WHY CAN’T WE RUN A RAILWAY?

(after all, we invented them)

The timing could not have been worse. At the very moment beleaguered train passengers face the largest fare rises in five years, the Mail reveals that the bosses of train companies are receiving bumper pay deals worth millions after presiding over services which shame Britain.

For a country that invented rail travel we are making a remarkably good job of trying to finish it off.

Figures released yesterday show that the number of people buying season tickets plunged by 9.4 per cent between July and September compared with a year earlier. The growth in passenger numbers, which surged after privatisation 20 years ago, has gone into sharp reverse.

Who can blame passengers for taking to their cars instead? When they return to work tomorrow they will find that ticket costs have risen by an average of 3.4 per cent – with most fares linked to the rate of the Retail Prices Index (RPI) for last July.

For this, passengers are being treated to a deteriorating service. In the five weeks to Christmas a shocking 48 per cent of trains across the country were either delayed or cancelled. That figure would be far worse were it not for a loose definition of the word late which would be laughed at in Japan or Germany.

In Britain a commuter train does not become classified as ‘late’ unless it arrives at its final destination at least five minutes after its scheduled time. For long distance trains it is ten minutes.

Passengers on South Western and CrossCountry services will start the New Year facing 24hour strikes. They won’t be the only ones. The railways are rapidly turning into a theme park of 1970s industrial relations.

The 18 months of misery endured by passengers on Southern Railway was only partially ended in November when drivers voted to accept a monstrous pay rise of 28 per cent over five years, which will take their pay, including overtime, to £75,000.

This was their reward for causing some passengers to lose their own jobs, thanks to industrial action making it impossible for them to get to work on time.

Drivers elsewhere in the country are now spoiling for their own fat pay rise – hence the threat of strikes on other lines. The bosses aren’t exactly setting an example in pay restraint either – with staggering increases on the way.

Normally, private companies which awarded themselves fat pay rises while simultaneously driving their customers away would go bust in no time.

But that isn’t how things seem to work on the railways. If passenger numbers go up, they profit. If passenger numbers come in lower than expected, they get bailed out. NOTIONALLY, privatisation transferred financial risk to the private sector, yet in practice taxpayers are now paying more than twice as much subsidy to the railways – £4.8billion of it in 2015/16 – than they were in the last days of British Rail.

At the same time, fares have soared. It makes no sense that rises in season tickets and offpeak fares are linked to RPI when most other things now are linked to the – usually lower – Consumer Prices Index (CPI).

Peak-time fares are not regulated at all, with the result that rail companies are able ruthlessly to exploit their monopolies.

over the years, Virgin Trains has jacked up its standard peaktime fare from london to Manchester to an astonishing £338. You can fly to New York for less.

True, there are cheaper advance fares, but they are not always available and are of little use to passengers who, for example, have to travel at short notice because a family member has fallen ill.

Setting extortionate ‘anytime’ fares allows train companies to extract huge penalty fares from passengers who in many cases have caught the wrong train by mistake – perhaps because all trains were running late.

Where is all the investment which private rail companies were supposed to be pouring into the network?

Today’s trains, at an average age of 21 years, are the oldest since records began.

It is being left to the taxpayer to stump up the full cost of the extravagant hS2 project – currently estimated to cost £56billion. No one should be fooled into thinking that hS2 will improve timekeeping. It is already doomed to become the least reliable high-speed line in the world.

The plan is to run virtually every express to the North of england on the same line – 18 trains an hour, with no spare capacity. If one train is delayed it will mean all trains running late for hours afterwards – either that or trains will have to be cancelled.

Few who remember British Rail – I briefly worked for the nationalised industry in the 1980s – would want to reinvent it. But why can’t we have genuine competition between rail companies? We have budget airlines because we have competition in the air. on the railways a civil servant decides which company is going to have the exclusive right to run the trains on a particular line for years to come.

Why should that right be exclusive? If more than one company were allowed to run trains on any particular line, at least there would be competition which would improve service for longsuffering passengers.

or, to put it another way, you can just imagine what food shopping would be like if one of the big supermarket chains was granted the exclusive right to sell food in any given city. The food would be lousy and we would be ripped off because the supermarket would know we had no choice.

That is how it works on the railways. It needs to be put right.