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Use it or lose it is only one bit of Part J. The “Better Use” provisions later on in Part J allow for firm rights to be discontinued.

What routing changes to ordinary IA tickets have been made since privatisation?

Marylebone was the subject of the first NSE “Total Route Modernisation” scheme during BR days so it was well on the way back from the dark days of closure in the early 1980’s. Moving it from LMR to WR in 1987 was the catalyst, when it was combined with WR London area local services under NSE to...

Right, here we go again. The ORR figures do not allocate all marginal infrastructure costs. If they did, all TOCs would be making a loss. There are three types of infrastructure cost, short run marginal, long run marginal and fixed. Confusingly, the last two are often called fixed. In the ORR...

The sets were not exactly pushed and were subject to quite a lot of maintenance down time so looking after the air con wasn’t too onerous. The problem for BR at that time wasn’t a lack of forward thinking, it was justifying the cost of fitting and maintaining air con to ordinary stock. The...

I always thought it was the A1. A journey I occasionally had to do on Xmas Eve from Hornsey Depot, only to Boston (branching off at Norman Cross) rather than all the way to the North East as Chris Rea and his missus had to do that day! That’s why Driving Home for Xmas is one of my favourites. It...

Snow1964, that’s not how the performance regime runs in the contract. You cannot withhold payment. There is a periodic performance element to it which deals with non-compliances. That automatically adjusts the period payment - it’s a highly specified and mechanistic process and Hitachi are...

You need to look at where the subsidy was going to. There has been a substantial increase in infrastructure costs which isn’t down to any “profiteering”. TOCs pre-COVID didn’t see much need for increased subsidy except where the DfT specified increases in services or stock. The IEP programme...

Ernest Marples was quite a lazy minister - it was the appointment in April 1959 of James Dunnett as Permanent Secretary that started to changes attitudes to rail at the Ministry. He had come from the Ministry of Supply the previous year (as a Deputy-Secretary) and was the heir apparent when Sir...

That’s how the parliamentary process proceeds. When the Bill was published, the date for Second Reading was mooted by those who knew as the first week in December but seems to have slipped a week. Second Reading is not where the real action is - that is in the Bill Committee and Third Reading...

Then the regulation policy for the route/time of day kicks in. If the Up Manchester is a key train, the Lumo will get held. You cannot timetable a route for the possibility that any particular train will always be late. That is why arbitrary firebreaks are such a blunt tool - they don’t match...

And the problem with that is? The Up Manchester then leaves the Lumo for dead as it heads for London, arriving half an hour before it. It’s not as if it would be behind it at Colwich.

Because the Lumo train has nothing to do with this decision. It runs about half an hour after the 0700 ex Manchester currently does. NR has been pursuing an aggressive policy of introducing arbitrary firebreaks into the timetable, something that is very contentious amongst the operating...

No lawyers are involved in this. Basically it is a clerical activity, carrying out the clauses in the contract that adds up presentation failures to form a periodic adjustment to the availability payments via the overall performance regime. It’s not a straight x pounds for every engine failure...

What Ian Yeowart usually does is register each proposal as a different company under the Grand Union banner. When you take over an OA operation, you don’t buy the paths (that is illegal), you buy the company. Grand Union wasn’t taken over by FG last year, it was, in turn, two of the individual...

This isn’t FG, this isn’t the Lumo proposal, this is Yeowart with another one of his schemes. Getting north of York will be difficult, if not impossible, which is why the Lumo XC proposal only goes to York.

It is, IEP availability costs per year are around £1m a vehicle. From that, you can work out roughly what the daily availability charge for a set is. It isn’t cheap! The IEP programme is expensive but was designed to bring in enough revenue (through increases in services) to cover the extra...

They are sending units out to avoid not receiving availability payments. Those payments are five figures a day, per set. As I said above, the number of engines out is not a reason for accepting sets, if they can cope with the diagram. If GWR diagram the units to run more diesel miles than is...

GWR don’t get fined for not providing a set on time. They may not get the set after its maintenance window but they will still be paying the daily availability payments for the total contracted availability. The contract hand over is built around the unit being able to complete its diagram...

Yes, but the fuel range has to be reduced to 700 miles. 3 engines will do it (if they are in good order) but they will use more fuel, around 1.9L to 2.0L per engine mile is what I would expect.