In which case, why does Government not run the Health industry indirectly, with the real people in charge understanding Health? Probably all connected with politics and funding, as it would be with railways. and which there is no escape (as British Railways knew so well)
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Do branch lines contribute much financially to the greater network?
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I like to view it as a distinction between "rail enthusiast" and "public transport advocate".
If you ask my opinion as a rail enthusiast in a fantasy world I'll gladly go along with many of the pet moans and say that there should be more loco-hauled services; more weird workings; more re-openings; more new lines; more services operated with old stock; more unpredictability; more nostalgia; the entire set. I'd lend my voice to those calling for the return of Network SouthEast, for All Line Rovers to cost tuppence ha'penny and be valid for a month without any peak restrictions; for droplights galore; for the reintroduction of compartment coaches; basically everything that enthusiasts like about BR but without any of the pesky government interference, and all tailored precisely to my exact interests and my utmost comfort.
In the real world though I recognise that we can't run the railways as a theme park for people who miss the simplicity of their younger years. We have to be pragmatic about how we we plan and deliver services, because we need to ensure that money is being used efficiently and in the way by which it delivers the most benefit - hence the discussion about public transport and not specifically rail transport. That means acknowledging that there will be times where using heavy rail is akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, that there are times where a significant proportion of the benefit of the railway can be delivered by another mode at a much lower cost. It means arguing that there are, unfortunately, railway lines and services that suck up large sums of money and return little benefit and that those lines and services might be better run as coaches. It means arguing for changes in regulation to allow better integration and co-operation between services and modes even when these changes, by conventional wisdom, appear to be anti-competitive. It means arguing for changes that upset long-established practice, and long-established understanding.
Perhaps most importantly though it means acknowledging that there are a vast number of competing demands for public monies and that many of them have ways of appearing much more urgent, let alone deserved. The NHS is the big one, obviously, but there are lots of others too - social security (a lot more people would see an immediate here-and-now benefit from a rise in benefits payments), justice (plenty of potentially-innocent people with their lives stuck in limbo waiting years for court dates), housing, aged care, and so on and on.
Now I still believe that it's right to subside public transport for its societal and environmental benefits, but I hope people can see why I feel that its use of that subsidy needs to be guided by actual benefit rather than sentimentality. Reducing this to absolute opposites on the Yorksrob-Serpell spectrum achieves nothing other than continuing hostility, and ultimately entrenches the fatalistic "it's all too hard and nothing can be done" attitude.
I think it's one thing to acknowledge that all of those wonderful heritage features, such as loco haulage, compartment carriages, drop-lights etc probably aren't going to come back.
It's quite another acquiesce to another round of damaging and irreversible route closures. Do you honestly think that the powers that be won't be overly swayed by financial concerns at the expense of passengers ?
Our existing moth-eaten network has already been slashed back further than is desirable. Don't let them start down the slippery slope again.
Agreed. I was away to write something similar. I'm unsure if @XAM2175 is in support of cuts to the network or not.
Thanks. I do think that with all of the talk of the most efficient use of finding, we just end up in the pointless "horses for courses" arguments of the 1980's, which seemed to be a fig-leaf for proposed cuts.
Arguably there's actually rather a lot going on at the moment. Okehampton has just been "reconnected" after being effectively abandoned for many decades. Last year, Soham and Bow Street new stations opened, the year before Horden and Kintore. East-West Rail phase 1, the Northumberland line and Levenmouth branch are certainly going ahead along with HS2 between London and Crewe. Crossrail is built and soon will be open. This year, new stations are expected to be opening at Reading Green Park, Portway Park & Ride, Inverness Airport, Marsh Barton, Brent Cross West, Thanet Parkway, and Barking Riverside. Looking to next year we've got Darlaston and Willenhall, St Clears and Winslow. And so on and so on. There's also Reston, but maybe the less said about that the better given if it had already been open arguably closing it should be on the table.
Girvan - Stranraer closing would scarcely be the end of the world when the savings are set against the spending going on elsewhere. Providing all of the subsidy that would have been used for Stranraer is recycled into the replacement bus and other rural areas.
Similarly, my proposal would be to close Fearn and build a new station at Evanton even if Tain - Wick remains open, so that an improved Inverness - Tain service could run and importantly the extra stop at Evanton wouldn't add journey time.
The corollary of this is that the capital spending we're seeing broken down into each fiscal year is still quite low even if you put the big budgets for first Crossrail and then HS2 into it, and it's still much too concentrated in small areas.
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I would rather we focus on providing a high-quality, robust, and genuinely useful transport network than waste time and money trying to prop-up questionable appendages left over from a Victorian-era notion of a railway network.
Notice the underlined words; they're the very important difference in the vision.
Congratulations, you've immediately attempted to reduce to absolutes the post in which I said that the issue shouldn't be reduced to absolutes.
It's only in that state because of previous cuts, and more cuts will have the same result, until we have no or little railway. The only thing that solves the problem, is by having a better railway. Investment is the key, but I fear that's a foreign concept to some people.
It would be a shame if, after waiting decades to have some proper railway capital investment, we were reduced to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Relocation of the odd station side, we should be expanding the network from its current base and not be sacrificing bits of it for the sake of dinner perception of efficiency.
The railway network is a useful transport network, and it's the fact that it is a network that makes it useful.
To use the example of a line which is very close to my heart, the Whitby route is one that seems to be first in all the lists for the chop. Yet the many people who use it (often crammed onto the trains) obviously do find it useful. In spite of this, we still have all the old arguments - usage is too skewed towards weekends, the bus route is marginally shorter, it costs too much etc.
The fact that the such a route that is clearly useful to many people, is so often singled out in these sorts of arguments, undermines the whole "horses for courses" argument.
For me, a useful transport system is one where I can get the train the length and breadth of the country, with good local bus services for short hops. It does not involve replacing parts of the core network, i.e. the rail section, with buses.
What state?
Do you mean the state of being smaller than it was at its largest?
Why is that automatically a bad thing? After all, we don't live in the Victorian era any more. The personal car genie is out of its bottle. The fast, cheap, and flexible road transport genie is out of its bottle. Neither are going back in anytime soon absent marked - and immediately obvious - worsening of environmental conditions and/or massive state intervention; and even if both of those things happen then it still won't automatically mean that the Victorian era network is suitable.
When I hear people decry the state of the network based purely on its track distance I find myself thinking that those people don't actually care about the transport as a service. I think they're approaching it like a completionist track-basher who can't be satisfied until every grey line in the atlas has been drawn over in red, like the measure of the network's utility is defined not by its use to genuine passengers but instead entirely by how much of the map it covers.
Correct! Investment in an efficient and effective integrated transport network. Nice and simple, eh?
I'll let you in on a little secret; I don't really care. Either way. I'm entirely ambivalent about it because I'm not looking at maps compiling a 'chop list' based on which little branches look like they can be easily pruned, so you needn't get upset that I'm coming to take your one of your precious babies.
To make it abundantly clear: I don't support closures. Especially not in the current regulatory environment. But neither am I blind to the examples I've seen and used abroad that show that trains and coaches both have their places in a sensible network, so if a plan is put forward showing there's genuine gains to be made by converting certain sections of railway to integrated coaches, I won't automatically oppose it either.
So, effectively, you're defining a major part of the nation's transport strategy - and the spending of numerous billions of pounds of public funds each and every year - entirely in terms of your leisure
To add to this, the Kyle and Far North trains I travelled on last year were also busy. An earlier poster suggested a taxi service would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than maintaining these lines but even if that is true, how many would support introducing such a service? Could I still use my disabled person's pass for free travel? And how long before it is inevitably cut? How many folks who today take the train would actually use such a service instead of driving? Bus services are being cut across the country so I don't hold out faith that any branch line replacement service would last for long
What state?
Do you mean the state of being smaller than it was at its largest?
Why is that automatically a bad thing? After all, we don't live in the Victorian era any more. The personal car genie is out of its bottle. The fast, cheap, and flexible road transport genie is out of its bottle. Neither are going back in anytime soon absent marked - and immediately obvious - worsening of environmental conditions and/or massive state intervention; and even if both of those things happen then it still won't automatically mean that the Victorian era network is suitable.
When I hear people decry the state of the network based purely on its track distance I find myself thinking that those people don't actually care about the transport as a service. I think they're approaching it like a completionist track-basher who can't be satisfied until every grey line in the atlas has been drawn over in red, like the measure of the network's utility is defined not by its use to genuine passengers but instead entirely by how much of the map it covers.
Correct! Investment in an efficient and effective integrated transport network. Nice and simple, eh?
I'll let you in on a little secret; I don't really care. Either way. I'm entirely ambivalent about it because I'm not looking at maps compiling a 'chop list' based on which little branches look like they can be easily pruned, so you needn't get upset that I'm coming to take your one of your precious babies.
To make it abundantly clear: I don't support closures. Especially not in the current regulatory environment. But neither am I blind to the examples I've seen and used abroad that show that trains and coaches both have their places in a sensible network, so if a plan is put forward showing there's genuine gains to be made by converting certain sections of railway to integrated coaches, I won't automatically oppose it either.
So, effectively, you're defining a major part of the nation's transport strategy - and the spending of numerous billions of pounds of public funds each and every year - entirely in terms of your leisure
Well, I'm glad you're not coming to take my baby
But it's not just my leisure. It's everyone else who uses the network, in the case of the Whitby branch, even though there is a bus route running parallel.
For what it's worth, I do believe that coaches have their place in their transport mix - they have already demonstrated that without having to close railways for the sake of some ideologically defined concept of efficiency.
You might not care, but people do care about their local rail routes.
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I've not used the far north yet, but I have used the Kyle line and noted healthy passenger loadings.
You raise a good point that bus/coach services have historically proved to be ephemeral in the past. The public have long memories.
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I never mentioned mileage, I mentioned connectivity. Take Okehampton. That branch seems wasteful to bring back for such a small town, but, when it is built upon down to Plymouth, and bypasses the troublesome Dawlish sea wall, it will prosper. That's the goal, to make our railways connect as many people as possible, and surely we can fix troublesome branch lines to do that.
tbtc
Veteran Member
That all sounds perfectly reasonable and well argued (which is why you can expect others to try to reduce it into some binary "Yorksrob vs Serpell" rather than understand any nuance - as you say!)
How do you run a railway without an element of Robbing Peter To Pay Paul?
It's always been the way - it happened a lot in BR days (e.g. the Regional Railways 158s that were pinched by Network South East, various cascades of stock around the country to try to cover shortfalls) - there's an opportunity cost to every spending decision - every pound that your Government spends subsidising quiet branch lines is a pound that they could use on the NHS
You keep saying "useful", rather than using any actual figures
In the case of the Whitby branch, Whitby had around 130,000 passengers per annum in the years pre Covid. So that's 65,000 departing passengers each year. Which means roughly the capacity of a two coach DMU per day worth of passengers per day. i.e. with four services a day each service is a quarter full (fewer than fifty passengers per service). Obviously some of these will be focussed on the "school" services. This is why people are a little sceptical with your amazing bad luck of being "crammed onto the trains" every time you visit a line that has low passenger numbers
I'm sure that services/ stations/ lines are all "useful to the people who use it" - they obviously use it because they find it "useful" - the question isn't "do the people who use a train find that train useful", it's "do enough people use the train to justify the subsidy"
I'm not sure what you mean here Rob... are you saying that The Powers That Be should keep running all services regardless of any financial costs (e.g. keep subsidising all journeys, even if the subsidy per passenger mile gets out of hand)?
Are you (as someone who's consistently argued for the Government to control all of the railway) saying that you want the Government to keep subsidising the railway, regardless of the costs, when that money could be used on health/education etc?
In what world would there be absolutely no "financial concerns" taken into account when assessing whether a service can be justified?
For example, the Barton line made sense when there was a ferry over the Humber. The A15 now goes over the river, so there are no ferries. The branch is a very lightly used stub to a fairly small settlement (Barton upon Humber). Do we just keep subsidising that line indefinitely, even though it's lost most of its purpose?
The Stranraer line made sense when lots of people used the train to get to the ferry terminal as the main way of crossing to Larne. Then Ryanair etc came along and you could take a flight directly from Edinburgh/Glasgow/ Prestwick to Belfast/Dublin. Then the ferries fought back by moving to Cairnryan (a shorter crossing, but a long way from any train station). With the Irish passengers no longer using the branch, the passenger numbers have declined significantly and the station at Stranraer is a very bleak half mile away from the town centre. Do we just keep subsidising that line indefinitely, even though it's lost most of its purpose?
I could go on with routes that once had a reason for existing but that market died away (or the freight that sustained the line dwindled, leaving a handful of passenger trains to cover all of the costs of the route), but I'm guessing that, if it were up to you, we'd have kept a station at the Baseball Ground even after Derby County moved to Pride Park and the original station lost its purpose?
Well said
Some people aren't interested in solving problems or focussing on increasing overall passenger numbers, they just have a starting point of how the railway looked in about 1960 and desperately try to find a way of justifying getting back to that
I don't really understand how it's a shame though, because moving the available subsidy around so that it's well targeted for the people it's serving (which you may disparage as 'robbing Peter to pay Paul') is how public services are fundamentally run. Resources are scare, so we prioritise. This gets us the biggest benefits in the long term.
I think we all agree that public transport requires larger public resources than it currently gets, but again if you're arguing for more resources you can only win that argument by showing that you've used the resources you already have in the best possible way.
Because if both projects could get the same resources, they'd both be success stories and provide better connectivity for passengers, so more passengers use them. It's called investment becuase every penny you spend, you aim to get back. The more pennies you pay in, the more you get back. Its quite simple really.
So you're suggesting that the monetised benefits for spending on Girvan - Stranraer are going to be the same as the benefits per £1 spent on, for example, the Northumberland line or Barking Riverside? And that these will both be equal "success stories"?
It depends how it's done. Better connecting them to a major city, for example, could be one way to gain a return on your investment, as they go into the town to do things, work, play, etc. But there are a lot of possibilities, perhaps too many to list here. All that is stopping us, is our creativity and drive.
I noticed you didn't answer the question.
If you ran an hourly service from Stranraer through to Glasgow you're saying that would bring similar benefits per £1 spent to running an hourly service from Ashington through to Newcastle?
And I'm trying to say it's not as simple as that. Your proposal might not work, but another could. And if one of the proposals does work, why shouldn't we try to look for it? Think big, think bold. If we never had, we'd still be living in caves, so to speak.
I note that you still haven't answered the question.
I think you're going to have to concede that the answer to it is that the benefits relative to the costs are much greater in places like Ashington than they are in Stranraer. I'm afraid that it is rather the point of doing business case work in the first place that you get wildly varying rates of return on public spending in different areas using different technologies.
A bus is an enormously more efficient solution than a train for something like Girvan - Stranraer, and always will be. Therefore using a train is wasting public money.
I'm saying I don't know, but success stories have happened, and can happen. If it's happened before elsewhere, it can happen again, we just need commitment and determination.
That's all very nice yes but I'm afraid it doesn't really mean anything, and it certainly doesn't mean that it's sensible to keeping using trains between Girvan and Stranraer in perpetuity.
Yes, we were all told that resources are scarce and we need to prioritise. However whenever we've been persuaded to switch to the bus replacement in the past, it's disappeared and we've been left with no public transport. The treasury has pocketed the benefit, not public transport users.
In terms of Stranraer, perhaps passengers just want to continue to be able to catch their direct train to Glasgow. If there's a market for local bus services to Girvan, surely it will be provided for.
In terms of the question that you've posed to @MattRat, what relevance does it have of reopening Blythe will have more benefit than running to Stranrear. They are different propositions and will come from different budgets (not least because Strangest is revenue whereas reopening Blythe is capital). One might just as easily as what benefit reopening Blythe has over the local pot hole budget.
Ah, but v few people now travel all the way on the through services to Glasgow though because they're so slow, so improving the service to Girvan would just move the interchange point from Ayr to Girvan while speeding up end to end journeys.
I'm afraid that even the excuse "but changes of train!" doesn't work here
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I was actually comparing the current spending on the subsidised services excluding capital costs.
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Improving local road maintenance will be bringing bring vastly more benefit than subsidy for Northern train services does so I wouldn't draw attention to that if I were you.
Improving road maintenance bringing more benefit ? It'll bring more traffic and more cars hurtling around like they're driven by Stirling Moss, so little benefit to me as a pedestrian !Ah, but v few people now travel all the way on the through services to Glasgow though because they're so slow, so improving the service to Girvan would just move the interchange point from Ayr to Girvan while speeding up end to end journeys.
I'm afraid that even the excuse "but changes of train!" doesn't work here
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I was actually comparing the current spending on the subsidised services excluding capital costs.
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Improving local road maintenance will be bringing bring vastly more benefit than subsidy for Northern train services does so I wouldn't draw attention to that if I were you.
Meanwhile, in the USA....
So you two are suggesting that you never use, and think others should never use motorised vehicles on roads, including not purchasing anything that is delivered by motor vehicles on roads?
I'm actually suggesting an improvement to a publicly funded local public transport service which would be cheaper than the railway to run and produce more output, not suggesting that we should be inducing traffic. Also I'm very unconvinced that better maintained roads induce speeding or extra driving but that's by the by.
This has been such a big one I wonder if it needs it's own dedicated thread.
The trouble is that closing a line is very much permanent, and would require significant investment to get running again. I don't think closing lines when resources gets scarce provides much benefit as it's unlikely they would be reopened in better times.
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We should be doing everything we can to reduce private car use due to the number of road deaths, pollution (tailpipe and tire particulates), congestion, and the inaccessibility to non-drivers. I don't agree that better maintained roads is a bad thing but building new roads or widening existing ones absolutely does encourage people to drive
In addition, to take this point head on, trains might have more permanence in reputation but do they actually in facts? Very very few places that used to be railways have no bus service any more. The only one that I can think of is Callander to Crianlarich where the bus was reduced to one trip a day.
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Indeed I agree. And closing Girvan - Stranraer while using the money saved to pay for more bus services and more frequent Glasgow Suburban services (for example) will help to achieve that aim. What's the issue?
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I think that we can be damn near sure that we aren't going to need to convert Tain - Wick and Girvan - Stranraer back into passenger use any time within your sensible planning horizon of choice, or indeed introduce a rail freight service on the latter.
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