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I hate Birmingham New Street railway station.
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Apr 1, 2014 10:32
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I was arguing with someone in the office about privatisation and have made a list of other countries national railways that we pay huge subsidies to run our own. Deutsche Bahn (aka Arriva)
Chiltern Railways CrossCountry Grand Central Railway London Overground Rail Operations (50/50 joint venture with MTR Corporation) Tyne & Wear Metro SNCF (aka Keolis)
Southeastern London Midland Nederlandse Spoorwegen (aka Abellio)
Greater Anglia Northern Rail Which explains this   At least we're getting something in return from Virgin, Go-Ahead, First and Stagecoach though; private sector investment is 1% of all investment in UK rail! Rude Dude With Tude fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 11:01
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Hypation posted:It's not privatisation per se - its the conflicts of interest the government chooses to embed in the process and more significantly the way they spend the receipts that is the 'real' issue.
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Apr 1, 2014 11:10
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Pissflaps posted:I hate Birmingham New Street railway station. It's been improved a lot and you can get into the Bullring without going outside into actual Birmingham so it has some positives.
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Apr 1, 2014 11:15
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:I was arguing with someone in the office about privatisation and have made a list of other countries national railways that we pay huge subsidies to run our own. For example, since the privisation of the Dutch railways Arriva (Deutsche Bahn) are running railways in the Netherlands as well. And French company Veolia runs trains in Germany and the Netherlands, the Italian railways run in Germany etc. etc. But this hasn't lead to huge cost or season ticket rises. You don't get the same nationalisation calls there because people are relatively happy with how things are running. Not that I'm all for privatisation of railways at a;; - but it feels like the UK is especially bad at it.
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Apr 1, 2014 11:30
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LemonDrizzle posted:It's also that a lot of public services are more or less natural monopolies, which means that one of the key benefits of privatization - improvement driven by fear of competition - is almost completely negated and instead you end up handing things over to a bunch of rent-seekers who let the services rot while steadily raising fees. Those natural monopolies are price regulated. Either by way of setting prices to deliver an allowable rate of return based on an approve regulatory asset base or by some fixed incremental pricing structure. So you can easily inject competitive rewards in this kind of structure: Fixing the review cycle every say 5 years allows the owners to upgrade and improve and keep any excess returns they get from those improvements for the remainder of the review period. Then pricing is reviewed and readjusted to remove the economic rent. Or you simply don't care about economic rent and offer a top line price adjustment formulae - anything you do to improve costs and get an excess return you can keep. They get more rent from better services. One other key is linking pricing adjustments to service levels and enforcing that - currently hardly anyone does this efficiently. They should though. A key reason is the inefficiency is baked into the construction cost and service level is primarily a function of capacity which is driven by the initial construction- ie once it is built you will be screwed not once it is privatised. Even this can be managed - the problem is it is not. One way is the ability to buy back the asset under pre-agreed pricing mechanisms and retender it - the insistence on 99 year leases etc is not ideal.
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Apr 1, 2014 11:39
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Hypation posted:Those natural monopolies are price regulated. Either by way of setting prices to deliver an allowable rate of return based on an approve regulatory asset base or by some fixed incremental pricing structure. So you can easily inject competitive rewards in this kind of structure: Fixing the review cycle every say 5 years allows the owners to upgrade and improve and keep any excess returns they get from those improvements for the remainder of the review period. Then pricing is reviewed and readjusted to remove the economic rent. Or you simply don't care about economic rent and offer a top line price adjustment formulae - anything you do to improve costs and get an excess return you can keep. They get more rent from better services. There are two big problems with the kind of x-year review cycle you're talking about : the owners have little incentive to make any investment that will take more than one cycle to pay off, and it only enables a very limited form of competition that excludes smaller operators and creates a kind of oligopoly wherein only a handful of large companies can bid for contracts. Because the service is a natural monopoly, anyone who is bidding for a contract has to be sufficiently large and diversified to survive if they don't get it; you can't start by serving a tiny portion of the market and grow from there. The other problem is that if you're changing ownership every few years you're going to prevent the accumulation of institutional knowledge, so the new owners will spend a lot of time recreating mistakes made by the previous ones. As for linking price adjustments to service quality, it's all well and good to say this should be done better but a bit meaningless if it isn't since normally when someone says A would work great if only we did B (but for some reason nobody does B), the implication is that B is either unfeasible or profoundly non-trivial. Second, this is now starting to sound like quite a lot of work - rather than just handing the service over to the private sector, we have to oversee it, carefully evaluate its performance to see what price changes can be tolerated, enforce good behaviour, and so on. One might be tempted to avoid the hassle and just bring the whole thing in house.
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Apr 1, 2014 13:59
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:I was arguing with someone in the office about privatisation and have made a list of other countries national railways that we pay huge subsidies to run our own. Deutsche Bahn also run the Caledonian Sleeper through DB Schenker Rail (UK) who First Group contract it out to because reasons. And RATP run the Manchester Metrolink if you want to count light rail.
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Apr 1, 2014 13:59
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LemonDrizzle posted:There are two big problems with the kind of x-year review cycle you're talking about : the owners have little incentive to make any investment that will take more than one cycle to pay off, and it only enables a very limited form of competition that excludes smaller operators and creates a kind of oligopoly wherein only a handful of large companies can bid for contracts. Because the service is a natural monopoly, anyone who is bidding for a contract has to be sufficiently large and diversified to survive if they don't get it; you can't start by serving a tiny portion of the market and grow from there. The other problem is that if you're changing ownership every few years you're going to prevent the accumulation of institutional knowledge, so the new owners will spend a lot of time recreating mistakes made by the previous ones. I agree that multi-year review cycles exclude incentives taking more than 1 review cycle to pay off. That's why its dumb to have annual cycles. I disagree that the review cycle has anything to do with the size of the organisation able to participate. Also there is no trend to oligopoly unless you run a privatisation or PPP that has a single tender package with operations, construction and financing all bundled together. Once you separate the packages then there is no ability to stich up the market through exclusive banking arrangements - This is the real limiting factor as to who can participate and who cannot in a tender process. There are over 20 large construction companies capable and interested in priming the construction or operations of large infrastructure projects. There are over 50 infrastructure and SWF funds interested in owning outright infrastructure. These would be subcontracting labour anyway. Most are looking for a way in to new markets and it is entirely plausible for large foreign owned construction / infrastructure companies to enter a new market via a single asset purchase. Changing ownership does not prevent accumulation of institutional knowledge because the operational staff do not change- you don't fire everyone and start over. Most of the time there is the operational staff, their management, the infrastructure company's board, the investment manager's management team, and the investment manager's board. changing the ownership changes the investment manager. The linkage of price adjustments to QoS is done all the time in IT. It is capable of reliable measurement. Also oversight is already being done by the independent regulators and even if the asset is government owned, the government owners at the bureaucracy level are every bit adversarial as private owners are in their relationships with the regulators - not withstanding it is the left and right hands of government. The infrastructure managers are under political pressure to provide quality service from their line ministries and under financial pressure from treasury to deliver the state an economic return. Their management decisions are then scrutinised by the regulators. You can't bring supervision in house without losing the independence of price reviews.
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Apr 1, 2014 14:34
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:I was arguing with someone in the office about privatisation and have made a list of other countries national railways that we pay huge subsidies to run our own. Keolis also hold a 45% share in Transpennine Express.
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Apr 1, 2014 15:12
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Hypation posted:Changing ownership does not prevent accumulation of institutional knowledge because the operational staff do not change- you don't fire everyone and start over.  Christian Wolmar posted:Railtrack was floated on the Stock Exchange in a £2.5bn sale in 1996 and for several years made healthy profits, but it started haemorrhaging money as a result of the Hatfield train crash in October 2000. Hatfield exposed both the engineering and financial flaws of privatisation. The accident, which killed four people, was caused by a broken rail which derailed part of an electric train travelling at 115 miles per hour. The subsequent investigation revealed that cracks in the rail had first been spotted nearly two years previously and that a series of mistakes by Railtrack and its contractors, Balfour Beatty, resulted in such a lengthy delay to effect the repair that the rail finally broke a couple of weeks before its replacement was scheduled. http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2001/10/the-life-and-death-of-railtrack/
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Apr 1, 2014 15:40
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There's vertical separation like what has happened in some countries where the train operator is separated from the infrastructure (but the two entities remain largely intact), and there's what the tories did to BR, which was pretty much a total evisceration. It was broken into as many pieces of possible, mostly in an attempt to crush the rail unions.
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Apr 1, 2014 15:53
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the railway line through dawlish reopens tomorrow, having been closed since feb 5th. in plenty of time for people wanting easter getaways, which I'm sure is much relief to management bods not wanting any more upsetting headlines. network rail continuing to look into alternative routes that are less vulnerable to storms and high tides.
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Apr 3, 2014 21:54
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Counterpoint: That specific privatisation involved a vertical restructure. Part of that involved Rail Track itself becoming a pure infrastructure owner with its engineering and infrastructure management becoming the responsibility of BRIS - British Rail Infrastructure Services. ie the engineers were not lost but transferred. According to wiki: "Railtrack let out most of the 2,509 stations to the franchised passenger train operators, managing only a handful (12, later 17) of the largest city termini itself; maintenance and renewal of the infrastructure was also contracted out to British Rail Infrastructure Services, leaving Railtrack's directly-employed staff consisting mostly of signallers. " In addition, rail fatigue, the cause of the Hatfield is a slow burning problem. The crash occurring in 2000 (only 3 years after privatisation) was a result of the failure of government to properly reinvest in the rail infrastructure. This is an example of my earlier point that Government and Private owners have the same incentives to strip costs and retained earnings out of businesses. The speed limits were reduced putting Railtrack on the path to administration when BRIS (incorporating Railtrack's parent's former employees) could not guarantee the safety of the lines. You do not have a Hatfield without a decade or so of prior mismanagement and failure to invest in appropriate maintenance (which in this case occurred when it was government owned). That history of mismanagement and the carving out of retained earnings is also what contributes to the above inflation fare increases. Then as far as the cost increases go: According to Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail: The "administration of Railtrack led to an explosion of costs as the discipline of the company's equity had been lost, and very sharp falls in performance" - not the privatisation. But however it is caused, the same conditions exist whenever governments of private corporations engage in major capital expenditure on infrastructure assets. Essentially what happened was the acquirors bought Railtrack screwed up the due diligence. They had Hatfield and then realised the extent to which they screwed up. Railtrack itself was well screwed before the privatisation. Hypation fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 04:19
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Cerv posted:the railway line through dawlish reopens tomorrow, having been closed since feb 5th. in plenty of time for people wanting easter getaways, which I'm sure is much relief to management bods not wanting any more upsetting headlines. Network Rail are giving out sticks of rock to celebrate  Hypation posted:In addition, rail fatigue, the cause of the Hatfield is a slow burning problem. The crash occurring in 2000 (only 3 years after privatisation) was a result of the failure of government to properly reinvest in the rail infrastructure. This is an example of my earlier point that Government and Private owners have the same incentives to strip costs and retained earnings out of businesses. The speed limits were reduced putting Railtrack on the path to administration when BRIS (incorporating Railtrack's parent's former employees) could not guarantee the safety of the lines. You do not have a Hatfield without a decade or so of prior mismanagement and failure to invest in appropriate maintenance (which in this case occurred when it was government owned). That history of mismanagement and the carving out of retained earnings is also what contributes to the above inflation fare increases. 2000 was 6 years after privatisation, and the mismanagement and cuts and fuckery at the end of BRs existence is entirely down to the Thatcher & Major governments deliberate underfunding of services to drive down quality in an effort to gain public support of the "the government is inefficient and so privatisation is the future" meme. This is covered further in this post and also bozza's original trainpost which I can't find right now (it was on a blog or something???)
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Apr 4, 2014 10:04
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Transport secretary said 'thanks to the superb work by First Great Western and Network rail' when talking about Dawlish reopening today. What did FGW do and why do they deserve the first credit?
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Apr 4, 2014 11:34
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Metrication posted:Transport secretary said 'thanks to the superb work by First Great Western and Network rail' when talking about Dawlish reopening today. What did FGW do and why do they deserve the first credit? contracted replacement buses
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Apr 4, 2014 11:38
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Cerv posted:contracted replacement buses Quite an achievement.
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Apr 4, 2014 11:40
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FGW are slapping ads over the place about infrastructure upgrades that Network Rail are doing. Blatently trying to take the credit. Seems to be the done thing now. Take advantage of how the public basically don't understand how this all works.
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Apr 4, 2014 11:45
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Cerv posted:FGW are slapping ads over the place about infrastructure upgrades that Network Rail are doing. Blatently trying to take the credit. Yeah the only thing FGW do is run late and let us take possessions late the bastards. A lot of their guys are super nice and a pleasure to work with, but its a bloody nightmare trying to get access. Also those investment posters and such a load of shite.
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Apr 4, 2014 12:09
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:This is covered further in this post and also bozza's original trainpost which I can't find right now (it was on a blog or something???) Is this it?
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Apr 4, 2014 12:29
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Investment is usually an exercise in illusion anyway. I remember waiting at Workington whilst a manager waxed lyrical about the hundreds of thousands that had been spent on a station refurbishment: my point that the train was 15 minutes late and that's all the passengers really cared about was ignored. The majority of issues passengers have with trains are usually only brought up when compounded by an unreliable service. There are some genuine issues like the lack of disabled toilet access on 142/144/153 units but a lot of 'this train is a mess/there are no power points/the toilet is blocked' wouldn't be as major an issue if the trains were reliable and on time. Of course given the scope of the network there tends to be one incident free day followed by a run of fatalities, broken rails and train failures.
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Apr 4, 2014 12:30
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Bingo!
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Apr 4, 2014 12:34
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My favourite Dawlish story is that apparently the Army turning up was a massive publicity stunt for the government. Some general or something apparently inquired about getting "some of his chaps trained up on those cables and whatnot" with the local S&T engineer telling him to get hosed, he won't have half trained squaddies fiddling with his equipment. Ninja: won't see that in the news!
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Apr 4, 2014 12:57
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Pissflaps posted:I hate Birmingham New Street railway station. I used to have to use that piece of poo poo. Now I use Liverpool Street - much nicer.
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Apr 4, 2014 13:12
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:2000 was 6 years after privatisation, Nope. Original source I had said 1997. Railtrack was created in 1994, it was government owned at the time. The privatisation planning and implementation process lasted 3 years (1994 to 1997) with Railtrack being one of the last pieces to be sold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail Railtrack's IPO was May 1996. The Hatfield disaster was October 2000 - some 4.4 years later. so it seemed I got it wrong too...... ....but then I dug out the actual prospectus here: http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/SBCWarburg_Prospectus1996.pdf Page 8 contains the timetable indicating a listing as of 20th May 1996 but final instalment due date on the 3rd June 2007. (three years three months before the Hatfield crash). Since under the conditions of the IPO, title did not pass and there were reserved rights until the second instalment was paid (see clauses 9 and 14 page 239), then the privatisation was not completed until 1997 - a year after it listed. That is, I recognise a hypertechnicality and was likely why the original source I used said 1997. But privatisation typically means pay cash get shares and you didn't get shared until 1997. So I'd pay 4.4 years too. (but 6 is wrong) Hypation fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 13:53
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Hypation posted:Nope. Original source I had said 1997. This somewhat ignores the chaos of the privatisation, it was incredibly messy on the ground as teams and delivery units were broken up, funding disappeared and all investment was halted. While Railtrack might not have been floated until 1997 the company took over in 94. Read the link in the OP about the West Coast Main Line to see how it was in new works, then multiply that by 10 for how it was in maintenance.
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Apr 4, 2014 14:50
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Total Meatlove posted:It's been improved a lot and you can get into the Bullring without going outside into actual Birmingham so it has some positives. Not having to go out into actual Birmingham always has its positives, especially personal security (less likely to get shot or stabbed)! Speaking of, I wonder how many people will be run over by the trams when the Midland Metro is eventually extended into Birmingham. I'm kinda hoping about 10 per week, dozy bastards!
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Apr 4, 2014 15:51
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I've literally watched a man get stabbed in the back of the head on the stairs going up into The Pallasades. I'm from the country I'd never seen anybody get attacked like that before. 
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Apr 4, 2014 16:30
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 Sensible franchising news! http://news.sky.com/story/1238224/unions-bid-to-halt-rail-franchise-awards Sky News posted:Unions Bid To Halt Rail Franchise Awards
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Apr 7, 2014 08:40
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How long does it take this kind of court case to mature? When will we know if they've successfully stalled it past the next election?
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Apr 7, 2014 08:45
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Lofty132 posted:Investment is usually an exercise in illusion anyway. I remember waiting at Workington whilst a manager waxed lyrical about the hundreds of thousands that had been spent on a station refurbishment: my point that the train was 15 minutes late and that's all the passengers really cared about was ignored. Then again, in some cases refurbishment is much appreciated, such as in the case of Wakefield Kirkgate and the rape subway.
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Apr 7, 2014 08:51
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E: Awful double posted for me by mistake.
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Apr 7, 2014 09:10
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:
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Apr 7, 2014 20:40
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So, quick query, train people: I bought three lots of tickets for varying dates from the East Coast trains website at the end of March and asked for them to be delivered first class. So far none of them have arrived. They are sending me a new booking reference so I can print the ticket myself at a station for the first journey, as it is this coming Sunday, but given the guy's incredulity over the phone that none of the tickets had arrived I strongly suspect they're going to think I'm up to something when I give them the same story two more times in the near future (which seems likely at this point). What, if anything, can I do should they accuse me of anything dodgy? I'm going to ring my local post office tomorrow to make absolutely sure they aren't holding anything (I haven't received a card) but otherwise I've got nothing in terms of proof. It's a bit of mystery as to what has happened to them. Doctor_Fruitbat fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 23:08
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:So, quick query, train people: I bought three lots of tickets for varying dates from the East Coast trains website at the end of March and asked for them to be delivered first class. So far none of them have arrived. They are sending me a new booking reference so I can print the ticket myself at a station for the first journey, as it is this coming Sunday, but given the guy's incredulity over the phone that none of the tickets had arrived I strongly suspect they're going to think I'm up to something when I give them the same story two more times in the near future (which seems likely at this point). Are you sure you haven't had some sort of BRAIN ATTACK and have put down an old/wrong address or something?
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Apr 10, 2014 20:57
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No, I checked the address, it's definitely correct. My flatmate knows nothing, but he's so apologetically honest when he does anything even remotely close to being considered wrong that I have no reason to suspect he'd lie about it.
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Apr 10, 2014 21:20
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Pissflaps posted:I hate Birmingham New Street railway station. Don't worry, the fact that one day a week all the signals fail round new street and trains are unable to enter the station is NOTHING to worry about. What you should be worrying about is that all the staff there are loving crooks who will hit you with penalty fares for the most trivial of reasons and frankly have got to be breaking the law somewhere given every time I walk past them giving a penalty fare to someone who bought an offpeak instead of a peak ticket, normally while repeatedly telling them that they have to pay right now or they'll get a criminal record or go to jail or "tell us where you really came from" so they can justify giving an even bigger penalty fare. The third thing you should worry about is that the station is still standing and hasn't been demolished yet given it is a tremendous piece of godawful poo poo. BRUTALISM YEAAAH OOHRAH
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Apr 11, 2014 15:18
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Does anyone know why the barriers are left open at night in London's mainline terminals? Obviously it isn't but it kind of implies that travel is free, the same happens at East Croydon late at night (from when I've pass through anyway), and bizarrely Wimbledon during the day sometimes. In contrast the barriers in tube stations are closed at all times (same with London Overground). Do they have to be manned when they are closed?
Metrication fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 15:24
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The barriers at tube and overground stations aren't always closed. You've just not been to the right stations at the right times. Zone 1 they're (pretty much) always closed, but the further out you go and the later at night the more likely they are to be open. And yes, it's because they have to be staffed. Otherwise someone with a faulty oyster card, creased papaer ticket or whatever would be trapped inside. Never mind what would happen in an actual emergency evacuation situation.
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Apr 11, 2014 15:56
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