Train/track integration

I agree with many of Industry Insider’s points about renationalisation ( RAIL 844), but I must take issue with the comparisons with aviation and shipping regarding the separation of operations from infrastructure.

Insider states: “Airlines do not run airports or air traffic control systems; shipping firms do not run ports.”

The implication is that this same separation should also automatically apply to railways, but there is a major difference: railways are natural geographical monopolies in a way that airlines and ship operators are not.

There are, of course, particular nodes in the rail network where several operators come together today just as they did in preGrouping times - Reading and York spring to mind. However, for most users of the passenger railway in Britain, ‘open access’ is just a chimera.

The majority of UK railway stations offer no realistic prospect of a choice of operator. That fact demolishes many of the arguments for separation of train and track.

By contrast, there are good reasons for bringing them under the same management. These include a better ‘fit’ between infrastructure and services, better co-ordination of Permanent Way works and less disruption to the timetable, more scope for small-scale changes to be made quickly, efficiencies in administration, and improved communication between the operating side and the track and signalling departments. The obvious caveat is that nationwide safety and interoperability standards would have to be firmly policed, to ensure compatibility across the entire network.

Insider’s criticisms of the nationalised railway - the quality issues, high costs, government interference, general inefficiency - can equally be applied to that lumbering nationalised behemoth Network Rail, whose failing signalling systems, rubbish-strewn track and jungle-like linesides, inflated costs, mind-numbing bureaucracy and general inefficiency add so much to train service delays, high prices and the ‘can’t do’ attitude that characterised the worst aspects of British Rail.

Andrew Mourant’s excellent article on the Far North Line and Christan Wolmar’s interview with NR top brass in the same issue make these points far better than I can. Having said that, the infrastructure owner’s privatised incarnation - Railtrack - was even worse, and proved incapable of maintaining the network in a safe state.

Separation of train and track is costly, inefficient, unresponsive and restrictive, regardless of whether the two elements are wholly in private or in public hands or (as at present) a mixture of the two.

I agree that renationalisation is not the answer, but integration of train and track is the way to go. Stephen Spark, Balham