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Topic: Mystic Save The Train? (Read 1853 times)
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Lee
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The UK's rail franchising system is a complex , fragmented and "costly muddle", for which passengers will end up paying the price , MPs have warned (link below.) http://www.rmtbristol.org.uk/2006/11/mps_raise_railfranchising_fear_1.html#moreThe factor that worries me most about the new DfT Closure Guidance is that both TOC's and Network Rail can propose a closure.
The TOC's are likely to consider this if they find themselves having difficulty paying the franchise premiums (as GNER have) , and the cost savings of service withdrawal are seen as the only way out. The Jacobs Greater Western Franchise Replacement Outline Business Case Report offers a blueprint for potential closure cost / benefit analysis.
Network Rail are likely to consider this if they come under pressure to free up capacity for extra freight trains.
Even if in future , the DfT wanted to veto a closure , they would not be able to as the decision would rest with the ORR and not the Secretary Of State.
However , in both of the above scenarios , Ministers will be able to say "not our fault , blame them." "At the end of the day, passengers will pay the price when operators cut service levels or hike fares to pay the premiums" - Gwyneth Dunwoody , Commons transport select committee chairman. The payment of large premiums by operators for contracts to run train services is, in essence, a tax on train travel with the operators each having to vie against each other to see who can apply the highest rate of tax and still have a viable business. There's a couple of major flaws in this system: a) It's not "fail safe". In other words, the operators are encouraged to push their bids to the limits of what's sensible and sometimes beyond, and if they push them beyond the result is going to be very messy b) It makess the contract awarder - the Department for Transport - and NOT the travelling public - into the major customer. You'll see proof of this, if it's proof that you need, in that the TOCs are providing the service that their major customer has specified, and not what their other customers (the travelling public) are asking for. Look at the TransWilts service .... look at the moving of 2 coach units away from the Bristol 'burbs ... cut at DfT's request, moved at DfT's request, in spite of howls of anguish from travellers and (at least in the transwilts case) objections from county, district, town councils and MPs all along the route. But this is destructive talk; I'm saying "it's broken" without actually suggesting a fix. Is it fixable? It probably is, but if you talk to 20 experts you're likely to end up with 20 differing views. And if I suggest something here' no-one's going to listen to little ole me, are they?? Still - I could dream / suggest / comment on a bidding system that's not pure cash driven - one that sets a price of (say) 800k and the asks "what can you do for that?" of the bidders. Gives them a base specification and then encourages them to provide extra service ... such a mechanism is much more "fail safe", and it's much more about providing what the public will want (with a proviso that I'm trusting the DfT to accept bids that maximise the public usefulness rather than bids that do the most in key marginals). An 900m GW franchise would give us a two-hourly train on the TransWilts. It would give us Oxford to Yeovil, in fact. It would give us an hourly Severn Beach to Westbury, with alternate extensions to Weymouth. It would even give us a 2 hourly Chippenham to Southampton via the airport there, and stations at Lacock, Staverton/Holt, White Horse and Wilton. Ah - we're actually getting somewhere. I wondered ... what does the 200m that the treasury has not received under this new system actually cosy in other terms? Well if you look at http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/costiraqwar.htmyou'll find that the Iraq war was estimated - over a year ago - to be costing 7.5 billion. That's about 40 TIMES what I'm suggesting should be used to fund a proper 10 years investment. But you know, it's not even going to be that expensive. Make that extra use of rail, you save on road building - it has a place but not a predominant place. You save on road fatalities. You save on environment. You save on time wasted in traffic jams. Here is the latest Christian Wolmar article (link below.) http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/articles/rail/550.shtmlQuotes from the above link : "Short franchises are disruptive, take up huge amounts of management time in the bidding and rebidding processes and do not allow for innovation or enhancements, but enable transfer of revenue risk, though reduced by the collar and-cap arrangements." "Is it any surprise that the brighter sparks at the Office for Rail Regulation are now considering a world without franchises, where there would simply be contracts with operators to provide set amounts of service, but no guarantee that they would be exclusive. Their ideas have yet to be thrashed out, but every franchise deal that is signed seems to ask yet more questions about the purpose of the arrangement." Christian Wolmar is also known by his nickname "Mystic Wolmar." I would suggest that he now has a serious challenger  "It also called on the government to 're-balance the way it evaluates bids so that more emphasis is placed on innovation, environmental improvements and wider socio-economic factors, and less weight is given to increasing premiums and reducing subsidies'. 'Innovation should be rewarded through an option to invest parts of the franchise premium directly into the services or infrastructure of the franchise. The government also needs to create incentives for operators to control their costs more effectively.'" "Overall, the committee said the franchising system is 'a complex, fragmented and costly muddle which is unlikely to provide the innovation and investment needed for the passenger railways of the future'." "It said 'the Government has embraced the notion that private enterprise is best at delivering high-quality, innovative services such as the passenger railways, and yet it does not trust companies to deliver these services without highly detailed and specific contractual requirements which reduce the scope for innovation'." "'It supports competition, and yet appears to see open access operators (click on http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/open.html) as a threat to stability. It wants risk to be transferred from the public to the private sector, and yet risk cannot be transferred in anything other than name because, as everyone knows, no government could afford to let the railways go bust.'" Considering that neither of us actually work in the railway industry , Graham , maybe its time for a career change |
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Graham Ellis
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Considering that neither of us actually work in the railway industry , Graham , maybe its time for a career change I had a breakfast meeting with a fellow campaigner on railway issues just over a week ago. The person in question is a hardened campaigner from a number of other areas, but stated that 'the railway campaigning is pretty depressing as you feel you achieve nothing - it seems to be a completely different set of ground rules that are involved, and the whole thing is such a complex mess with declared and undeclared vested interests and agendas ....' I don't think I would be strong enough to make a career in the railway industry that made any difference, yet I would be too outspoken to take up a pawn's position and spew out the rhetoric of any of the key player organisations that we've got to know over the last 18 months. |
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Lee
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I had a breakfast meeting with a fellow campaigner on railway issues just over a week ago. The person in question is a hardened campaigner from a number of other areas, but stated that 'the railway campaigning is pretty depressing as you feel you achieve nothing - it seems to be a completely different set of ground rules that are involved, and the whole thing is such a complex mess with declared and undeclared vested interests and agendas ....' I couldnt agree more. However , Ive always believed that if you dont try , youll get nowt anyway. Personally , I think that without Save The Train , Melksham station would have sunk , unoticed , and without trace. Even if we fail to escape the Beeching 2 that I believe is to come , I strongly believe that change must come to the railway industry , the comedians that advise Government and the Ministers who cant even see the "joke." As Gwyneth Dunwoody points out , the current system is unsustainable. This change will have to come as a result of pressure both from within , and from outside the rail industry. |
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Graham Ellis
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It would be lovely - really lovely - if I felt that we had effected the position materially. And, who knows, we might have done so in some small ways. Perhaps it's a result of some of the noises made that the 234 bus's early morning journeys to Chippenham serve the station there, and on the other hand perhaps it's our requests for the morning train to be a little later and the evening train to be a little later that lead the timetablers to do the exact opposite .... based on a hidden agenda to supress the service, and our strong clues as to what would (and would not) be used. But this is all hypothetical.
The common sense position for the Department for Transport and First to have taken would have been to listen ... to the report they commissioned from Jacobs, to our inputs, to other users, to the County Council, to the South West region, and to have modified their initial decision based on the extra evidence that perhaps their planners weren't originally aware of. Certainly, some of this evindence and information is new - things like extra usage figures that came out after the franchise was specified, so there would have been no loss of face involved. Alas, the common sense position wasn't taken; rather the position of defending, to the end, the outdated choice that had been made; listen to the government talk green this autumn, and tell me how that squares with withdrawing a useful and rapidly growing train service.
Lee - way back on 20th September last year, I speculated to a room crushed to overflowing that a 2-hourly train service from AT LEAST Swindon to Westbury, and possibly extended to Oxford at one end and Salisbury / Southampton at the other would be a more sensible option that killing what I thought was just the daytime trains. Since then, it's turned out that my sugeestion was uncannily similar to Jacobs, that my gut feelings were correct as I got deeper into understanding the econiomics of running a train service, and that others uch as yourself have come to similar conclusions. ONLY the DfT and First seem to be opposed ... it's just that they're the two players who hold most of the cards.
Alas, it's also turned out in some aspects even worse than we were told it would be. We were told that we would continue to have a peak arrival in Swindon from Westbury, and a peak return. Sorry - we haven't. We were lied to. An arrival before 8 isn't a peak train, nor is a return train after half past six. And we were told that we would have two other services at a time judged best by the operator. The operator, alas, has elected to run those two services based on the convenience of their available stock and not at a time that they provide a service. Curious, that, isn't it? Isn't the whole purpose of a passenger train service to provide transport for passengers?
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« Last Edit: November 06, 2006, 01:27:39 AM by Graham Ellis »
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