British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
I find the debate on here about BR vs. privatisation almost as sterile as the Brexit debate. The anti-BR side constantly point out how much better railways are now than in the 60s and 70s. Well I never! It would be pretty astonishing given technological advances since then if they weren't, wouldn't it? As somebody pointed out above, we don't compare cars from that era with cars now.
(Incidentally, I'm biased because my late father worked for BR for 40 years. He told many tales of great success, and many tales of great failure, with most stuff in between. Much like now).
I don't think it's that sterile. Most people seem to be taking a nuanced position. But our memories of BR are necessarily pretty anecdotal and imperfect. I reckon I'm somewhere around the average age for the board (48), so was about 17 when BR was privatised - and while I do have memories of BR, it's necessarily pretty selective; a child/teenager's experience of the railway aren't necessarily representative.
Based on the evidence available to us, we have concluded that the material posted online did not provide a full picture and that Mason did not commit the offences in respect of which he was originally charged.
Quite why Manchester United feel the need to say this, I don't know. If they're that confident, they should back him and put the full facts into the public domain.
The recording is pretty damning. He did not commit offences. He did some truly awful things which bring the football club into reputational difficulties.
And yet - given that the couple in question are still together and now have a child - I'd suggest that there is at the very least something we don't know about this particular case.
It's my cautiously held belief, based upon understanding from FOAFs, that MG is an absolutely horrible man. But I maintain that we don't know a lot of what was going on in this particular case.
Without any prejudice to the specific case either way, I think it's important to point out that people in abusive domestic relationships often return to their abusive partners, multiple times, and so it really doesn't tell us anything about the specific case.
It simply isn't an observation that enables you to determine anything about what is going on.
Neither, also, does Manchester United's decision. That will primarily have been based on what they thought the public would think.
I suspect it will be primarily based upon how much moolah they can get from Saudi for him.
My understanding was that they were parting ways by mutual consent, so I think nothing, and Greenwood has agreed to forgo the value of the rest of his contract in return for being a free agent?
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
But stations were/are a Network Rail/Railtrack thing, which *is* UKG ...(or mediated through TS in Scotland, and NI is different completely).
And BR was building new stations. Bristol Parkway for instance (it invented the concept).
I find the debate on here about BR vs. privatisation almost as sterile as the Brexit debate. The anti-BR side constantly point out how much better railways are now than in the 60s and 70s. Well I never! It would be pretty astonishing given technological advances since then if they weren't, wouldn't it? As somebody pointed out above, we don't compare cars from that era with cars now.
(Incidentally, I'm biased because my late father worked for BR for 40 years. He told many tales of great success, and many tales of great failure, with most stuff in between. Much like now).
I don't think it's that sterile. Most people seem to be taking a nuanced position. But our memories of BR are necessarily pretty anecdotal and imperfect. I reckon I'm somewhere around the average age for the board (48), so was about 17 when BR was privatised - and while I do have memories of BR, it's necessarily pretty selective; a child/teenager's experience of the railway aren't necessarily representative.
Older than you, so fonder memories of BR: 1. Free tickets (thanks, dad). 2. If you were going to Scarborough from, say, London, and your train was a bit late, the connecting train from York to Scarborough would actually be delayed for the London train to arrive. Happy days.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Why is revenge wrong? A person may choose, as an act of Grace, to forgive a grievous wrong that had been done to them.
But, why should they be *required* to do so.
An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, as Gandhi is said to have said (but probably didn't, and it was rather Canadian MP George Perry Graham who said something along these lines in a
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Why is revenge wrong? A person may choose, as an act of Grace, to forgive a grievous wrong that had been done to them.
But, why should they be *required* to do so.
An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind, as Gandhi is said to have said (but probably didn't, and it was rather Canadian MP George Perry Graham who first said something along these lines in a 1914 debate on the death penalty).
The same Gandhi who thought the Jews would show themselves morally superior to the Nazis by submitting willingly to execution.
But, as I said, Gandhi didn't say it, so you need to pick on GP Graham!
I find the debate on here about BR vs. privatisation almost as sterile as the Brexit debate. The anti-BR side constantly point out how much better railways are now than in the 60s and 70s. Well I never! It would be pretty astonishing given technological advances since then if they weren't, wouldn't it? As somebody pointed out above, we don't compare cars from that era with cars now.
(Incidentally, I'm biased because my late father worked for BR for 40 years. He told many tales of great success, and many tales of great failure, with most stuff in between. Much like now).
I expect many of us can trace our roots back to the railways - they were, after all, a major source of employment for a hundred years. My grandfather was a GWR trainee driver based in Shrewsbury in 1907. One October morning he was told not to bother coming to work because there had been a crash blocking all the lines.
He was off work for two weeks until the the lines reopened and received no pay. A fact he continued to resent until his dying day nearly 70 years later.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Interesting question, but the problem is very few people will have visited enough to give an answer. I don't know what the world's most underrated city is because I've not been to that many of them. Of the cities I have visited, the most underrated is probably Palma de Mallorca. Largely because people just go through it on the way to the beach resorts.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
And that is precisely the benefits that the Tories hoped for with Privatisation. Thanks to the brilliant BR managers at Chiltern (once freed from BR's yoke imposed by the DfT...) you can catch a competing Chiltern service. Obviously the only reason that Chiltern needed that level of complete overhaul of tracks and trains is that the government had BR close it...
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
Interesting question, but the problem is very few people will have visited enough to give an answer. I don't know what the world's most underrated city is because I've not been to that many of them. Of the cities I have visited, the most underrated is probably Palma de Mallorca. Largely because people just go through it on the way to the beach resorts.
Agree with that. Palma is our favourite city, and we frequently stay in the centre. An ideal size - big enough to have lots to do, eat and drink, but small enough to walk everywhere, including to the beach.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
I find the debate on here about BR vs. privatisation almost as sterile as the Brexit debate. The anti-BR side constantly point out how much better railways are now than in the 60s and 70s. Well I never! It would be pretty astonishing given technological advances since then if they weren't, wouldn't it? As somebody pointed out above, we don't compare cars from that era with cars now.
(Incidentally, I'm biased because my late father worked for BR for 40 years. He told many tales of great success, and many tales of great failure, with most stuff in between. Much like now).
I don't think it's that sterile. Most people seem to be taking a nuanced position. But our memories of BR are necessarily pretty anecdotal and imperfect. I reckon I'm somewhere around the average age for the board (48), so was about 17 when BR was privatised - and while I do have memories of BR, it's necessarily pretty selective; a child/teenager's experience of the railway aren't necessarily representative.
Older than you, so fonder memories of BR: 1. Free tickets (thanks, dad). 2. If you were going to Scarborough from, say, London, and your train was a bit late, the connecting train from York to Scarborough would actually be delayed for the London train to arrive. Happy days.
2 is vital. But completely lost sight of now. I relied on it many a time (for equivalents elsewhere). Very peeved when it fell over with privatisation.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
Interesting question, but the problem is very few people will have visited enough to give an answer. I don't know what the world's most underrated city is because I've not been to that many of them. Of the cities I have visited, the most underrated is probably Palma de Mallorca. Largely because people just go through it on the way to the beach resorts.
Well it is a silly question - but some of the answers are nonetheless interesting.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Yes I do think it boils down to this. Do we want the state doing this on our behalf? The 'pros v cons' calculus is important but you have to process that question first.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Why is revenge wrong? A person may choose, as an act of Grace, to forgive a grievous wrong that had been done to them.
But, why should they be *required* to do so.
That depends on what is meant by 'revenge'. In many ways, a court's sentencing is society enacting revenge on a convict for their wrong-doing, on behalf of society generally and the victims in particular.
What matters is how that revenge is managed - proportionality and process - that's what separates arbitrariness from justice.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
And that is precisely the benefits that the Tories hoped for with Privatisation. Thanks to the brilliant BR managers at Chiltern (once freed from BR's yoke imposed by the DfT...) you can catch a competing Chiltern service. Obviously the only reason that Chiltern needed that level of complete overhaul of tracks and trains is that the government had BR close it...
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
Oxford to Paddington is just 53 minutes. It's a tad slower by Chiltern!
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
It should have been built years ago, integrated with Heathrow and with HS1, and then integrated with NPR. Like would have happened if this were France (but not the US where their Californian high speed rail has been equally faffy).
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
And that is precisely the benefits that the Tories hoped for with Privatisation. Thanks to the brilliant BR managers at Chiltern (once freed from BR's yoke imposed by the DfT...) you can catch a competing Chiltern service. Obviously the only reason that Chiltern needed that level of complete overhaul of tracks and trains is that the government had BR close it...
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
Oxford to Paddington is just 53 minutes. It's a tad slower by Chiltern!
MyCamden friend too me for a ride on it rather than via Padders but I think he found it easier to get to Marylebone - also wanted to show me Betjeman Metroland and the hordes going shopping at the Bicester shopping village on the old airfield/rocket testing place.
Bloody lucky for Oxonians to have the alternativce route, though, when the bridge over the Thames at Nuneham started sinking and they had to stop the line south of Oxford to jack up the bridge and replace the abutment of late. (ISTR, but may be wrong, that the offending abutment was the one Brunel put in for his original prefab timber bridge and nobody had replaced it properly when putting in two successive iron or steel girders to replace the wooden one.)
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Why is revenge wrong? A person may choose, as an act of Grace, to forgive a grievous wrong that had been done to them.
But, why should they be *required* to do so.
That depends on what is meant by 'revenge'. In many ways, a court's sentencing is society enacting revenge on a convict for their wrong-doing, on behalf of society generally and the victims in particular.
What matters is how that revenge is managed - proportionality and process - that's what separates arbitrariness from justice.
Distinctions are critical here. In personal situations 'Revenge' is best kept as a word for situations where the victim or their associates decide to be judge, jury and executioner in their own case.
Public justice exists in part to prevent revenge and provide an alternative.
That Manchester United statement on Mason Greenwood:
We're not sure whether he's a wrong 'un or not, so we're going to sit on the fence, and we've agreed with him to do so. We're also not sure whether to dispense with him or not, but on the balance of probabilities we reckon keeping him on would attract too much criticism and piss off some sponsors, so we've also agreed with him we're going to reluctantly let him go despite the fact that he's unequivocally possibly innocent. And if you think we're going to share the reasoning behind this, think again. Okay?
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
On Mason Greenwood, he has been found innocent in law but clearly there is more to it and he is grateful to United for their support and admits he made mistakes
I understand that many staff within United and, not least the Women's Team, were very concerned had he been allowed to play for the club again, indeed resignations are supposed to have been discussed
As a lifelong Manchester United supporter, I endorse the clubs actions which Greenwood accepts and hope that he and his partner and their child are able to create a new lifestyle away from the media spotlight
Franchising has failed – the last time I checked 5-6 franchises has been renationalised because the moronic privateers who were running them ran them into the ground.
Renationalise what's left, and start afresh.
A single brand, a single arse to kick, a la TfL but for the whole nation.
Ownership isn't the issue - it is mission. Chiltern Railways had a 20 year franchise and utterly transformed the route. Northern Rail had a much shorter franchise and were not contractually allowed to even recognise that passenger numbers had risen, never mind run enough trains.
Since "privatisation" the DfT in various guises have managed a system which is absurdly complex, expensive and legally restrictive rather than run the railways for the passengers. The franchising structure essentially lumbered the industry and the taxpayer with huge costs, management of which has been the key focus.
A commercial enterprise free to plan long term would be great. A stateco run commercially would be great. Ownership isn't the issue - its the DfT. A perfect example - Lumo, the private sector open access operator pirating for passengers between London and Edinburgh. It may be private, but the kind of train it could buy and the exact specification of the interior was dictated by the DfT. If they strayed from their directions the DfT informed them they would not be granted an open access license.
Lumo trains crush their seats in and have minimal luggage space. This creates major problems. But they had to offer a minimum number of seats in a 5 car train or no operation allowed. The DfT direct the seats thing so that politically they can claim expansion on the East Coast route whilst starving Network Rail of actual investment to add actual capacity.
As usual for the UK we're doing it as cheaply as possible whilst charging as much as possible.
Worth watching Ben Elton's The Great Railway Disaster if you haven't already see it. Some elements are stronger than others but some of the examples he gives of moronic attitudes to investment make one wince.
And one of the biggest issues has been the lack of a proper unified ticketing system. Someone uised to a simple daily trip on TfL has no ****ing idea what it is like on the rest of the [edit] UK network, or rather networks.
The lack of ticket offices with knowledgerable folk [edit] will make it much, much harder for many people to avoid the traps.
Yes, it should be possible to tap your card at the start of your journey, and again at the end of it, and automatically have the cheapest fare charged. Anywhere in the country.
Same as with the various car charging schemes, one should be able to register one’s car once nationally, and receive a bill at the end of the month.
Too many transport solutions rely on convoluted rules and income from fines, so they make the system as complex as possible to try and catch people out. It’s the sort of thing that really annoys people.
I think a national ticketing system that operates as a direct debit would be amazing. You get charged full price for each transaction, but get a big discount at the end of the month if you travel 4x a week or something. It's transparent, with each line given a rating for how expensive it is (ECML "A" etc).
You could even have an fun awards system - 100% off all travel if you manage to go on every rail line in the UK. I can think of one PBer...
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
Conceived by Labour, work started by the Coalition, continued by the Tories in the teeth of all common sense. Unfortunately there's no-one with clean hands left to stop it.
My modest proposal is to finish the London-Birmingham section but run it as a conventional railway with major parkway stations every 15 miles or so. Each would in turn become a development hub for the second half of the century. Steeple Claydon would become a major industrial and financial centre where it crosses the Oxford-Cambridge line. And so on.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Did the APTs ever see the light of day? I certainly don't think I ever travelled on one (though I think there is one on the front of the box of my favourite childhood board game, 'Great Game of Britain'). But I do rather like Pendolinos. I know some find them a bit motion-sicknessy but I never have. They feel sleek and, well, fast.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Did the APTs ever see the light of day? I certainly don't think I ever travelled on one (though I think there is one on the front of the box of my favourite childhood board game, 'Great Game of Britain'). But I do rather like Pendolinos. I know some find them a bit motion-sicknessy but I never have. They feel sleek and, well, fast.
Yes they built a few sets. One of my most abiding childhood memories is seeing one blasting through Lancaster at eye watering speed. It was one of the best things I have ever seen.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
Voyagers (Class 220/221) at least had bigger windows! I used to ride the Pendos quite a lot between Euston and Coventry when I worked at Warwick 2013-2018.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
Those last two sentences are peak pb.com for today! Thoroughly enjoyed it. Well done.
I've never noticed the toilet smell, but I agree about the regrettably mean approach to provision of windows and luggage space.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
Conceived by Labour, work started by the Coalition, continued by the Tories in the teeth of all common sense. Unfortunately there's no-one with clean hands left to stop it.
My modest proposal is to finish the London-Birmingham section but run it as a conventional railway with major parkway stations every 15 miles or so. Each would in turn become a development hub for the second half of the century. Steeple Claydon would become a major industrial and financial centre where it crosses the Oxford-Cambridge line. And so on.
Decent enough idea. I'd terminate it the nearest place I could build a new town to be a commuter feed for London, which was the only reason for it that made sense anyway.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
Its basically already built
Bugger off it is.
You may not realise from your ivory tower in Scotland but half of the midlands has been dug up for years - massive new viaducts have been put in, etc
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
Conceived by Labour, work started by the Coalition, continued by the Tories in the teeth of all common sense. Unfortunately there's no-one with clean hands left to stop it.
My modest proposal is to finish the London-Birmingham section but run it as a conventional railway with major parkway stations every 15 miles or so. Each would in turn become a development hub for the second half of the century. Steeple Claydon would become a major industrial and financial centre where it crosses the Oxford-Cambridge line. And so on.
But that would miss the point, which is the separation of fast and slow trains. If we're to have parkway stations every 15 miles forming development hubs, put them on on the old line which we're relieving.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
Voyagers (Class 220/221) at least had bigger windows! I used to ride the Pendos quite a lot between Euston and Coventry when I worked at Warwick 2013-2018.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
Voyagers (Class 220/221) at least had bigger windows! I used to ride the Pendos quite a lot between Euston and Coventry when I worked at Warwick 2013-2018.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
And that is precisely the benefits that the Tories hoped for with Privatisation. Thanks to the brilliant BR managers at Chiltern (once freed from BR's yoke imposed by the DfT...) you can catch a competing Chiltern service. Obviously the only reason that Chiltern needed that level of complete overhaul of tracks and trains is that the government had BR close it...
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
Oxford to Paddington is just 53 minutes. It's a tad slower by Chiltern!
MyCamden friend too me for a ride on it rather than via Padders but I think he found it easier to get to Marylebone - also wanted to show me Betjeman Metroland and the hordes going shopping at the Bicester shopping village on the old airfield/rocket testing place.
Bloody lucky for Oxonians to have the alternativce route, though, when the bridge over the Thames at Nuneham started sinking and they had to stop the line south of Oxford to jack up the bridge and replace the abutment of late. (ISTR, but may be wrong, that the offending abutment was the one Brunel put in for his original prefab timber bridge and nobody had replaced it properly when putting in two successive iron or steel girders to replace the wooden one.)
If IKB had been in charge of HS2 it would be finished by now for half the projected cost. One or two potential snags lurking in the undergrowth, though.
Because they were going up anyway on the basis of BR developed tech. That is certainly what happened on the ECML.
Because the motorways got choked up. And so on.
There are many causal factors, but the former isn't a strong one. A change of management mindset was a massive one IMO - the idea the railways *could* grow, and that they were not managing a diminishing network.
Governmental anti-car policies - or at least not as heavily pro car/Road - also helped, as did a growing economy.
I am currently enjoying Italian suburban services, and whilst they are cheap, they're fairly painful. Like going back to BR days.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
Voyagers (Class 220/221) at least had bigger windows! I used to ride the Pendos quite a lot between Euston and Coventry when I worked at Warwick 2013-2018.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
The chemical toilet smell on Pendolinos is one of the worst things about them. I find the whole Pendolino experience unpleasant.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
And that is precisely the benefits that the Tories hoped for with Privatisation. Thanks to the brilliant BR managers at Chiltern (once freed from BR's yoke imposed by the DfT...) you can catch a competing Chiltern service. Obviously the only reason that Chiltern needed that level of complete overhaul of tracks and trains is that the government had BR close it...
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
Oxford to Paddington is just 53 minutes. It's a tad slower by Chiltern!
MyCamden friend too me for a ride on it rather than via Padders but I think he found it easier to get to Marylebone - also wanted to show me Betjeman Metroland and the hordes going shopping at the Bicester shopping village on the old airfield/rocket testing place.
Bloody lucky for Oxonians to have the alternativce route, though, when the bridge over the Thames at Nuneham started sinking and they had to stop the line south of Oxford to jack up the bridge and replace the abutment of late. (ISTR, but may be wrong, that the offending abutment was the one Brunel put in for his original prefab timber bridge and nobody had replaced it properly when putting in two successive iron or steel girders to replace the wooden one.)
If IKB had been in charge of HS2 it would be finished by now for half the projected cost. One or two potential snags lurking in the undergrowth, though.
Loafds of Brunel's bridges west of Exeter were wooden and temporary. Amazing structures, but done on the cheap. You can still see many of the piers of the old bridges.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
Plenty: it will be a growth engine, significantly improving services on the existing WCML and bringing the North closer. But NPR is needed too. And massive housebuilding as well as a host of other infrastructure upgrades across the country. Otherwise we're back into British declinism again.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
The only people who say HS2 needs to be binned don't understand the issue
The ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline all run at "capacity". HS2 solves that capacity issue by allowing longer and faster trains to run to the main destinations.
Better than that because the ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline currently contain both fast and slow moving trains were all trains to run at the same speed there is additional capacity available by shifting all the fast trains to ECML which would allow significant extra capacity (think its 100%) to be made available on those lines.
Hence by building 1 new line we actually increase capacity 4 or 5 fold. Sadly we don't know the economic impact of the above (which will be truly massive because if you builds trains, they get used) because the maths was too complex and too broad for the Treasury to do the work.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
The only people who say HS2 needs to be binned don't understand the issue
The ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline all run at "capacity". HS2 solves that capacity issue by allowing longer and faster trains to run to the main destinations.
Better than that because the ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline currently contain both fast and slow moving trains were all trains to run at the same speed there is additional capacity available by shifting all the fast trains to ECML which would allow significant extra capacity (think its 100%) to be made available on those lines.
Hence by building 1 new line we actually increase capacity 4 or 5 fold. Sadly we don't know the economic impact of the above (which will be truly massive because if you builds trains, they get used) because the maths was too complex and too broad for the Treasury to do the work.
But it needs to run somewhere useful, rather than, say, terminating in the Wild, Wild West of London
HS2 should have been built by StateCo and operated for the good of the public, with planning reform so it couldn't be delayed or rejected for silly reasons.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
1980s BR was the butt of every comedian’s jokes, they really didn’t give a flying f… about their customers. Trains arrived when they arrived, and left when they left, although there might have been something of a timetable written down somewhere, the breakfasts were, umm, legendary, and even their famous slogan of the time “We’re Getting There” could have been designed to be read in two ways. BR was the poster child for managed decline, up until privatisation.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
And that is precisely the benefits that the Tories hoped for with Privatisation. Thanks to the brilliant BR managers at Chiltern (once freed from BR's yoke imposed by the DfT...) you can catch a competing Chiltern service. Obviously the only reason that Chiltern needed that level of complete overhaul of tracks and trains is that the government had BR close it...
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
Oxford to Paddington is just 53 minutes. It's a tad slower by Chiltern!
MyCamden friend too me for a ride on it rather than via Padders but I think he found it easier to get to Marylebone - also wanted to show me Betjeman Metroland and the hordes going shopping at the Bicester shopping village on the old airfield/rocket testing place.
Bloody lucky for Oxonians to have the alternativce route, though, when the bridge over the Thames at Nuneham started sinking and they had to stop the line south of Oxford to jack up the bridge and replace the abutment of late. (ISTR, but may be wrong, that the offending abutment was the one Brunel put in for his original prefab timber bridge and nobody had replaced it properly when putting in two successive iron or steel girders to replace the wooden one.)
If IKB had been in charge of HS2 it would be finished by now for half the projected cost. One or two potential snags lurking in the undergrowth, though.
Loafds of Brunel's bridges west of Exeter were wooden and temporary. Amazing structures, but done on the cheap. You can still see many of the piers of the old bridges.
(Not just west of Exeter - one thinks of Bath station, Bridgwater, etc. as well as Nuneham. Of course, they were prefab and modular so if one bit rotted they just unbolted it and put a new one in almost between trains (no doubt stopping some trains for a while though).
Incidentally, it was 38 degrees here today. 5 hours walking around Pompeii and I feel like one of the tragic plastercasts - when I go in the shower all the salt will wash off and there'll be nothing left inside.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
Thanks - of coiurse that makes sense now you point that out (or not, in another sense!).
I travelled on a Pendolino the other day - I don't normally do the WCML being an East Coast person - and the whole family felt sick on it thanks to the tilting. Made me wonder why we abandoned our beautiful home grown APT just to import the same tech back twenty years later with the same problem that led to the APT's demise.
Another odd aspect of the old Pendolinos was their couplings were incompatible with other trains, or am I misremembering? So if one broke down, it was hell trying to extract it even if one had a Class 37 nearby. (Never mind the intercompany arguments if someone else owned the locomotive.) No idea if that hjas been fixed.
The smell of the toilets still permeates the whole train too. And you had seats with no windows, and almost no luggage space so bags were blocking the aisle and creating agro between the passengers. I really didn't like it. Sad because normally I love trains more than life itself.
Voyagers (Class 220/221) at least had bigger windows! I used to ride the Pendos quite a lot between Euston and Coventry when I worked at Warwick 2013-2018.
Voyagers are as bad as the Blue Tories ie shit
SKS is a Pacer
Solid and reliable - get you from A to B
Fair fucks
Pacers were neither solid or reliable and should have been disposed of much earlier just like SKS
Interesting question, but the problem is very few people will have visited enough to give an answer. I don't know what the world's most underrated city is because I've not been to that many of them. Of the cities I have visited, the most underrated is probably Palma de Mallorca. Largely because people just go through it on the way to the beach resorts.
If there's a clear winner it immediately loses the title since it's no longer underrated.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
1980s BR was the butt of every comedian’s jokes, they really didn’t give a flying f… about their customers. Trains arrived when they arrived, and left when they left, although there might have been something of a timetable written down somewhere, the breakfasts were, umm, legendary, and even their famous slogan of the time “We’re Getting There” could have been designed to be read in two ways. BR was the poster child for managed decline, up until privatisation.
Amazing how people's memories vary.
It did have a timetable. A single all line one. Printed as a paperback. Every year, done on time, and you could find it everywhere such as the public library, or buy a copy at the station.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
The only people who say HS2 needs to be binned don't understand the issue
The ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline all run at "capacity". HS2 solves that capacity issue by allowing longer and faster trains to run to the main destinations.
Better than that because the ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline currently contain both fast and slow moving trains were all trains to run at the same speed there is additional capacity available by shifting all the fast trains to ECML which would allow significant extra capacity (think its 100%) to be made available on those lines.
Hence by building 1 new line we actually increase capacity 4 or 5 fold. Sadly we don't know the economic impact of the above (which will be truly massive because if you builds trains, they get used) because the maths was too complex and too broad for the Treasury to do the work.
But it needs to run somewhere useful, rather than, say, terminating in the Wild, Wild West of London
In a proper country it would stop first at Heathrow, then head into London where it would connect to St Pancras and continue merrily down to the Chunnel and onwards to the continent. And stop at Ebbsfleet which used to be a very convenient Eurostar stop for me before it was closed thanks to Brexit.
Incidentally, it was 38 degrees here today. 5 hours walking around Pompeii and I feel like one of the tragic plastercasts - when I go in the shower all the salt will wash off and there'll be nothing left inside.
Potentially 42C in France the next couple of days too. There's a really strong gradient between us and Western Europe at the moment. A little touch of it will waft this way midweek before the cool down.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Yes I do think it boils down to this. Do we want the state doing this on our behalf? The 'pros v cons' calculus is important but you have to process that question first.
So it comes down to our own moral vanity?
Don't quite follow. In what sense is it vanity?
Because it places upholding our self-image as the highest good. We deny the families of the victims real justice because it would offend our sense of ourselves as morally superior beings.
HS2 should have been built by StateCo and operated for the good of the public, with planning reform so it couldn't be delayed or rejected for silly reasons.
It is being built by the state, isn't it, albeit using contractors? As for planning reform - probably, yes, but good luck k with that...
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
1980s BR was the butt of every comedian’s jokes, they really didn’t give a flying f… about their customers. Trains arrived when they arrived, and left when they left, although there might have been something of a timetable written down somewhere, the breakfasts were, umm, legendary, and even their famous slogan of the time “We’re Getting There” could have been designed to be read in two ways. BR was the poster child for managed decline, up until privatisation.
Whereas now trains are the poster-child for managed decline, just it costs an awful lot more and the service is still crap.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
The only people who say HS2 needs to be binned don't understand the issue
The ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline all run at "capacity". HS2 solves that capacity issue by allowing longer and faster trains to run to the main destinations.
Better than that because the ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline currently contain both fast and slow moving trains were all trains to run at the same speed there is additional capacity available by shifting all the fast trains to ECML which would allow significant extra capacity (think its 100%) to be made available on those lines.
Hence by building 1 new line we actually increase capacity 4 or 5 fold. Sadly we don't know the economic impact of the above (which will be truly massive because if you builds trains, they get used) because the maths was too complex and too broad for the Treasury to do the work.
But it needs to run somewhere useful, rather than, say, terminating in the Wild, Wild West of London
But that is part of the issue - it needs to end up at Euston because St Pancras / Kings Cross is already full.
Then the government has decided that it saves money if you change a plan half way through rather than letting people get on with it.
HS2 should have been built by StateCo and operated for the good of the public, with planning reform so it couldn't be delayed or rejected for silly reasons.
It is being built by the state, isn't it, albeit using contractors? As for planning reform - probably, yes, but good luck k with that...
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
The only people who say HS2 needs to be binned don't understand the issue
The ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline all run at "capacity". HS2 solves that capacity issue by allowing longer and faster trains to run to the main destinations.
Better than that because the ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline currently contain both fast and slow moving trains were all trains to run at the same speed there is additional capacity available by shifting all the fast trains to ECML which would allow significant extra capacity (think its 100%) to be made available on those lines.
Hence by building 1 new line we actually increase capacity 4 or 5 fold. Sadly we don't know the economic impact of the above (which will be truly massive because if you builds trains, they get used) because the maths was too complex and too broad for the Treasury to do the work.
But it needs to run somewhere useful, rather than, say, terminating in the Wild, Wild West of London
In a proper country it would stop first at Heathrow, then head into London where it would connect to St Pancras and continue merrily down to the Chunnel and onwards to the continent. And stop at Ebbsfleet which used to be a very convenient Eurostar stop for me before it was closed thanks to Brexit.
Yup! The lack of thinking as to the termination points makes no sense. It’s a 100-year investment, so have it run from Birmingham to Heathrow, to St.P and with the facility to end up on the HS1 line towards the Chunnel. Even if that means digging a 10-mile tunnel under West London.
Yup! The lack of thinking as to the termination points makes no sense. It’s a 100-year investment, so have it run from Birmingham to Heathrow, to St.P and with the facility to end up on the HS1 line towards the Chunnel. Even if that means digging a 10-mile tunnel under West London.
HS2 should have been built by StateCo and operated for the good of the public, with planning reform so it couldn't be delayed or rejected for silly reasons.
It is being built by the state, isn't it, albeit using contractors? As for planning reform - probably, yes, but good luck k with that...
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
1980s BR was the butt of every comedian’s jokes, they really didn’t give a flying f… about their customers. Trains arrived when they arrived, and left when they left, although there might have been something of a timetable written down somewhere, the breakfasts were, umm, legendary, and even their famous slogan of the time “We’re Getting There” could have been designed to be read in two ways. BR was the poster child for managed decline, up until privatisation.
Well Mrs Thatcher was also the butt of every comedian's jokes in the 1980s.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
1980s BR was the butt of every comedian’s jokes, they really didn’t give a flying f… about their customers. Trains arrived when they arrived, and left when they left, although there might have been something of a timetable written down somewhere, the breakfasts were, umm, legendary, and even their famous slogan of the time “We’re Getting There” could have been designed to be read in two ways. BR was the poster child for managed decline, up until privatisation.
Whereas now trains are the poster-child for managed decline, just it costs an awful lot more and the service is still crap.
Rubbish. If that was the case the government would not have given the railways billions during covid.
All parties seem to want strong railways. As ever, the treasury is a major problem, and often fight tooth and nail against investments. Which is one reason why Blair and Brown only electrified 20 miles or so of railway in 17 years....
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
When you say Oxfordshire, are we talking about a route which operates into London Paddington? Its just that you are using the 1960s as a comparator. In 1976 BR introduced the fastest diesel trains in the world out of Paddington. The HST was both comfier and faster than the current IEP operation. And likely much cheaper for turn up and go flexible journeys.
Again again. BR got loads right. And loads wrong. It all depended on the political climate at the time.
One of the reasons my train connection into London is a million times better than it was in the 1960s is I now have a choice between a 10 minute walk to my own station (with direct trains to Paddington four times more frequent than 60 years ago) and a 15 minute drive to Oxford Parkway (which didn't have a direct connection to London then).
On both direct trains to London and the complexities of travel to elsewhere in Britain, it's the real choice privatisation has brought that makes the present system so much better than relying entirely on the UK government.
Er, the stations are nationalised. So your post is an example in favour of a state-run railway...
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
I don't know in total. But I know the proposals in Greater Manchester quite well. And, for example, investing an extra c £1bn in an underground through station at Piccadilly, would in the benefits it brings relative to HS2's proposals for a suface turnback station, pay for itself in about 5 years. Because the HS2 station is a half-arsed solution which a) puts a station with capacity for 11tph on a spur with capacity for 15tph, incorporating all sorts of risks of delay and unreliability in the process, and b) releases more city centre land for high value development, which is kind of the point of HS2. This is a massively complicated subject which took up about five days of Select Committee time in June, so I'm bowlderising wildly! But the point is there is massive scope to, by doing this properly rather than in a half-arsed way. reach a point where benefits comfortably outweigh costs, rather than just about outweighing costs with a following wind*.
(As a side issue, HS2 insists on using tunnelling methodology (or at least considering the cost of tunnelling methodology) based on how much it costs to tunnel in London. It's much, much easier, cheaper and lower risk to tunnel in the north, because we are on Sherwood Sandstone rather than the muds and silts of London. )
Now, an extra £1bn is a lot, particularly when it will be multiplied by whatever other places are making similar arguments (though I doubt many are of that scale). Infrastructure is expensive. The whole cost envelope is $96bn, and that isn't enough. But the point isn't just to have the minimum viable product, it's to invest so we get benefits back. And 'doing it properly' will yield far more benefits and a much better benefit to cost ratio.
*Actually, the reason the benefit cost ratio as it is looks so discouraging is because there are so many benefits which you can monetise but which treasury chooses not to consider - chiefly those of knock-on improvements to the existing network through removal of fast trains which eat up so much capacity (including, significantly, reliability benefits) and those of improved land values in high connectivity locations (land values being a proxy way of monetising the benefits which come from improved connectivity, since they reflect the value the market places upon these decisions). Both of these are kind of the point of HS2 but weirdly don't get considered when calculating benefits against costs.
I find the debate on here about BR vs. privatisation almost as sterile as the Brexit debate. The anti-BR side constantly point out how much better railways are now than in the 60s and 70s. Well I never! It would be pretty astonishing given technological advances since then if they weren't, wouldn't it? As somebody pointed out above, we don't compare cars from that era with cars now.
(Incidentally, I'm biased because my late father worked for BR for 40 years. He told many tales of great success, and many tales of great failure, with most stuff in between. Much like now).
I don't think it's that sterile. Most people seem to be taking a nuanced position. But our memories of BR are necessarily pretty anecdotal and imperfect. I reckon I'm somewhere around the average age for the board (48), so was about 17 when BR was privatised - and while I do have memories of BR, it's necessarily pretty selective; a child/teenager's experience of the railway aren't necessarily representative.
Older than you, so fonder memories of BR: 1. Free tickets (thanks, dad). 2. If you were going to Scarborough from, say, London, and your train was a bit late, the connecting train from York to Scarborough would actually be delayed for the London train to arrive. Happy days.
Yes, I remembered that when I ran at top speed (along with dozens of others) to make a connection in Newport recently after the London train was 12 minutes late. The next train was an hour or more later. The fastest runners among us held the doors for the slower people, which included mums with pushchairs, and received much abuse from the station staff for our efforts.
It worked, everyone made the change. But would have been better (and much less sweaty) if the two train 'companies' had simply co-operated. The whole episode was nasty consequence of a fragmented system.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
I don't know in total. But I know the proposals in Greater Manchester quite well. And, for example, investing an extra c £1bn in an underground through station at Piccadilly, would in the benefits it brings relative to HS2's proposals for a suface turnback station, pay for itself in about 5 years. Because the HS2 station is a half-arsed solution which a) puts a station with capacity for 11tph on a spur with capacity for 15tph, incorporating all sorts of risks of delay and unreliability in the process, and b) releases more city centre land for high value development, which is kind of the point of HS2. This is a massively complicated subject which took up about five days of Select Committee time in June, so I'm bowlderising wildly! But the point is there is massive scope to, by doing this properly rather than in a half-arsed way. reach a point where benefits comfortably outweigh costs, rather than just about outweighing costs with a following wind*.
(As a side issue, HS2 insists on using tunnelling methodology (or at least considering the cost of tunnelling methodology) based on how much it costs to tunnel in London. It's much, much easier, cheaper and lower risk to tunnel in the north, because we are on Sherwood Sandstone rather than the muds and silts of London. )
Now, an extra £1bn is a lot, particularly when it will be multiplied by whatever other places are making similar arguments (though I doubt many are of that scale). Infrastructure is expensive. The whole cost envelope is $96bn, and that isn't enough. But the point isn't just to have the minimum viable product, it's to invest so we get benefits back. And 'doing it properly' will yield far more benefits and a much better benefit to cost ratio.
*Actually, the reason the benefit cost ratio as it is looks so discouraging is because there are so many benefits which you can monetise but which treasury chooses not to consider - chiefly those of knock-on improvements to the existing network through removal of fast trains which eat up so much capacity (including, significantly, reliability benefits) and those of improved land values in high connectivity locations (land values being a proxy way of monetising the benefits which come from improved connectivity, since they reflect the value the market places upon these decisions). Both of these are kind of the point of HS2 but weirdly don't get considered when calculating benefits against costs.
I'm not sure how you can see the extraordinary success of Crossrail and consider cancelling HS2.
Even simple stuff like the £2 cap for buses has seen 1.5 million extra journeys in the first three months in Manchester. They are aiming for an additional 50 million a year by 2030.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
The obvious argument against the Death Penalty is that as a deterrent it is an utter failure. If it worked as a deterrent then its introduction would stop murders, but historically it makes no difference to the murder rate and some people have argued that it makes things worse (if you are going to hang for murdering one, why worry about doing a dozen?)
The true argument about the Death Penalty is more about whether we, as a society, want to exact revenge on the apparently guilty.
Cost or deterrence is irrelevant. We have to decide if we are the sort of people who want to hear their neck snap or fry them until their eyeballs pop.
Yes I do think it boils down to this. Do we want the state doing this on our behalf? The 'pros v cons' calculus is important but you have to process that question first.
So it comes down to our own moral vanity?
Don't quite follow. In what sense is it vanity?
Because it places upholding our self-image as the highest good. We deny the families of the victims real justice because it would offend our sense of ourselves as morally superior beings.
It's not about feeling good about ourselves it's about including in the standards underpinning society that it's a crime to murder somebody. We don't deny the families of victims 'real justice' we deny them eye-for-an-eye retribution. Why? Because of that standard we've just signed off on - that it's a crime to murder somebody. If you have the DP, it sanctions the state doing that and by inference if a private citizen (eg a murder victim's friend or family member) took it upon themselves to do similar it wouldn't be a crime. Bang goes our standard. Society has one less. Society is lowered.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
I don't know in total. But I know the proposals in Greater Manchester quite well. And, for example, investing an extra c £1bn in an underground through station at Piccadilly, would in the benefits it brings relative to HS2's proposals for a suface turnback station, pay for itself in about 5 years. Because the HS2 station is a half-arsed solution which a) puts a station with capacity for 11tph on a spur with capacity for 15tph, incorporating all sorts of risks of delay and unreliability in the process, and b) releases more city centre land for high value development, which is kind of the point of HS2. This is a massively complicated subject which took up about five days of Select Committee time in June, so I'm bowlderising wildly! But the point is there is massive scope to, by doing this properly rather than in a half-arsed way. reach a point where benefits comfortably outweigh costs, rather than just about outweighing costs with a following wind*.
(As a side issue, HS2 insists on using tunnelling methodology (or at least considering the cost of tunnelling methodology) based on how much it costs to tunnel in London. It's much, much easier, cheaper and lower risk to tunnel in the north, because we are on Sherwood Sandstone rather than the muds and silts of London. )
Now, an extra £1bn is a lot, particularly when it will be multiplied by whatever other places are making similar arguments (though I doubt many are of that scale). Infrastructure is expensive. The whole cost envelope is $96bn, and that isn't enough. But the point isn't just to have the minimum viable product, it's to invest so we get benefits back. And 'doing it properly' will yield far more benefits and a much better benefit to cost ratio.
*Actually, the reason the benefit cost ratio as it is looks so discouraging is because there are so many benefits which you can monetise but which treasury chooses not to consider - chiefly those of knock-on improvements to the existing network through removal of fast trains which eat up so much capacity (including, significantly, reliability benefits) and those of improved land values in high connectivity locations (land values being a proxy way of monetising the benefits which come from improved connectivity, since they reflect the value the market places upon these decisions). Both of these are kind of the point of HS2 but weirdly don't get considered when calculating benefits against costs.
Each time the costs of this project reach a precipitous new high, a new cost-benefit analysis comes out showing that some more benefits have come to light to justify the costs. It's embarrassing.
We do need to do infrastructure, and all construction projects, very differently in this country. Projects should be smaller, less expensive, and follow the needs of business. Lift taxes and off businesses, let them grow, and where bridges, railway lines, tunnels, ports and roads are needed will soon become clear. And they might even be funded or part-funded by the businesses who stand to gain.
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
I don't know in total. But I know the proposals in Greater Manchester quite well. And, for example, investing an extra c £1bn in an underground through station at Piccadilly, would in the benefits it brings relative to HS2's proposals for a suface turnback station, pay for itself in about 5 years. Because the HS2 station is a half-arsed solution which a) puts a station with capacity for 11tph on a spur with capacity for 15tph, incorporating all sorts of risks of delay and unreliability in the process, and b) releases more city centre land for high value development, which is kind of the point of HS2. This is a massively complicated subject which took up about five days of Select Committee time in June, so I'm bowlderising wildly! But the point is there is massive scope to, by doing this properly rather than in a half-arsed way. reach a point where benefits comfortably outweigh costs, rather than just about outweighing costs with a following wind*.
(As a side issue, HS2 insists on using tunnelling methodology (or at least considering the cost of tunnelling methodology) based on how much it costs to tunnel in London. It's much, much easier, cheaper and lower risk to tunnel in the north, because we are on Sherwood Sandstone rather than the muds and silts of London. )
Now, an extra £1bn is a lot, particularly when it will be multiplied by whatever other places are making similar arguments (though I doubt many are of that scale). Infrastructure is expensive. The whole cost envelope is $96bn, and that isn't enough. But the point isn't just to have the minimum viable product, it's to invest so we get benefits back. And 'doing it properly' will yield far more benefits and a much better benefit to cost ratio.
*Actually, the reason the benefit cost ratio as it is looks so discouraging is because there are so many benefits which you can monetise but which treasury chooses not to consider - chiefly those of knock-on improvements to the existing network through removal of fast trains which eat up so much capacity (including, significantly, reliability benefits) and those of improved land values in high connectivity locations (land values being a proxy way of monetising the benefits which come from improved connectivity, since they reflect the value the market places upon these decisions). Both of these are kind of the point of HS2 but weirdly don't get considered when calculating benefits against costs.
Is the 1 billion figure from an engineerstudy?
It's not a finger in the air job; there was a lot of work went into it and it's gone through a process of being tested by barriesters in Select Committee. It's not 'exactly £1bn', I just can't remember the exact figure.
I just skimmed through all the comments, so I may have missed some on-topic ones. But I would be fascinated to hear more of you say whether Our Gracious Host has just tipped you to a good betting opportuinty, or whether he has made a rare error. (Especially if you have backed your opinion with a few pounds.)
(For the record: I am still undecided what the odds should be, partly because of the Republican Party winner-take-all rules, which make it possible for Trump to win all the delegates from some states, with as little as 30 percent of the primary vote. Had the party used proportional rules everywhere in 2016, it is entirely possible that Trump would have lost the nomination, and that the convention would have chosen a compromise candidate.)
British Rail was the most efficient railway in Europe and after sectorisation (a model which much of Europe then copied) it was making improvements. What it needed was more investment and a long-term interest in seeing it work. The Tories decided to play politics instead.
There speaks somebody who never used British Rail.
But my mother and father did for decades. And they maintain it is worse now than it ever was then.
And your mother and father are downright wrong.
I still use a complex intercity route (Cotswolds-Merseyside) I used to use in the late sixties. It's now far, far, more frequent and flexible, on far, far better (= comfier, faster, more frequent and newer) rolling stock with far, far tastier food and drink en route - and a real choice of operators. Pricing's now on a different model: buying tickets ahead of time offers substantial discounts that weren't available 60 years ago. But for the overwhelming majority of customers on this route (who ARE able to predict when they want to travel), journeys now cost a significantly lower proportion of average wages than they did 60 years ago.
But it's not just some complicated cross-country services: my prime journey (Oxfordshire-London) is, 90% of the time, light years better than the Soviet-style horror show I had to endure from BR in the 1960s. And most of the 10% of the time when it's not better is when the unions arbitrarily decide to go on strike.
It's palpable nonsense to say that BR was better than the system today. And the real reason it's palpable nonsense is that bits of today's train system are a lot worse, bits much the same and bits massively better: crude generalisations almost always lead to sloppily informed, and dangerous, alternatives (like "renationalise").
The one over-simplified one-liner I'd accept is that a distressingly common feature in current poor performances is the Treasury's uninformed micro-management. A feature which would be even more malign and frequent should Britain ever renationalise its railway system.
That was 60 years back, yes?
The de Havilland Comet was top of the range, the Moris Minor a miracle of its age. You can consider that even with our poor investment levels, the rolling stock, signalling and coffee will have improved simply by buying new stuff when the old stuff is irreparable.
Just thinking about travelling from Scotland to London from about 1965 to the end of BR. In other words, from almost the first Deltics to HST to IC225, which came in a few years before privatisation. All that improvement took place under BR. The most recent trains have not been that much of an improvement - incremental, sure, but nothing to compare with these introductionsa.
We're at a stage on the ECML (and elsewhere) that there's no real point in faster trains because the trains are going are fast as the track will allow. Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
HS2 is such a slow moving train wreck. Like the footballer who picks up a through-ball early, no defenders ahead, has too long to think, dribbles a bit and then ends up weakly paddling the ball into the goalie's gloves. The longer it goes on the weaker the outcome becomes.
It needs to be binned, and it's appalling that this isn't mainstream parliamentary opinion.
I take the opposite view. It needs to be done properly, rather than half-arsed. As does NPR.
I am curious as to how many more billions of 'properly' you feel this turkey of a project should be given.
I don't know in total. But I know the proposals in Greater Manchester quite well. And, for example, investing an extra c £1bn in an underground through station at Piccadilly, would in the benefits it brings relative to HS2's proposals for a suface turnback station, pay for itself in about 5 years. Because the HS2 station is a half-arsed solution which a) puts a station with capacity for 11tph on a spur with capacity for 15tph, incorporating all sorts of risks of delay and unreliability in the process, and b) releases more city centre land for high value development, which is kind of the point of HS2. This is a massively complicated subject which took up about five days of Select Committee time in June, so I'm bowlderising wildly! But the point is there is massive scope to, by doing this properly rather than in a half-arsed way. reach a point where benefits comfortably outweigh costs, rather than just about outweighing costs with a following wind*.
(As a side issue, HS2 insists on using tunnelling methodology (or at least considering the cost of tunnelling methodology) based on how much it costs to tunnel in London. It's much, much easier, cheaper and lower risk to tunnel in the north, because we are on Sherwood Sandstone rather than the muds and silts of London. )
Now, an extra £1bn is a lot, particularly when it will be multiplied by whatever other places are making similar arguments (though I doubt many are of that scale). Infrastructure is expensive. The whole cost envelope is $96bn, and that isn't enough. But the point isn't just to have the minimum viable product, it's to invest so we get benefits back. And 'doing it properly' will yield far more benefits and a much better benefit to cost ratio.
*Actually, the reason the benefit cost ratio as it is looks so discouraging is because there are so many benefits which you can monetise but which treasury chooses not to consider - chiefly those of knock-on improvements to the existing network through removal of fast trains which eat up so much capacity (including, significantly, reliability benefits) and those of improved land values in high connectivity locations (land values being a proxy way of monetising the benefits which come from improved connectivity, since they reflect the value the market places upon these decisions). Both of these are kind of the point of HS2 but weirdly don't get considered when calculating benefits against costs.
Each time the costs of this project reach a precipitous new high, a new cost-benefit analysis comes out showing that some more benefits have come to light to justify the costs. It's embarrassing.
We do need to do infrastructure, and all construction projects, very differently in this country. Projects should be smaller, less expensive, and follow the needs of business. Lift taxes and off businesses, let them grow, and where bridges, railway lines, tunnels, ports and roads are needed will soon become clear. And they might even be funded or part-funded by the businesses who stand to gain.
My Gordian knot cutter is "take on no project that cannot be completed in three years or less". If it takes longer than that, fuck it.
Comments
But our memories of BR are necessarily pretty anecdotal and imperfect. I reckon I'm somewhere around the average age for the board (48), so was about 17 when BR was privatised - and while I do have memories of BR, it's necessarily pretty selective; a child/teenager's experience of the railway aren't necessarily representative.
EDIT: Seems I was wrong about that.
And BR was building new stations. Bristol Parkway for instance (it invented the concept).
1. Free tickets (thanks, dad).
2. If you were going to Scarborough from, say, London, and your train was a bit late, the connecting train from York to Scarborough would actually be delayed for the London train to arrive.
Happy days.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/gandhi-on-jews-part-2-nazis-and-cowardice/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrewsbury_rail_accident
He was off work for two weeks until the the lines reopened and received no pay. A fact he continued to resent until his dying day nearly 70 years later.
Interestingly, on the WCML, HS2 trains which rejoin the WCML after Crewe/Wigan (depending on what emerges from the Golborne Link fiasco) to continue to Scotland will travel slower than the existing Pendolinos, because the HS2 rolling stock doesn't tilt - cos it doesn't need to, because it expects to travel on track engineered for 200kmph+.
A pity though that most journeys do not have competing operators on competing routes. And that the line upgrades done by Network Rail / DfT on the gWr route have imposed vastly expensive and yet barely fit for purpose infrastructure and trains...
What matters is how that revenge is managed - proportionality and process - that's what separates arbitrariness from justice.
Bloody lucky for Oxonians to have the alternativce route, though, when the bridge over the Thames at Nuneham started sinking and they had to stop the line south of Oxford to jack up the bridge and replace the abutment of late. (ISTR, but may be wrong, that the offending abutment was the one Brunel put in for his original prefab timber bridge and nobody had replaced it properly when putting in two successive iron or steel girders to replace the wooden one.)
Public justice exists in part to prevent revenge and provide an alternative.
We're not sure whether he's a wrong 'un or not, so we're going to sit on the fence, and we've agreed with him to do so. We're also not sure whether to dispense with him or not, but on the balance of probabilities we reckon keeping him on would attract too much criticism and piss off some sponsors, so we've also agreed with him we're going to reluctantly let him go despite the fact that he's unequivocally possibly innocent. And if you think we're going to share the reasoning behind this, think again. Okay?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britain#/media/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png
Because the motorways got choked up. And so on.
On Mason Greenwood, he has been found innocent in law but clearly there is more to it and he is grateful to United for their support and admits he made mistakes
I understand that many staff within United and, not least the Women's Team, were very concerned had he been allowed to play for the club again, indeed resignations are supposed to have been discussed
As a lifelong Manchester United supporter, I endorse the clubs actions which Greenwood accepts and hope that he and his partner and their child are able to create a new lifestyle away from the media spotlight
My modest proposal is to finish the London-Birmingham section but run it as a conventional railway with major parkway stations every 15 miles or so. Each would in turn become a development hub for the second half of the century. Steeple Claydon would become a major industrial and financial centre where it crosses the Oxford-Cambridge line. And so on.
I've never noticed the toilet smell, but I agree about the regrettably mean approach to provision of windows and luggage space.
SKS is a Pacer
Fair fucks
Governmental anti-car policies - or at least not as heavily pro car/Road - also helped, as did a growing economy.
I am currently enjoying Italian suburban services, and whilst they are cheap, they're fairly painful. Like going back to BR days.
But 3-foot gauge is cute.
The ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline all run at "capacity". HS2 solves that capacity issue by allowing longer and faster trains to run to the main destinations.
Better than that because the ECML, WCML and Midland Mainline currently contain both fast and slow moving trains were all trains to run at the same speed there is additional capacity available by shifting all the fast trains to ECML which would allow significant extra capacity (think its 100%) to be made available on those lines.
Hence by building 1 new line we actually increase capacity 4 or 5 fold. Sadly we don't know the economic impact of the above (which will be truly massive because if you builds trains, they get used) because the maths was too complex and too broad for the Treasury to do the work.
They seem to cope, I just wonder why they haven't rushed to copy the rest of the UK. Surely they must be idiots.
It did have a timetable. A single all line one. Printed as a paperback. Every year, done on time, and you could find it everywhere such as the public library, or buy a copy at the station.
Then the government has decided that it saves money if you change a plan half way through rather than letting people get on with it.
Edit Done properly - it goes Manchester, Crewe, Birmingham London
Leeds, Sheffield / Doncaster Hub, Nottingham / Derby Hub, Birmingham, London.
And then you add on Birmingham to Bristol...
This thread's destination has changed due to late running!
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1693624227600179583
New Thread
All parties seem to want strong railways. As ever, the treasury is a major problem, and often fight tooth and nail against investments. Which is one reason why Blair and Brown only electrified 20 miles or so of railway in 17 years....
Because the HS2 station is a half-arsed solution which a) puts a station with capacity for 11tph on a spur with capacity for 15tph, incorporating all sorts of risks of delay and unreliability in the process, and b) releases more city centre land for high value development, which is kind of the point of HS2.
This is a massively complicated subject which took up about five days of Select Committee time in June, so I'm bowlderising wildly! But the point is there is massive scope to, by doing this properly rather than in a half-arsed way. reach a point where benefits comfortably outweigh costs, rather than just about outweighing costs with a following wind*.
(As a side issue, HS2 insists on using tunnelling methodology (or at least considering the cost of tunnelling methodology) based on how much it costs to tunnel in London. It's much, much easier, cheaper and lower risk to tunnel in the north, because we are on Sherwood Sandstone rather than the muds and silts of London. )
Now, an extra £1bn is a lot, particularly when it will be multiplied by whatever other places are making similar arguments (though I doubt many are of that scale). Infrastructure is expensive. The whole cost envelope is $96bn, and that isn't enough. But the point isn't just to have the minimum viable product, it's to invest so we get benefits back. And 'doing it properly' will yield far more benefits and a much better benefit to cost ratio.
*Actually, the reason the benefit cost ratio as it is looks so discouraging is because there are so many benefits which you can monetise but which treasury chooses not to consider - chiefly those of knock-on improvements to the existing network through removal of fast trains which eat up so much capacity (including, significantly, reliability benefits) and those of improved land values in high connectivity locations (land values being a proxy way of monetising the benefits which come from improved connectivity, since they reflect the value the market places upon these decisions). Both of these are kind of the point of HS2 but weirdly don't get considered when calculating benefits against costs.
It worked, everyone made the change. But would have been better (and much less sweaty) if the two train 'companies' had simply co-operated. The whole episode was nasty consequence of a fragmented system.
Due to leaves on the line this thread terminates here
Even simple stuff like the £2 cap for buses has seen 1.5 million extra journeys in the first three months in Manchester. They are aiming for an additional 50 million a year by 2030.
We do need to do infrastructure, and all construction projects, very differently in this country. Projects should be smaller, less expensive, and follow the needs of business. Lift taxes and off businesses, let them grow, and where bridges, railway lines, tunnels, ports and roads are needed will soon become clear. And they might even be funded or part-funded by the businesses who stand to gain.
(For the record: I am still undecided what the odds should be, partly because of the Republican Party winner-take-all rules, which make it possible for Trump to win all the delegates from some states, with as little as 30 percent of the primary vote. Had the party used proportional rules everywhere in 2016, it is entirely possible that Trump would have lost the nomination, and that the convention would have chosen a compromise candidate.)
Incidentally, this concept may appeal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path