitable. He was very specific that B.R. needed to gain a share of the new freight markets in consumer products, that the main lines needed to be used more intensively, that the "spare" passenger stock for peak hour only services and football "specials" should be reduced and that the busy commuter services needed to be rationalised.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 9 Jan 2022 ==

People will of course say "ah with the benefit of hindsight..." and they're right that helps a lot. What I don't really understand is why, with benefit of hindsight, some people still think further cuts to the network is a good idea.

Almost no-one today suggests that railways lines should be closed. Many people believe the railway should keep its costs down and that includes running loss-making services as economically as possible.