Britain was built on its railways. Now we can't even run them
Trains are green and should be comfortable, fast and convenient. That they're not is a national disgrace
o Andrew Martin
o The Observer, Sunday 28 November 2010
My father worked for British Rail and in the 1970s I overheard an argument he had with a travelling salesman who lived down the road. Emboldened by a couple of sherries at our house, this chap advocated – rather rudely, I thought – the complete abolition of railways. He would replace them with buses, which he thought more efficient. My dad said: "And would you run them along clear, straight roads?" "Ideally, yes," said the salesman. "And would the buses be very regular?" "They would," said the man, "they could come in a constant succession." "Well then," said my dad, "that's called a train." That shut the salesman up (for a while), and when he went home, my dad said: "Typical Tory."
He believed that all Conservatives were fundamentally anti-rail and it's certainly true that our railways are poorly planned and underfunded because of a conservative/libertarian mindset. (The laissez-faire Victorian approach to railways was perhaps a reaction against the French Revolution: that was what happened when the state took control.) But the current government seems to be practising the strain of Toryism that regards railways as fairly civilised and decorous: the Church of England on wheels, you might say.
Before the election, Cameron checked the ambitions of the civil aviation lobby, which to my mind was like Tom Brown standing up to Flashman, by saying they weren't going to have their new runway and that was that. The roads budget has been slashed and last week Cameron insisted once again that a north-south high-speed railway will be built. (For rail fans, it seems too good to be true.) The transport secretary, Philip Hammond, also confirmed that infrastructure projects planned by the previous government will go ahead and overcrowding will be alleviated by about 2,000 new carriages.
Yes, there are caveats: the completion of Thameslink and Crossrail will be delayed slightly. That sentence about the new carriages should properly conclude "by 2019". Electrification in the north-west will proceed, but a decision on whether the electrification of the Great Western line will get beyond Oxford has been postponed. (More than half of our network is served by diesels, which most of Europe regards as amusingly picturesque and as dirty and inefficient as steam engines.)
Also, fares are going to rise steeply in the coming years. "We want the fare payer to make a contribution," said Hammond. In fact, the British fare payer contributes far more than in our competitor countries, so the people who use the greenest form of transport are being penalised for doing so. Since 1997, the cost of train travel has increased in real terms by 13%; the cost of road travel has fallen by 14%; and the average price of a one-way flight from Britain has fallen by 35%.
If Britain were to be regarded as a community with a serious drink problem (which it is, of course), then this policy would be akin to charging more for non-alcoholic drinks than alcoholic ones. It makes no sense, as Cameron has tacitly admitted by arguing that high-speed rail is socially regenerative. If railways do have what is called "non-user benefit", then surely society as a whole should fund them? To argue otherwise would be like saying that the bill for the higher education we need to function in a globalised world should be paid for exclusively by those who receive that education. Oh no, wait, that's already happening.
Perhaps the secret purpose of the fare increases is to choke the ever-rising demand for train travel. We should remember that Hammond drives a Jag and that he has said he is "not a railway romantic". That our railways are run by someone not romantically inclined will come as no surprise to the average passenger.
The modernday British railway "customer" takes his seat (if he's lucky) at a place with a drop-down plastic table designed to be slightly too small to hold his laptop. There is no plug socket for the laptop, but unfortunately the man squeezed in alongside him has enough battery life to watch Quantum of Solace on DVD, which he does without the inconvenience of earphones. Meanwhile, the guard is shouting through a malfunctioning PA and is committed to using two words where one (or, better still, none) would do, hence "platform surfaces", "station stop", "personal belongings". To think that in my boyhood, there was an armrest big enough to rest your arm on, a dimmer switch to adjust the mood and a seat to stretch out on…
Our modern trains are cramped and garish. The whole network is characterised by inelegance, as is the fare structure. Not only do we have the most expensive rail fares in Europe, we also have the most rail fares. Barry Doe exposes the endless anomalies of the system every month in Rail magazine. "British Rail," Mr Doe told me by phone, "had about four types of returns and a couple of advance fares, whereas if we look at the fares between London and Manchester today…" At this point, Mr Doe began counting them off from his computer screen. "Walk-on fares… 15. Advance fares… let me see… 36." According to Mr Doe, the trouble is that our railways, being rather insecure, try to emulate airlines, with incredibly expensive peak-time walk-on fares offset by numerous discounts for advance booking. And rail users fall into two broad categories: those who don't know about the discounts and those who won't buy them because they can't commit to a specific service weeks in advance.
The aim of the fares structure is to extract every last drop of revenue from the customer and the fact that it deters so many customers seems like a divine retribution for meanness. You could say the same of railway privatisation, which was meant to make the railways cheaper to run, but actually made them more expensive. Stephen Joseph, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, says we must reduce the "fragmentation" caused by the privatisation and restore economies of scale. (This point always brings to mind the information booth at King's Cross, which is decorated with the plaques of the four train companies operating from the station, plus one for Network Rail. These plaques all look quite expensive. If you had a nationalised railway, you'd only need one.)
Mr Joseph speaks also of empowering local transport authorities to build new railways in conjunction with the employers or developers who will benefit. This is how it's done all over Europe. He talks of longer trains; of the need to reopen many of the lines closed in the 60s, during the midlife crisis of 20th-century Britain when balding men in flares decided trains weren't "with it", whereas car parks were sexy.
Cameron and Hammond are altogether more evolved, but Hammond, in expressing his keenness to keep petrol prices down, has bizarrely declared "the end of the war on the motorist". If he changed the second word of that phrase to something more like "beginning", now that would be exciting.
Britain was built on its railways. Now we can't even run them | Andrew Martin | Comment is free | The Observer
Britain was built on its railways. Now we can't even run them
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