A significant reduction in commuting will give the railway fresh impetus
So, after reading the supplement on Reimagining & rebooting our passenger railway (RAIL 952), the railways are in a crisis. Passenger numbers are down (hardly surprising with multiple on/off lockdowns), and nobody will be commuting anymore (I exaggerate).
However, commuting has always been the bane of railways, requiring an excess of infrastructure and staffing for a short period of demand in the am and pm peaks. It has also attracted political interference, with politicians insisting on reduced or frozen fares for commuters, despite their disproportionate impact on resources.
This was the exact situation when the UK railways were privatised and franchising was introduced. Most potential franchisees were bidding not to make a profit in running trains, but to reduce the subsidy to run them. The peak timetable was frozen in time and the train operating companies were told to continue to offer commuters discounts (season tickets), while peak fare increases were regulated.
Today, that subsidy to run commuter services has been largely diverted to make the franchises look profitable. However, commuting is still inherently lossmaking.
So, is a significant reduction in commuting, as is being somewhat prematurely predicted, actually a bad thing?
Under British Rail, a reduction in commuting would have resulted in a reduction in peak train services. But faced with a fixed (peak) timetable, most franchises chose to increase their off-peak offerings, producing an enhanced all-day timetable.
And very successful it has been, with passenger numbers until COVID some of the highest ever more than twice as high as in the 1980s and 1990s!
This does mean, though, that any reduction in peak trains will also result in a reduction in the service offered to off-peak users. That said, there is scope to reduce train lengths and staffing numbers, if commuting is to be reduced and spread over a longer period (as has been suggested).
Of course, a reduced commute will also result in less overcrowding. This has been the one variable regulatory metric that franchisees have had to contend with, and it has resulted in not only longer trains and resignalling (to accommodate more trains), but also trains designed to carry more passengers - at the expense of aesthetics and passenger comfort. Now, we should be able to wind this back.
It has been said that there could be a 50% reduction in the Friday commute, from both flexible schedules and home working.
Isn’t this good, too? Friday is a busy day for leisure travel, so less commuters means more seats and lower fares (if you recall Blue and White Savers).
What we really don’t want to start doing is cutting back on services that have made our railways not only the “green” choice, but also the fast and flexible one.
Mike Jones, Emsworth
■ In the Reimagining & rebooting our passenger railway supplement, one contributor said we should adopt low-cost airline methods of filling every train seat, even if that meant only charging some passengers £1.
This is exactly the wrong way for the railways to go. We all want busy, well-used trains, but no one wants to sit elbow to elbow with a stranger, wondering if he or she has paid a quarter of the fare that you have.
Nor will a Byzantine system of advance booking and variable fares make train travel an attractive alternative to road transport.
Instead, what is needed is the simplest fare structure possible, with no advanced booking, no reservations, and a frequent service.
This works in London and the South East. I turn up for trains at will, always find a seat (I don’t travel in rush hours, but they are a thing of the past, right?) and don’t have to walk down the train guessing which of the reserved seats will actually be occupied on this journey (a high percentage of reserved seats on long-distance trains don’t seem to be).
Does this make a profit for the Treasury? I have no idea. But it certainly moves vast numbers of people daily in a potentially near-zero carbon way - and didn’t I read somewhere that there was a climate change emergency?
The Government’s Decarbonising Transport plan last year says public transport, where available, should be the cheapest and most attractive option. Also, that it should be made cheaper relative to car usage than it is now. That is supposedly government policy. It doesn’t say we should only do this if it makes a profit.
If all transport modes have to make a profit, the sooner we have national road pricing the better. We need to know just how many of those rural roads are ‘viable’ and whether there is still a business case for maintaining them. Is it fair to expect hardworking taxpayers in towns and cities to ‘subsidise’ roads that only serve a few farms, rural houses and villages?
No one thinks this way about roads, so no one should think this way about railways. They are infrastructure, which should be well-used and run cost-effectively. But they are not a business that has to provide a return.
Peter Conway, London
Reading the supplement on Reimagining & rebooting our passenger railway, I am reminded why seasoned rail enthusiasts often express the opinion that even they have trouble understanding how our rail industry works, how to access it, and are in a fog as to the future - let alone wonder how the public copes.
Some concepts are obviously understandable. For example, understanding that the pattern of commuting has changed/is changing, that the way rolling stock is used and provided must change, and that fares will be changed or modified.
For many people, the arrival of a Great British Railways will seem years away. Having to suffer possibly the same years of the Great British Railways Transition Team gobbling up money on scoping, more research and studies is too much to bear.
We have had too many studies, costing too much money. Did we really need studies and consultations to arrive at the opinion that there was a bottleneck on the Castlefield Corridor?
The most often touted idea is that our fares structure is too complicated. But how is the notion of three main classes of ticket
difficult to understand (Anytime, Off-Peak and Advance Purchase)?
What, in plain terms, did Tim Shoveller mean when he said “lowering the peaks and raising numbers in the middle of the day, where we can do it for free, provides a better service for passengers”?
I can understand that changing demands might mean different peaks in future, and therefore different fares and tickets, but why does he say “free”? Or in what context?
More confusing are the comments of Arriva’s David Brown, when he states: “A bugbear of mine, as a father of three children, is travel in groups of five. They are not catered for. We need a new offer.”
Does he mean another new fare and, therefore, another new ticket?
Alistair Lees says: “Since COVID, rail managers have invented 500 ticket products.” Yet David Brown appears to want another one?
Another aspect that is not addressed is that there are lots of special interest groups who want more and more things from the railway, specific to their respective needs.
For example, I refer to the article in RAIL 951 on the Campaign for Family-Friendly Trains. Is it really possible, realistic or fair to let these groups (cyclists, disabled, dog owners, e-scooters, etc) believe that it possible to adapt
rolling stock and station facilities to service all of their expectations? The disabled group, of course, should be given priority.
The politicians and the existing industry do not convey the impression that they all know how to manage for the future, whatever new model is adopted
Steven Foster, Morecambe
Conveying information is vitally important - whether through broadcast media, social media, station displays and announcements, or on-train displays and announcements.
Yet all too often, it is delegated to those inadequately trained in clarity and too close to the trees to see the wood.
Examples include a particularly disgraceful instance a few years ago, when major engineering work led to a blockade of the East Main Line south of Peterborough. Broadcast media had evidently been informed, but so incompetently that they were all warning us not to travel on the ECML, with no hint that trains were running as normal north of Peterborough!
And why does local radio so seldom tell us just where on a longer line a failed train or engineer’s blockade is, so that the geographically literate can figure out for themselves how their shorter journey is likely to be affected?
I’ve lost count of the number of times the value of excellent temporary signage has been ruined by contradictory permanent signage that nobody has thought to cover up. Or the number of automatic announcements that have then been contradicted by the on-board staff.
Making best use of limited display space will always be challenging, as the amount of information is in conflict with both legibility and ease of comprehension. This is especially so with television-sized displays at stations, where it can take a while for the novice viewer to even notice “page 2 of 3” along the bottom, never mind get their brain around how those three pages fit together to tell them what they need.
There are some good examples around of intelligently crafted automatic on-train announcements, and there is scope for more. London Underground, when approaching Angel station, tells us to alight for the RNIB. But when approaching Waterloo East westbound, it could also usefully warn the unfamiliar that it’s better to stay on board if they want the main London Waterloo terminus.
There is also good and bad to be found in ad-hoc displays and announcements. Waiting at Portchester recently, someone was thoughtful enough to warn us that the approaching train’s accessible toilet was out of order. What a pity they didn’t also think to say whether there was also an alternative working loo aboard!
Elocution can make or ruin an announcement. Announcers don’t need to speak like a Shakespearian actor - regional accents are fine. But they do need to speak slowly enough and clearly.
And we need a non-essential warm-up to get used to them: “Bentham next stop” hides the important information at the beginning before we’ve had a chance to tune in to the speaker, as opposed to “the next station is Bentham”.
To close with a few more general points: novice travellers can be confused by what most of us would dismiss as silly things, such as seeing a place name on
the side of a train. Is that the train’s destination or the train’s name? Please don’t ever name another train after a place.
As has been occasionally remarked before in RAIL, many novices assume that a walk-up ticket’s validity is limited to the originally intended train. The ticket itself needs to tell them otherwise, and not just in jargon!
William R Lynch, Suffolk.
I found in this supplement that the booking clerk will be a thing of past with Great British Railways. On the whole network, including London terminals, you will be faced with banks of machines.
The rail unions have said that the plans involve one grade of customer service assistants who will be multi-tasked. So, no clerks, no managers, and basically one grade doing despatch and showing customers how to work machines.
Interesting times. I’m glad I have retired from the rail industry.
Trevor Jordan, Lancashire
I may have missed it, but, nowhere in the 32-page supplement could I find a reference to printed (pocket) timetables - not even by Transport Focus, which challenges the railways to “Do the basics brilliantly”.
Our railways can reimagine and reboot to their heart’s content, but reintroducing the printed timetable would certainly enhance my “passenger experience” - and, I suspect, that of many other travellers.
My journey starts at home when I consider where and when to travel, and it continues on board as I follow the route and check the progress of it (and, in those rare situations when it goes wrong, quickly plan options to complete it).
Not all of us have fancy phones. And as Ben Jones writes: “A public timetable is a promise to passengers.”
Let’s have it back again on station racks in print, too, please. In support of Barry Doe, I am reassured that mine is not a lone request!
Graham Thompson, North Yorkshire