UK Rail Strategy

[Peter Kelford]

Imagine the scene: you are working for a consultancy firm/govt. department/organisation that has been called upon to provide a report known as 'Britain's Railway Future'.

Please submit your version of this report on this thread.

A few guidelines:

No Plagarism
Expand on your key ideas, for example, don't just say 'Scrap HS2' without any further reasoning.

 

[Peter Kelford]

The word 'competition' has been removed from the title as it is a remnant from an earlier iteration of this thread.

 

[Bevan Price]

My first and main conclusion would be that the chief competitors for passenger transport are the private car, and to a lesser extent for long distance travel is air transport. Therefore, nominal competition between TOCs is an unhelpful distraction that does little or nothing to improve services for passengers. Therefore I would recommend that there should be a single national operator for rail passenger services.

(Whilst my own preference would be for a state-owned operator, but a single national private operator would be a better solution than the present franchise system, which wastes losts of money preparing cases / documents, etc. for each franchise renewal - money that could be better spent on improving the railway.)

 

[Jorge Da Silva]

I would expand the rail network in stages which would involve providing better connectivity between towns and cities by reopening old rail lines as well as building some new infrastructure such as Northern Powerhouse Rail. I would also upgrade existing infrastructure by electrifying some rail lines and increasing capacity by four tracking in some key areas such as South Sheffield Approach.