Sold off in the 1990s, the UK’s railways are returning to public hands — but at what cost?
Liberalization of the railways has been a key tenet of European transport policy since the early 2000s, with proponents claiming that competition results in improved service quality and increased ridership. This is an instantly disprovable statement given that ridership was already on the rise across Europe prior to, rather than after, liberalization efforts, suggesting other effects are at play.
On the other hand, the case against fragmented and privatized operations focuses on three key arguments. The first is that railways are complex systems where commercial boundaries at engineering interfaces are a threat to safety and efficiency. The second is that railway operations are geographic monopolies where market conditions are — at best — contrived. The third is that railways are a public service that cannot fail — hence, introducing private interests into the railways is merely a way to sequester income into private hands while the state shoulders the financial risk. In other words, private interests’ role is simply to extract profit that could otherwise be reinvested into the system.
The United Kingdom was one of first countries in Europe to liberalize a significant portion of its railways (Northern Ireland’s railways remained publicly owned and operated). As such, the aftermath of privatization is instructive in tracing liberalization’s final destination. In short: it isn’t pretty.
Selling the Family Silver
The UK’s contiguous network in Wales, Scotland, and England was privatized in stages between 1988 and 1997, starting with its domestic train manufacturing industry. This took place following a massive self-off of public assets in the aftermath of the broader financialization of the British economy. For example, the water industry in England and Wales was wholly divested through the 1980s — something no other country has ever done. Thanks to archived papers from then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, we can understand precisely what the political drivers for mass privatization were.
First, as a large employer of over 50,000 staff, divesting the water industry would greatly contribute to “the privatisation programme”. Second, it would take necessary investment in an ageing asset off the public books. Finally, it would increase shareholding in the public, mitigate state interference, and create financial assets for trade. It is worth noting that none of these justifications took the quality or expansion of services into account.
And so, we turn back to railways. In 1990, things had been looking up for British Rail. Ridership had been climbing solidly since the mid-1980s. The average subsidy was as low as 20 percent of running costs, making the British system one of the most efficient in Europe. Urban, regional, and high-speed rail projects were being delivered or, in the latter case, were in serious development.
Three rolling stock operating companies bought — at rock-bottom prices — an enormous range of hugely valuable trains for which British Rail had scrimped and saved over the preceding decades.
Then the early-1990s recession hit. More than a decade of constrained public spending and service sell-offs meant there was an immediate impact on passenger numbers, sending the government into a panic. Suddenly, the Thatcherite doctrine of “sell everything but the railways” was thrown out the window, and plans for privatization were put in motion.
In July 1992, a white paper entitled “New Opportunities for the Railways” was published, heavily informed by Treasury mandarins and their advisers at the Tufton Street-based Adam Smith Institute in London. It recommended nothing less than an atomization of the formerly integrated railway operating structure, with the creation of as many independent elements as possible to maximize perceived opportunities for competition.
On 1 April 1994, the Railways Act came into effect and the demise of British Rail began. It is worth noting that privatization had already started in the 1980s, for example with the sale of the train manufacturers in Derby and various ferry operations. But the 1990s was different — this was a fire sale.
Deadly Side-Effects
The first private entity to be created was Railtrack, which took over the railway infrastructure such as track, signals, and stations. Seven infrastructure maintenance units and six track renewal units were set up to split off maintenance from operation. Six freight operating companies were created. Twenty-five train operating units were also established, which from 1996 onwards were franchised out to the train operating companies.
Three rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs) bought — at rock-bottom prices — an enormous range of hugely valuable trains for which British Rail had scrimped and saved over the preceding decades. They then leased these back to the train operators at eye-watering cost and with little oversight, enabling a significant outflow of cash from the industry. This has incentivized one of British passengers’ biggest gripes — the widespread use of trains that are as short as possible to minimize leasing costs, without a care for the resulting overcrowding.
Another impact of the ROSCOs landing a large, cheap asset that they could rent out at high prices was the near-death of the UK train manufacturing industry, as there was no incentive to continue British Rail's programme of fleet renewals. In the aftermath of privatization, only British Rail’s partially fulfilled orders remained on the books, and new passenger trains wouldn't be built at volume until the early 2000s, resulting in the demise of all but the Derby works. At great cost, new plants have opened in Newton Aycliffe and Newport since, but even these are once again under threat thanks to the lack of any long-term rolling stock strategy.
All franchises had been awarded, a plethora of regulating and organizing bodies had been established to hold the system together, and privatization was essentially complete by 1 April 1997, achieving the outgoing administration’s goal of completing the process by the next general election. Despite promises to the contrary, New Labour’s coming into power did not result in a reversal of the process.
Franchise agreements, now managed by the Department for Transport, were growing more complex and more restrictive.
However, in September 1997, an express train collided with a freight train in Southall, London, killing seven people and injuring 139 others. A lack of effective communication between the fragmented elements of the railway was the root cause of the horrific crash, the first of a series of serious fatal derailments that were attributable to the new structure of the railways.
In October 1999, the death of 31 people and the injury of 417 others at Ladbroke Grove, London, resulted in a cascade of changes to safety regulation. The derailment of an express train at Hatfield in October 2000 killed four people and injured 70, sending shockwaves through the industry as it had resulted directly from Railtrack’s self-perception as a contract management organization, not an engineering outfit. This fomented the demise of Railtrack, which was absorbed into a new government body called Network Rail. A gargantuan and rushed effort to replace thousands of miles of substandard track materials followed, requiring billions of pounds of additional funds and greatly impacting passenger numbers for several years.
Another fatal derailment at Potters Bar in May 2002 killed seven people and was caused by the negligence of a private maintenance company. This led to the return of many maintenance tasks in-house under Network Rail. With the process of Railtrack’s reconstitution as Network Rail completing in October 2002, the UK’s rail infrastructure had been de facto renationalized.
Growing Pains
The West Coast Main Line had long been considered the jewel in the crown of the British rail network, having been electrified and modernized through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. By 1998, passenger growth was putting significant pressure on the route, and Virgin’s Richard Branson wanted to introduce new tilting trains and a much more frequent timetable. By 2002, costs had risen from 2.5 billion to 14.5 billion pounds (just short of 30 billion pounds in today’s money), and the scope of the project had been severely curtailed. What started in 1998 as a promise for a 140-miles-per-hour railway with fully digital signalling had descended into chaos by the early 2000s, contributing to Railtrack’s demise.
By this point, railways were at their most popular since the beginning of the previous century. Passenger numbers were skyrocketing, and a cross-party consensus agreed that rail investment and the expansion of the rail network were a good thing. Franchises previously let as “not for growth” such as those in Wales and the North were creaking at the seams as people turned to trains.
Franchise agreements, now managed by the Department for Transport, were growing more complex and more restrictive. The number of bidders reduced, and the ambition of their bids increased. This came to a head in 2009, when National Express was stripped of the East Coast franchise after failing to meet its payment targets despite continuing passenger growth.
In 2012, the West Coast bidding process was scrapped by government and was awarded as a short-term concession pending a review, and amidst a wider crisis across the industry in June 2018, the East Coast franchise — subsequently awarded to yet another optimistic bid by Virgin — also collapsed and had to be returned to state operation. By this point, franchise bidders were few and far between, and the system was close to collapse.
Railways must be set into the bigger transport picture with ambitious targets — mobility in totality, not rail in isolation.
These increasingly overambitious bids, combined with ever-more complex and controlling contracts, left only one lever open to the train operators to cut costs: staffing. From 2016 onwards, a wave of increasingly disruptive strikes took hold of the network, as terms and conditions were altered to attempt to reduce the number of staff the train operating companies had to have on their books.
Just as the industry’s new structure had resulted in the creation of the ROSCOs, which incentivised a freeze in new train procurement, the creation of Railtrack and its private suppliers resulted in a freeze in recruitment across the infrastructure domain. Crudely, when you have a fleet of trains that already run the service, why build new ones? The same ended up being broadly true for infrastructure — why employ new staff when you already have an enormous workforce?
A decade-wide gap in skills was the consequence. With the growth in passenger demand came a huge growth in the number of infrastructure projects being carried out, and this skills bottleneck, combined with an industry structure that exacerbated costs by maximizing the number of organizational interfaces, meant work was being delivered too slowly and at too high a price. Cost escalations became unbearable for government in 2017 and resulted not only in the curtailment of the national electrification programme, but also in the abandonment of other enhancements across the country, particularly in and around the north of England. Meanwhile, there was a glut of new train orders, many for new electric trains for which there were no longer overhead wires planned to power them.
May 2018 was supposed to be the moment that an enormous leap in capacity was created. New track and trains would enable a great leap in the number of trains running in the timetable. As it happened, neither the track nor the trains were in place to deliver much of this uplift, and the result was a collapse in the system’s reliability. Driver training could not happen, and a lack of trains, tracks, and staff resulted in the cancellation of upwards of one third of services in the South East and the north of England, with lesser but significant effects felt by passengers across the network.
Long an opponent of the franchise system and the lack of integration between track and train, then Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling initiated the Williams Review in 2018 to work out what shape the industry needed to be in to enable growth without cycling back to calamity. This review took time to pick up speed, leaving the industry in perpetual crisis mode.
The Final Nail in the Coffin
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic reduced ridership to 5 percent of pre-COVID levels and the industry was placed on life support. By the end of that month, all franchises were transferred onto emergency concessions, and the franchise system was gone. This was made official in September 2020, as the government stated that franchising was to cease to exist, and by April 2021 the National Audit Office announced that train operators were to be officially classified as state-owned, despite the continued involvement of private companies. The irony of a Conservative than a Labour government beginning the re-integration of the system should not be lost on readers — indeed, this is a recurring theme.
Finally, in May 2021, the Williams—Shapps Plan for Rail was published, setting out a loose view of the future structure of the railways. Although lacking in details, the headline was that a new organization called Great British Railways (GBR) was to be created. A transition team was established to understand what GBR would do and how it would be structured. The ROSCOs, as the last major vestige of the Railways Act 1993, remained untouched.
Roll forwards seven years and, despite several train operators being controlled directly by the Department for Transport, there is still no clear picture of what GBR will be empowered or funded to do, let alone what its structure and intentions will be. Meanwhile, a general election has worsened, not improved, the outlook for the railway industry, as the number of major projects continues to fall alongside ongoing maintenance funding. Capacity is more squeezed than ever before.
The rail industry needs democratization, so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us.
Despite the public’s continued support for publicly owned railways — 75% in 2025 compared with 60% in 2017 — the extent to which “nationalization” will achieve democratic oversight and the necessary reinvigoration of the industry remains unclear. Britain’s rail unions are cautiously supportive, but it is worth noting that scepticism has grown as the Labour Party drifts further to the centre.
The rail industry needs democratization, so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us. That means moving power, including over spending, away from Westminster. Democratic accountability at local and regional levels is key to unlocking the cycle of proposed and cancelled investment, and in pushing operators to do better. That means devolution of decision and funding powers to both the regions and cities, but also delivering sufficient industry funding autonomy so that it can respond quickly to these demands and rise above electoral cycles and fiscal anxiety.
Railways must be set into the bigger transport picture with ambitious targets — mobility in totality, not rail in isolation. Moreover, investment must be matched to those targets to build a railway that more people can use and benefit from — more capacity, more reliability and more accessibility.
Empowerment of the rail industry as a self-governing entity accountable chiefly to the UK’s regions and cities rather than to central government is a critical step in kicking things out of crisis mode and reshaping the industry to be fit for the long-term future. But as important is the need for the railways to tell a story about themselves that the public can get behind. Only with an ambitious and exciting vision of the future will the railways fulfil their true potential. Privatization, as the British experience shows, utterly failed to do so.
Read the original article
Comments
It implies railways were les safe post privatisation. This is misleading. There were more accidents and deaths, but that was because of a huge increase in miles travelled. Deaths per billion kilometers fell consistently before and after privatisation.
A lot of the problems lie in tracks and their maintenance, and the tracks were re-nationalised many years ago. It is not efficiently run (see HS2!).
They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid. Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Their ability and willingness to strike affects both costs and people's willingness to rely on public transport.
The big constraint is lack of subsidies. it probably makes little difference whether the system is privately owned but tightly regulated, or publicly owned so much as willingness to subsidise it. This is also shown by the failure of franchises taken back into public ownership to improve.
By TheOtherHobbes 2025-11-1315:338 reply This is incorrect. The biggest accidents - Potters Bar, Hatfield, Southall - happened in the years immediately after privatisation, before passenger numbers had grown much.
The problem was more that - in typical privatised fashion - the industry was treated as a cash grab, and property speculation and other side quests got more management attention than running a safe railway.
That first incarnation was so bad it was quickly nuked, and replaced with the hybrid arrangement we have today, which has a much better safety record, but is still comically expensive and inefficient.
And franchises very clearly have improved, so that's incorrect too. Delays and cancellations are down across the network, and that's before the system is reintegrated.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2025/oct...
The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge. The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.
This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.
> The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.
That's always the loss. In privitisation, in out-sourcing, and in downscaling engineering teams by firing senior engineers. And it's great for the those in charge of the budget cuts, because it is a loss that is very difficult to quantify financially, and will only show over a longer period of time. Typically, well after they cashed-out and left.
> And it's great for the those in charge of the budget cuts, because it is a loss that is very difficult to quantify financially, and will only show over a longer period of time. Typically, well after they cashed-out and left.
IMHO most executive pay should be locked up for decades by law, and they only get a middle-class wage stipend in the interim. And I mean really locked up, such that a significant fraction should only be payed out as long as 20 years later. And that pay gets forfeited if the organization has too many problems.
It'd help disincentive smash-and-grab management like you describe (because weakening the org would jeopardize the locked up pay, and would help a big with succession (because their pay would depend on the successor's performance, too).
By Ekaros 2025-11-146:27 Don't we have already solution for this? It is called pension. Extra executive compensation should be set up as pension, which starts paying at usual pension age. And it must be locked to only be shares of the company. And it should work by automatically selling to open market the shares locked up until the expected life expectancy expires.
By deanishe 2025-11-148:14 I don't think you can make management take a long-term view when shareholders have a short-term one, tbh.
By 1234letshaveatw 2025-11-1413:47 And thus the cycle continues- the EU stifles meritocracy, bemoans the resulting lack of innovation and entrepreneurship, and resorts to inventing new and novel ways to penalize US companies as a coping mechanism
By ethbr1 2025-11-1318:34 The difficulty is quantifying the relationship between risk and organizational knowledge.
Otherwise bloated, inefficient companies look the same as those retaining institutional knowledge.
I remember reading an article in the journnal of the RSS about whether it was actually less safe or whether it was just statistical clustering.
I don't however remember the conclusion!
I've tracked down the article to https://academic.oup.com/jrssig/article-abstract/4/1/15/7029... but I don't have access.
Its available in full online and concludes:
> The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety, as measured by accidents, has become worse since privatisation.
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j....
By Reason077 2025-11-1318:18 This article was written in 2007, just a few years after Network Rail was re-nationalised in 2002.
Since 2002, there has only been a single passenger fatality attributable to poor maintenance: the Grayrigg derailment in 2007.
This followed a cluster of high profile crashes during the Railtrack (privatisation) era in 1997-2002 that killed dozens, and were directly or partly attributable to poor maintenance.
I’d argue that the longer Network Rail’s good safety record continues, the more we can disregard that article.
> as measured by accidents
Suspiciously specific denial. What about other metrics?
By graemep 2025-11-1317:24 Read the bottom of page 17 and page 18 of the article I linked to.
Given where it was published (a magazine backed by statisticians associations in three countries) it would have been very damaging to the author's (a professor at Imperial College) reputation to have been sloppy about conclusions.
By renewiltord 2025-11-1316:541 reply I always wondered what personality of software engineers leads to massive grab bag predicates.
Vs.def is_problem(ctx) -> Bool: ...1000 lines of various garbage...
Now I see. The latter would be suspiciously specific. I wonder if it correlates with belief in the Omnicause.def is_specific_condition(ctx) -> Bool: ...3 lines of specific predicate...By croes 2025-11-1418:39 More of the opposite
This be enough if there is metric that shows worse safety:
The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety has become worse since privatisation.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1316:492 reply Like what? Accidents are the only source of danger in the system.
The study at hand seems to have considered only fatal accidents. Probably for good statistical reasons. But the most obvious next “what” to my mind would be accidents that did not result in fatalities.
Followed closely by safety-involved “incidents” that were reportable somewhere (internally or to a regulator), but that luckily didn’t result in an accident that time.
One imagines these must get really hard to measure reliably the further they get from concrete death records.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-146:191 reply > But the most obvious next “what” to my mind would be accidents that did not result in fatalities.
This makes no sense as a criticism of "as measured by accidents". The fix for measuring by accidents is to measure by accidents?
I don’t mean it as a criticism! I think that their choice to study a dataset of accidents resulting in fatalities—was reasonable, and that it was admirable to reiterate that qualifier in the conclusion.
I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow. But it makes sense to me why academics might choose a narrow but highly reliable dataset, and try to be very transparent about that: safety is certainly much broader than just fatality-accidents, but fatality-accidents are awfully hard to fudge long-term records for.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1416:23 > I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow.
But you're not. We can separate the parent comment into two claims:
(1) The indicator was accidents;
(2) The indicator is too narrow.
You've supported (2) by pointing out that the parent commenter's idea of what the choice of indicator was was completely incorrect. But everything they said was wrong! They were wrong about the indicator, and they were wrong that the indicator they called excessively narrow was excessively narrow. They weren't saying that the paper judged by a criterion that was too narrow, independently of what that criterion was. (1) and (2) are both claims you can mine out of the parent comment, but they're not claims that were made separately in the parent comment.
"Accidents" covers everything you might want to know about. It's crazy to say that looking at accident rates is "suspiciously specific". It's crazy because it's as nonspecific as you can get.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-1317:051 reply Accidents aren’t a cause of danger, they’re the result of it.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-146:20 That is meaningless nonsense.
By selimthegrim 2025-11-1316:001 reply It says there’s no evidence for that hypothesis.
> The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.
It wasn't given away. Fiat Ferroviaria purchased the patents for it.
Mind, the UK wasn't the first tilted train (that would probably be PERC in the US) or even the first actively tilted train (either SNCF in France or Deutsche Bahn in Germany).
> It wasn't given away. Fiat Ferroviaria purchased the patents for it.
Those patents were sold in 1982 for the princely sum of £1.
This was the pattern that Thatcher presided over, selling national systems for a nominal £1 fee.
I think that is essentially giving it away.
By razakel 2025-11-179:15 She also stole a bank.
By Reason077 2025-11-1319:22 > ”The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.”
This all happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, long before privatisation.
British Rail itself decided that the APT tilting trains were too risky/radical, and shifted to a more conventional design, the HST.
And the Italians had been working on their own successful tilting technology for years before they bought the APT patents in 1982.
By johnnyanmac 2025-11-142:45 Yeah that sounds about right. I can't think of many situations where privatizing safety critical operations hasn't ended in disaster. Safety at that point ceases to be a priority and just another number on the sheet to crunch. If the lawsuit is cheaper than the savings from cutting corners, that's the move to make.
>The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.
Yeah, this is often the biggest loss of mass layoffs in the name of short term profits. Esepcially since the situations also tend to cut training programs. You're slashing a pipe for some quick water at the cost of draining the rest of your plumbing system. while firing the plumbers in the process.
I wish we could switch back to incentivizing long term portfolios and planning. It's reckless at this point.
By card_zero 2025-11-1318:07 From the start, in 1994, there was this arbitrarily imposed structure with Railtrack owning all the track, and all the private companies leasing. The original plan was that this Railtrack thing would be publicly funded, and that's where that structure came from. Slowly over three years, then, the railway went private. Railtrack wasn't private until 1996. Then the railway was "properly private," but not really, because of this track-monopoly structure imposed on it by legislation, Railtrack being in effect government-run and a "private" company somehow too. Five years later (2001) there was bankruptcy, administration and re-nationalization of Railtrack (into "Network Rail") anyway.
Lurking in the background the whole time was the RMT, the National Union of Rail [etc.] Workers, led by "communist/socialist" Bob Crow, a moderate in the union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Crow
So if this is viewed as an experiment in private ownership, experimental conditions were extremely messy and any conclusions are invalidated by cultural complexities and compromises.
I'm in the UK and services seem worse to me. I also remember pre-privatization British Rail. It was unbelievably awful.
The basic fact about rail privatization is captured in this chart. All else is commentary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
That chart doesn't normalize for population, service levels, social changes or any number of other extremely important variables.
Any facts taken from that chart need to be extremely caveated.
By dash2 2025-11-1420:49 What do you think happened exactly at the time the railway was privatized? Suddenly the population shot up?
This is like looking at the light map of the border between North and South Korea and saying "ah, but they aren't controlling for longitude!"
By buellerbueller 2025-11-1317:521 reply My commentary is this: It looks like around 1982, the trend reversed, well before the privatization. My takeaway is that whatever the government had done under nationalization was successful at addressing the concerns that existed and contributed to a downward trend that began before nationalization.
There are lots of wiggles in any graph and you can always take a wiggle and say "ah the trend was reversed". Privatization showed a steady growth in passenger numbers for decades. Nationalization didn't.
By buellerbueller 2025-11-1421:221 reply The trend is not a "wiggle." It is the slope of a local region, around which the "wiggles" bounce.
Sure, I agree: privatization continued the trend that nationalization established.
My point is simply this: the graph on its own doesn't indicate anything causal, but your original comment implied that the graph is enough to prove that privatization caused the growth.
Sure. The graph on its own doesn't prove causality. The graph, plus a little basic common sense, does give strong evidence of causality. Specifically, there's no other plausible alternative for the sudden dramatic turnaround in the mid-80s and sustained growth thereafter.
By buellerbueller 2025-11-1714:25 The turnaround in the mid 1980s predates privatization, so unless everyone had time machines back then, this is evidence against causality.
Also: common sense is not evidence. It never has been, nor will it ever be. Justification? Sure. Could even be that common sense is correct. But, evidence? No.
By littlestymaar 2025-11-1318:072 reply The British rail privatization was so successful in increasing passenger numbers it also increased the number of passengers taking the train in France (despite French rail still being state-controlled).
Or maybe, just maybe, there's another underlying casual relationship that explains why train use increased a ton in the 90s and 00s in both countries (and other European countries too, by the way, AFAIK passengers count also increased in Germany in that period). Who knows.
Much of the French high speed rail network (LGV Atlantique, LGV Rhône-Alpes, LGV Nord, LGV Méditerranée, LGV Est, etc) was inaugurated in the 1990s and 2000s.
This alone would have been responsible for a big increase in French rail traffic.
UK rail infrastructure certainly received improvements during this era too, but besides HS1 it was mostly just renewing and upgrading existing tracks. Nothing like the thousands of km of new high speed rail that was built in France!
By littlestymaar 2025-11-1319:261 reply If you just look at France it may be tempted to conclude it must be TGV, but that's the same methodological problem: it grew in most of Europe by comparable amount in the period.
Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period.
It's not TGV, it's not privatization and it is not Wiedervereinigung, it's a broader trend.
By Reason077 2025-11-144:12 > "Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period."
I don't entirely disagree with you, but rail lines don't function in isolation. If you introduce a new high speed main line, there is a network effect: connecting services will also see a boost in traffic from people travelling on other lines to reach the new one.
By dash2 2025-11-1420:53 Cool story. Got evidence? I googled for a minute and found this official document:
"Thus, as shown in Figure 3, the modal share of rail has oscillated between 7 and 10% for almost 30 years, with a low point reached in 1995 following several years of crisis, and a maximum reached in 2011."
https://www.autorite-transports.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/0...
Here's Figure 3. https://share.google/images/58s3sPR3bQ1LbQEHT . Where's the increase?
By LexiMax 2025-11-1316:41 > This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.
No kidding.
But of course, never underestimate the motivated reasoning of an HN user. After all, somebody made money off of the privatization. That could've been you, and you like making money, right?
There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder. I think it is reasonable for subsidies to be structured just like private investments rather than a donation. The public should reap the rewards of the money they invest in their country through taxes, just like wealthy investors do.
It's a question of perspective. I've spent my life in countries where I've seen my taxes being spent relatively well, I feel the benefits of it daily both as a private citizen and a founder. Everywhere I've lived, when transport, utilities, healthcare and education, even part of the media, were publicly managed, they were simply better and cheaper.
But I understand that this is not universal and that most governments don't operate effectively for their taxpayers. And that, yes, if the whole system is set up for it, private solutions can also thrive and be superior. I suppose it's hard to privatize public services effectively in an ecosystem that doesn't support private enterprise as much.
By roguecoder 2025-11-1316:503 reply That's interesting: it reminds me of the results we're seeing from workplace democracy in Germany.
Companies with workers on their boards are significantly less likely to go bust than companies where only investors' opinions matter.
But of course, whenever someone else's opinion matters, investors use their wealth to try to change that. Rich people seem to prefer worse outcomes as long as they get to be in charge.
By oersted 2025-11-1318:45 Yes of course but there are downsides to this too. Workers will certainly prioritize survival and stability, but sometimes at the expense of innovation, efficiency and growth. They do not really have an incentive for the company to do better, but they definitely don’t want to lose their jobs or make them much more difficult.
For most established companies it is really not much of a challenge to prevent it from going bust if that is your priority, but it requires sacrifices, mostly opportunity costs.
By Ar-Curunir 2025-11-1317:071 reply Yes, the desire for power is as important as the desire for capital.
If you have $100m your life isn't going to measurably change if you increase your wealth to $1b or $10b
At that point you start trying to accumulate power instead of money, and of course money is a by-product for power.
That's a pretty broad statement about rich people. How do you define rich?
By linkregister 2025-11-1321:361 reply Laughable that this is interpreted as a slur against r*ch people. It is a banal observation that power corrupts. Societies with constructs to check power experience better overall and individual prosperity in general.
The point I'm trying (and obviously failing) to make is that "rich people" is a very broad definition to the point of being completely meaningless. About 7 to 8 percent of my Americans have a net worth greater than 1 million dollars. Is that rich? By some standards, yes.
You mention constructs to check power? What do you mean?
1 million means you can stop working for 20 years and get around 4000 dollars per month which should be well enough to feed yourself, go out and get a roof on your head. Of course that's not even counting the revenue you can have this money generate for you while you are sitting on your ass.
So yes, I'd consider them rich. If you can totally stop working for more than 5 years I'd say you are rich.
By pipes 2025-11-1511:40 I agree. And that's what I'm getting at, making statements like the parent post about rich people is a bit ridiculous.
By linkregister 2025-11-1415:48 Sure, "rich" means different things in different contexts. In this case it's a shorthand for the much smaller group of people who control large companies and can move major levers impacting employment and trade. Admittedly it's ambiguous, as so many English terms in common use are.
By exasperaited 2025-11-1315:421 reply > There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.
This is in fact the situation in major parts of the UK rail network now; much has been renationalised or has the DoT as sole shareholder.
The UK rail system is not now truly privately held; this has been slowly unpicked by both the previous Conservative government and the current Labour government.
Nearly a third of Train Operating Companies are now under state ownership; LNER has been state-owned since 2018 and Northern since 2020. I don't know about LNER, but punctuality and reliability on Northern has significantly worsened since nationalisation.
Last year, we had the absurd spectacle of the Department for Transport notifying the Department for Transport that the Department for Transport had breached their contract with the Department for Transport, because the Department for Transport didn't meet the performance standards set by the Department for Transport.
> There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.
Interestingly, Quebec in Canada has been loosely following this model recently and it's working great. Long video but interesting if you like infrastructure stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlHqqA0onn0&t=532s
TLDR: CDPQ invests on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan, and has been building infra on behalf of the pension plan across Quebec (and Canada) to great success comparatively.
Those infrastructure "investments" will almost certainly not generate the same return for pensioners as putting the money in an index fund.
By jhonof 2025-11-1317:56 Sure but pensioners care about consistency vs. gross returns. You really don't want your pension to lose a ton of value in a downturn because people are constantly drawing from it, it's a risk off investment. Bonds are also poor investments compared to an index fund from a gross return perspective, but that's not why people/funds buy them, they buy them to lower risk.
By buellerbueller 2025-11-1318:17 Perhaps not, but you also get the infrastructure, which is worth something.
Would you get the same net result if you put the money in an index fund and then bought the infrastructure? That's the actual comparison.
By Arrath 2025-11-1317:02 Maybe so, but I would contend it is worth considering the broader implications of those investments and the effects that new and upgraded infrastructure could have on the greater economy.
Speaking only for myself, I would be okay with a lower return if it also means we as a society have good public transit, roads that aren't more pothole than asphalt, water that doesn't have to be boiled on occasion, reliable power, modern internet, and so on.
By ant6n 2025-11-1316:00 CDPQinfra deals in Quebec are wonky at best.
By CGMthrowaway 2025-11-1317:021 reply >There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.
Becoming more common in the US too, because of Trump's policy of US re-industrialization and national security. Intel Corp (10% equity), MP Materials (15%), Lithium Americas(5%), Trilogy Metals (17.5%), US Steel (golden share), Vulcan Elements, ReElement Technologies
By PaulDavisThe1st 2025-11-1317:412 reply But when the Obama administration tried to do this for renewables, it was called "communism" by the conservative right wing in the USA ...
By CGMthrowaway 2025-11-1318:371 reply Obama used loan guarantees and grants, not equity stakes.
No equity positions taken. Trump's policy is direct equity stakes as condition for industrial subsidies/tariff relief. It's statist, but I wouldn't call it communist.Solyndra $500M loan guarantee (defaulted 2011) Tesla $500M loan (repaid early 2013 with interest) First Solar $3B loan guarantees (currently being serviced) SunPower $1.2B loan guarantee (bankrupt 2024 but loan repaid) ARRA (2009) $25.6B grants disbursedBy guiriduro 2025-11-1319:21 Come come now. Elon has built Tesla on something closer to $38bn of taxpayer largesse/avoidance according to the Washington Post.0 I doubt many people would fail to create public entities with healthy casino ponzi stock trading if they had umpteen billion $ of govt funny money propping them up. Hell they might even start a rocket business as a sideline...
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
By oersted 2025-11-1318:34 A lot of the things the administration is doing seem a bit socialist because socialism has some overlap with populism. The main difference is that it is framed as Trump doing favours to certain groups of people, with expectation of reciprocity or at least personal gratitude and loyalty, instead of more institutional wealth redistribution or subsidy policies.
Depending on who he is doing favours to, it looks right-wing or left-wing under the traditional political lens, but it's more about Trump doing whatever he wants with the governments resources.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-1317:111 reply Where are these mythical countries you proclaim to have well managed public services and utilities?
Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Singapore...
People like to complain about public systems as if problems wouldn't exist in privately owned ones.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-1321:311 reply One of those is a city state, and two of them have a population comparable to Sydney, one comparable to New York.
In other conversations it’s widely argued that those four probably don’t map very well to the larger, more diverse in every way, Western Democracies.
That leaves Germany, which has its problems.
If Germany hadn’t shut down their nuclear power plants they could have had 94% low emissions electricity by now, rather than 64% and much more costly.
The German economy is so well managed they’ve introduced rent-control in some cities.
Absolute paragon of a Western Democracy!
By nandomrumber 2025-11-141:541 reply Haha, yeah true. I did have a self critical thought along those lines.
Maybe there’s an argument to be made that large countries should be broken up in to smaller, more manageable geographic / population sizes.
Trust busting style.
By cycomanic 2025-11-176:47 Just seeing your reply now and wanted to say that I really appreciate your humorous self-reflection. Too often we just argue aggressively against the others standpoint without any self-reflection of our own (I've certainly been guilty of it).
Also the idea of smaller units for creating a closer feeling of belonging is something I've been thinking about quite a few times. I think countries/nations etc. try to use patriotism and a us vs them (because there is often not enough real connection otherwise) mentality to artificially create this.
> They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid
This is in fact an interesting by-product of privatisation: train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them. They consequently became more expensive. A somewhat fun side effect of the free market, especially given the prevailing assumption that moving public sector employees into the private sector would drive down their pay and conditions.
By tialaramex 2025-11-1314:584 reply The idea is usually to de-skill workers and also to try to make their contractual terms worse.
In one very small way I actually sympathise on the railways, let me be specific, this is a long story:
The person driving the train clearly needs to learn how to drive that particular model of train, I think that's likely true basically everywhere. The UK's railway systems are however also reliant on drivers knowing the route. A driver must be familiar with exactly the rails their train will pass over to get from A to B, knowing what to expect ahead for some distance at all times. So it's possible that Jim, who is sat in a coffee room right now can drive a 450, but he doesn't know the Waterloo to Portsmouth via Southampton crazy bypass that's in place due to track work, so he is not able to drive the Portsmouth train that's right there, full of passengers and will now instead be cancelled because the scheduled driver did not arrive. In many of the world's railway systems route knowledge is not crucial (it might be good but it's not required).
However, because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding-ding,_and_away the modern rulebook also requires that the Guard have route knowledge. In contrast to the driver this is much less valuable, but it means that now your Portsmouth train maybe has to be cancelled because although the driver intended was available or the standby could do your route, the only available Guard knows the ordinary Portsmouth route, not the weird one.
I think this is a situation where we should fix systems instead rather than hoping that route knowledge for guards makes it work. But this means the guard is arguably de-skilled and less valuable than before.
Most European railways require a driver to have done some route familiarization for most routes, which tends to work fairly well. What does not work very well is that the UK has very patchy and antiquated train safety systems (AWS / TPWS are somewhat rudimentary and deployed - by far - not everywhere) and signaling. Even speed restrictions in the UK are placed very, very tightly and you better know them by heart because they didn't get placed with the idea that the driver must have sufficient time to reduce speed / react between where they get a warning signal and where the restriction comes into effect.
I suspect the move from public to private ownership did adversely affect the upgrades of those, as well as electrification on several key routes.
If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already. And at least in NL if you have a set of routes in a certain direction / route set - drivers would get route familiarization both for the main routes and for the bypasses.
By AnotherGoodName 2025-11-1316:32 It's pretty much global fwiw. I wrote route qualification software for places outside of Europe.
It should also be made clear that you don't need to get an actual qualification from a bureaucratic org. You basically just need to document the last time the driver drove the route with another qualified driver and then document that they've kept the qualification up to date. It's a documentation process and just not that onerous. Also absolutely required for any railway since trains don't stop or accelerate quickly. You need the drivers to know what's coming ahead and no amount of signage or signalling can beat knowing the route.
The only concern i have is the guard qualification. That does seem overboard but... i don't know the UK and chances are there's nuance to this. So i'd have concern with anyone reading GPs post and thinking this is the cause of UKs railway inefficiency.
By iggldiggl 2025-11-1418:39 > AWS / TPWS are somewhat rudimentary and deployed - by far - not everywhere
I don't think that's quite true. AWS is rudimentary, true (only forces acknowledgement of warning signals, but otherwise no speed supervision, braking curves or trainstop functionality), but AFAIK deployed almost everywhere, the only major exception I'm aware of being some complex but slow-speed station layouts.
And TPWS… while it doesn't do everything that a truly modern train protection system could do, together with the British practice of long enough overlaps (i.e. an additional safety distance beyond a stop signal that needs to be kept clear, too, in case of an overrun) it's still quite reasonably effective at preventing dangerous overruns. And its deployment has been indeed more gappy, but AFAIK junctions and major speed restrictions, where the biggest risks are, are still quite comprehensively fitted. The biggest gap are automatic signals on the plain line, but then again there haven't been many accidents at those.
> If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already.
Part of that goes a long way back. One of the most fundamental differences is that the UK still does route signalling, whereas Germany completely switched to speed signalling at the beginning of the 1930s.
Route signalling means that the signals indicate the route the train will take, but not the exact speed, so if you want trains to operate safely but without excessive dawdling, route knowledge is a must.
Whereas with speed signalling, the signals directly indicate the safe speed for proceeding, so route knowledge, while still useful and necessary for other purposes, is no longer quite as crucially relevant. Consequently, in the UK ad-hoc diversions without route knowledge are quite taboo, whereas in Germany, emergency diversions due to short-notice incidents are mostly (except for some specific lines with more complex requirements) allowed, albeit with a speed restriction of 100 km/h.
By AnotherGoodName 2025-11-1315:44 Assuming it’s similar to every other country; Route qualifications simply require first driving the route with another qualified driver. Once that is done you need to drive the route once every 6 months (this is in Australia ut i assume it’s the same) to keep that qualification up to date.
It’s not particularly onerous and understandably helpful for vehicles that take a long time to adjust speed.
The guard requirement does seem unnecessary though and is not a universal practice globally.
By terminalshort 2025-11-1315:211 reply What makes knowing this route any more difficult than knowing the route you are driving on a road? Copenhagen has an automated metro system, so this doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem.
By tialaramex 2025-11-1316:321 reply So e.g. the UK does not have speed signalling. One yellow lamp illuminated means "Prepare to find the next signal at danger". OK, so, how fast can I go? Well, it depends, your route knowledge might tell you that the "next signal" is up a steep rise, you can go pretty fast, even if it is at danger that rise will scrub off all the speed and normal braking is enough. Or, you might know that there's a sharp bend soon and so even moderate speed is excessive because you'll de-rail on that bend.
In daylight there are speed signs but, trains accelerate and brake much more slowly than your car, so while they're a useful reminder you cannot correctly drive the train based on observing these signs. At night you may not see them at all.
Then does your route diverge? In some cases the intent to diverge is signalled, unlike speed, Flashing double yellow for example means "Prepare to find the next signal at: Prepare to find the next signal at danger" plus "Your route will diverge". However you really need to prepare some distance in advance of this information anyway in some cases, so you need to know, long before the signals and certainly long before being able to actually see it, that you will make a turn.
The UK also has unsignalled stations - places where a passenger train will ordinarily stop, and must obey signals, but there are no starting signals, so you need to remember whether you were under a cautionary signal say five minutes ago, which still applies now, even though meanwhile a dog escaped, some idiot threw yoghurt at people and then two hundred soccer fans boarded your train.
The "Driver's Reminder Appliance" is meant to help with this last part, it's basically just a button you can push, to remind you that you pushed the button and restore your mental state...
By stonemetal12 2025-11-1316:581 reply > In daylight there are speed signs but, trains accelerate and brake much more slowly than your car, so while they're a useful reminder you cannot correctly drive the train based on observing these signs.
Did the time it takes trains to accelerate and brake change recently? The time it takes to accelerate and brake should have been considered when placing the signs in the first place.
By YmiYugy 2025-11-1317:37 I imagine it's different for different types of trains. Freight trains probably stop a lot slower than small passenger trains.
That ding, ding and away issue seems straightforwardly solvable with a small amount of technology (the train could refuse to go without the signal saying it’s okay) or something like the Japanese pointing and calling system, or even both.
Frankly, something like positive train control or the European Train Control System should be table stakes at this point. It should be difficult or impossible for a driver unfamiliar with a route to cause a crash.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1317:00 > It should be difficult or impossible for a driver unfamiliar with a route to cause a crash.
This is a question that's occurred to me in a different context. In Shanghai, there are subway stations where the passenger area is separated from the tracks by a floor-to-ceiling wall, making it impossible to drop something onto the tracks, fall onto the tracks, or get pushed onto the tracks.
There are also stations where there's no wall, and anyone can just shove you onto the tracks at any time.
The presence of a wall is highly predictable: newer stations have them, and older stations don't.
Should the older stations be renovated? That would be an increase in safety. It would also be a pretty substantial expense to address a mostly nonexistent problem. The wall is a good idea and it makes sense to include it when you're constructing a new station. But that doesn't mean it makes sense to add it to an existing station.
Is that true? My understanding is they command very high wages because their unions are strong and they have a lot of leverage: by striking they can impose extremely high costs on the wider economy (not to mention bad press for politicians).
Yes. This was literally a case study for my Sociology degree in the '90s.
(I would also mindfully say that there is a lot of subtle political propaganda in the UK around this issue- the powers that be want the public to blame train drivers for the failures of privatisation)
By terminalshort 2025-11-1315:192 reply That doesn't convince me. Companies commonly handle situations like this just fine. I know because I have seen it. I think you are the one who fell for the propaganda here.
> I know because I have seen it
Companies may or may not handle strikes properly. If it were that easy, industrial interests (and their emissaries, like Reagan and Thatcher) would not have spent more than a century trying to break unions.
By terminalshort 2025-11-1315:50 You missed the context. I am agreeing with you. This is the argument I'm responding to:
> train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them
By qcnguy 2025-11-1315:57 But you haven't made an argument, so you're in no position to criticize. You asserted that "train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them" and then didn't back this strange claim up, just said "I'm right" in different words. A sociology degree isn't convincing btw.
By Workaccount2 2025-11-1315:112 reply Our ports in the US, which affects the cost of endless goods, are still running with 1950's level tech because the unions are so strong (and have heavy mob ties).
By BurningFrog 2025-11-1317:20 The mob "connections" in the International Longshoremen’s Association is is alive and well in this era:
What is stopping other ports in the US from adopting 2025 tech and growing to the point where existing ports have to get new tech or become obsolete?
By renewiltord 2025-11-1317:001 reply You try it, you get a visit. Same way it's always been.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1317:031 reply > You try it, you get a visit. Same way it's always been.
In that case, there's no obstacle. This is exactly what happened with containerization, and guess what? The ports that did containerize, including some ports constructed from scratch specifically because existing unionized ports blocked containerization, replaced the ports that didn't.
By renewiltord 2025-11-1317:221 reply My understanding is that the mob extracted large payments in order for containerization to be permitted. Some half of the time they just live on container royalties which are exactly the mechanism the mob used for extraction.
So sure, there's no big deal, just pay the mob. People do argue for that.
Any evidence mob lives off container royalties? And what are container royalties to begin with???? (I had no idea when I borrowed a container for moving I was paying royalties.)
By renewiltord 2025-11-1318:201 reply My problem with people asking for evidence is that they often are expecting me to do a lot of work to give them a better world model, when they nonetheless have no intention of accepting any evidence.
So I have a guideline of good faith: you can hire me and I don’t mind doing it for you; or you can go read up on the subject, reach some understanding of what these things are, and we can discuss; or you can go do some research of equivalent value to me and bring that to me as a barter[0].
Otherwise, it’s really not a big deal to me if you don’t believe something that’s true.
0: for the moment, I’m willing to trade for the DNA height model that some people claim exists. If you can find it for me, I’ll find you some sources for container royalties.
By renewiltord 2025-11-1320:33 That's absolutely correct. I don't work for free. But you have my name wrong. I certainly didn't build the perpetual motion train Snowpiercer.
By Workaccount2 2025-11-1316:461 reply The mob part.
By thaumasiotes 2025-11-1317:041 reply The mob used to be a major issue in American politics. Today it isn't.
Are you arguing that it's grown more powerful with that change?
By Workaccount2 2025-11-1319:48 I'm arguing that if you are someone who tries to bring change to the ports, like the developer contracted by the government to do an assessment, you will get a visit, most likely at your home.
They won't kill you or rough you up, but they will tell you what your assessment will find. And reiterate that they are at your house, where your family lives.
By phatfish 2025-11-1315:36 I want someone who cares to be driving the train I'm on. They also require in person participation which make outsourcing hard. I'm fine with self driving when the line is designed for it. It will be a very long time before existing lines are self driving, and its not because on unions.
Not really sure why people like moaning about train drivers. Are they jealous a train driver is making more than them? While in the case of tech workers they sit quietly and watch their £65k jobs go to India.
By cedilla 2025-11-1314:59 Labour shortages makes finding scabs hard.
By BurningFrog 2025-11-1317:13 Unions that can shut down important parts of society can and do get paid about as much as they want.
This is much more like blackmail than doing right by the working man.
Did the train drivers somehow not have this power before privatization?
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-1317:26 If that's the case, then it would be the case whether the railways are privatized or not (making the case for nationalization vs privatization).
By thesuitonym 2025-11-1314:48 These two things are related.
By glenstein 2025-11-1317:14 Definitely an interesting wrinkle. I wonder, though, if it's still cheaper to have extremely overworked but well paid staff, and few of them, versus adequate staff and normal pay.
> Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots.
Yes and that's as it should be, a fully loaded high speed intercity train has more souls on board than most commercial aviation planes (apologies pet peeve of mine because our media keeps banging on about how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid).
A bad day at the office for me is I break production and cost the company some money, a bad day at the office for them is considerably more serious - it's a lot of responsibility.
By terminalshort 2025-11-1315:271 reply A train may have more people on it, but it does have the luxury of being able to just stop when there is a problem. Airplanes not so much. Copenhagen has had an automated metro system for decades now. Train drivers aren't even strictly necessary anymore.
By Retric 2025-11-1316:40 Each have their on individual problems. An aircraft’s ability to avoid obstacles is a massive benefit over a train’s only option being to very slowly come to a complete stop.
Train drivers are mostly obsolete. More than 20 years ago full self driving trains became a reality in several areas. Since a train cannot stop if something is on the tracks anyway, we can ignore safety issues. The computer tells the track to switch, and then the train to go when the track is clear. When it is time to stop the computer stops, and the doors are exactly in the right place to align with the doors on the platforms.
An automated train is better for everyone. So if your system doesn't have it they should be investing in getting it.
In some cases you need safety people at the platforms, or on the train, but their only useful control is the stop/go button.
What happens if signalling or mechanical failures occur and manual intervention is required? I will collapse the network, that’s why you see conductor-less operation only in separated environments, like subways (Nürnberg) or DLR (London)
Drivers cannot do much to in those cases anyway. Hit the emergency stop and wait for the mechanic. - computers can do the same thing
The better answer is do maintenance such that you don't have those failures in the first place.
By noir_lord 2025-11-1316:59 We had a mass attack on a train recently, the driver radioed ahead and got his train shifted onto a different line so he could stop the train at the nearest station (which had a police station across the road).
That's the kind of thing that is hard to automate because while you can automate any routine operation (eventually) it's the none routine things that get you.
Planes and Trains have both had increasing levels of automation for decades and that's fantastic, humans are flawed/get tired/get distracted but you still need a human in the loop who can decide what to do when the unknown/unexpected happens and for that human to be effective they need to be able to operate large parts of the vehicle without the automation and understand the basic principles of the system as a whole well enough to decide what they should do that won't make the situation worse.
In planes that's the Pilot in Command, in Trains it's the driver.
By VBprogrammer 2025-11-1317:011 reply Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of railway operations knows that this isn't at all true.
For example, I've been on a Glasgow bound train where the driver was instructed to pass the signal at danger following a lengthy signoff process. Some scallywags had stolen wire for copper.
By rmoriz 2025-11-1321:05 this. Railway signalling is a complex topic and totally different in Europa vs. the US. ETCS is another big step forward in terms of automation, but we don't see driverless trains. In Germany we have Linienzugbeeinflussung (LZB) since 1959 in tests and 1963 in early real life operations. LZB enforces dynamic train separation, speed limits and breaking but does not implement full automation. ETCS is the successor which does not require a cable in between the rails but balises.
By Starlevel004 2025-11-1316:01 Even the DLR has drivers onboard to take over in an emergency.
By bitwize 2025-11-1316:48 > An automated train is better for everyone.
Until the manufacturer puts DRM in your fucking train: https://www.thedrive.com/news/hackers-beat-anti-repair-softw...
But trains are inherently safer (or at least, they should be).
If the train driver falls asleep and the train is about to go where it shouldn't, then safety systems should kick in and halt the train automatically. This is not possible (to the same extent) in airplanes.
This is something I have a hard time squaring away.
A train will likely always need to be manned, there are, in fact, checks that have to be made by a person and can't be made by a computer.
However, it seems like the part of actually driving the train could be nearly completely automated. The train is on a rail, about the only thing a person is needed for when the train is in motion is to push a stop button if things go wrong. Things like speed and indeed even a decent amount of visual checks could be automated based on location.
If you have a grade separated system - which you really want anyway - there is nothing that could get in the way.
I'm against trams because a bus can do the same thing - and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable.
> If you have a grade separated syste
Yeah, that's not realistic in 99% of the cases.
> I'm against trams because a bus can do the same thing - and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable.
But buses can't do the same thing.
The thing about LRT is capacity per driver. Even the fanciest, most expensive buses can take maybe half the passengers a standard 30-40m tram can. It's not even a competition. That alone makes trams win every time there's enough population to fill that capacity. Even if you wanted to pay for three bus drivers rather than one tram driver, you can simply not put enough buses on the same route to make up for the difference. Even if said route is independent of other traffic, which it never ever is.
Rail transport always has high up-front costs but low operating costs. But a BRT system truly designed to rail standards would cost almost as much as just building a frigging LRT system. And if you do the sensible thing and choose overhead rather than battery power – well, there's a reason trolleybus rapid transit systems do not actually exist. There's zero reasons you'd want such a thing rather than light rail.
Trams benefit greatly from being mature technology with economies of scale. There's a lot of knowledge in the world on how to build great rail infrastructure and how to make great LRT vehicles at a scale. There are maybe two companies in the world that make BRT vehicles, and no matter how excellent the infrastructure, the service lifespan of a bus is less than half that of a tram.
There also exists this thing called "rail factor". No matter how fancy your bus system, an equivalent thing but on rails will always attract more passengers, especially from demographics that would otherwise not use transit. Whatever the reason, this effect can not be ignored given how important it is to attract new transit users. Steel on steel is simply always more popular than rubber on pavement when it comes to transit.
In almost all cases you don't have enough passanges to fill a large bus though. And in most of the cases where you do you should be paying 3 drivers to get three buses because that increased service is highly valued by riders. Long before you reach the end of that a grade separeted metro that can go faster that a bus or tram should be built thus getting mose people off the but. Only a few places in the world are left after the above where you need more than a bus can do at grade level (which implies a lot of short trips), but if you are in one I'll grant a tram is needed.
the 'rail factor' is claimed often - but I've never seen it put to a fair test. When you give the train better service of course people choose to use it.
Yeah, you need a pretty high population density before you get to the point where rail makes sense. That said, having rail connecting major metros does make sense generally, especially with how often people travel.
In the UK, I had to take a train from Preston England to London (2004ish). It was absolutely packed. A good reason for that is the ticket price was about 60 gbp and the trip took 3 hours (IIRC).
That's where I think the US should both invest and subsidize. There's a lot of air travel that could be replaced with rail travel if the US rail wasn't so terribly ran. It usually costs more than an airline ticket (which is crazy) and often takes a lot longer due to delays waiting on commercial trains. A lot of that can be fixed by regulating commercial rail shipping (for example, limiting train length). But also building new dedicated highspeed lines between major metros. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make a trip from Seattle to Florida in under 48h by rail and for less than $500.
A train should be cheaper and faster than a car. It should be cheaper than a plane.
By bluGill 2025-11-1321:16 Long distance rail doesn't make sense without local transport. If I have to rent a car when I get there I can justify a much longer drive - and because cars are door to door the drive isn't that much longer. Flying goes far enough that driving doesn't make sense.
i use amtrak once in a while, but I hate driving and still can only justify it because my body can't sit in a car that long without pain
There are absolutely zillions of cities in the world where buses aren’t enough on trunk lines but rapid transit metro would be ridiculous overkill, mostly in the 100k to 500k population segment. And in bigger cities with metros there are many routes where a metro expansion doesn’t make sense but buses aren’t enough.
I mean, this isn’t some theoretical question where the jury is still out there, there are countless examples. Cities everywhere don’t build LRT just for fun and because they have too much money! If there aren’t enough people for LRT that just means the town isn’t big enough, which is fair, or there are too few transit users due to car culture or whatever (eg. the US, which is an outlier).
The rail factor is not a hypothesis, the entire point is that it’s a discovered effect. If you haven’t seen it put to test, you simply haven’t been looking.
As one datapoint, I can simply point to the city where I live [1]: the LRT system that opened in 2021 has become exceedingly popular and effortlessly lifted transit use from the covid slump, with total passenger numbers now much higher than in 2019 and quite a bit higher than the rather conservative projections made when the system was being planned. Headways have already been shortened from 7.5 to 6 minutes to respond to peak hour demand, and extension modules have been ordered to lengthen a part of the fleet of 37m vehicles to 47m, adding 30% to the 260-passenger capacity.
On the other hand, another Finnish city of roughly the same size has been equivocating between LRT and BRT for years and years. Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment. It has also become quite clear that the only reason BRT keeps being discussed is that it’s used merely as a political tool to induce analysis paralysis, to delay and hinder any significant transit improvement by those against anything except antiquated car-centric urban design.
By iggldiggl 2025-11-1418:56 > Countless reviews have made it clear that essentially the only thing that BRT has going for it is lower up-front investment.
Plus maybe another legitimiate niche in developing countries where drivers' salaries are cheaper relative to capital investments cost.
By iggldiggl 2025-11-1419:06 > and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable
If you maintain a road to track standards, it's likely also just as expensive. (Definitely not cheap, because an intensive bus service will hammer a road quite nicely.)
By daedrdev 2025-11-1316:03 I do not like this argument. Margins in most businesses are not very high. There is thus physically not enough cash to raise wages very much. Driving a train is less difficult than a plane, and trains have much worse margins due to lower ticket prices, so we should expect wages to be less.
By FuckButtons 2025-11-1315:34 Well, that and people don’t keep on turning themselves into a red paste on the front of your server rack. I’ve heard some fairly harrowing stories from a train driver that made me think all the money in the world wouldn’t be enough to get me to do that job.
Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots?
Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it’s as it should be that none of us crabs should be in the bucket, with your claim that including, the crab closest to the edge of the bucket, presumably, should be climbing out of it?
By tome 2025-11-1315:35 Sorry, what?
EDIT: Oh, I think I understand what you mean. If I've got my understanding correct then my response is that noir_lord said that one of the crabs shouldn't be climbing out:
> their pay is fair for the responsibility
> Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots
What is inconsistent about those two things?
You can simultaneously believe that train drivers and airline pilots deserve to be paid more.
By universa1 2025-11-1315:00 As payment is very much a "relative" problem, giving everyone else more, means essentially giving train drivers less.
> You can simultaneously believe that train drivers and airline pilots deserve to be paid more.
But that's not what noir_lord thinks. He/she specifically said
> their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid [my emphasis]
which implies that train drivers are currently paid the correct amount.
It doesn't imply anything, they explicitly said they think it's fair:
> how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
You are the one who is implying something.
By tome 2025-11-1315:41 > You are the one who is implying something.
Maybe I am, so let's stick to exactly what noir_lord said
> > Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots
> that's as it should be
I understand this to mean that it is fair that train drivers are paid as much as airline pilots.
> in reality their [train drivers'] pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
I understand this to mean that train drivers are paid fairly, and everyone else, including pilots, are underpaid, i.e. it is not fair that airline pilots don't earn more than they currently do, i.e. as much as train drivers, from which I conclude that it is not fair that train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots, in contradiction to the first claim.
Where have I gone wrong?
They are been pedantic by pointing out that the set "everyone else" excluding train drivers would still include pilots rather than reading it as intended which would conventionally and implicitly exclude pilots.
It is what it is with some people.
Thanks for trying to help me understand. I'm not sure if I do yet. Can I check my understanding? Did you mean, when you said
> in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
that train drivers and pilots are fairly paid, whereas everyone else is underpaid?
The "everyone else" is not meant to be read literally.
Many people are well-paid, or even overpaid. CEOs, for instance.
It's just that most people, in most common professions, are underpaid.
It only makes sense to talk about a blanket statement like that being a "contradiction" when someone is attempting to speak in the language of formal logic or detailed argument, not colloquial speech.
By tome 2025-11-1316:17 That's fine, then the response I was looking for is simply "I didn't mean literally everyone else, I just meant simply 'most people, in most common professions, are underpaid'". That's a perfectly valid point of view.
Then I would have replied that, despite perhaps being true, I don't how it's relevant to the question of whether it's fair to pay train drivers and pilots the same.
By nostrebored 2025-11-1316:30 You don’t get it because it doesn’t make sense. People’s understanding of money is horrible.
By tome 2025-11-1314:58 See sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915649
By lambdas 2025-11-1315:11 > They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid
I must be an engineer for a different Network Rail
By dijit 2025-11-1319:15 This is incorrect on all counts and it strikes me as scary that its the top comment.
Train workers consistently strike, not because they are not well paid (though nowhere near airline pilots- though that is in free-fall), but because cuts to staff lead to safety issues.
The profits of the train system has never been higher, and the salaries of workers has stagnated in real terms for more than a decade.
By Dennip 2025-11-1318:14 Something you are not accounting for is that rolling stock is fully private still, and a huge huge chunk of the profits. Operators don't make much money, the govt owns and runs the rails themselves, but the rollling stock is where a lot of the money goes
By wasmainiac 2025-11-1316:41 Sources? This just sounds like union busting propaganda. “Trust it’s bad”
By iso1631 2025-11-1317:20 HS2 is nothing to do with the nationalised rail maintenance, that's just an example of the inability for the UK (and indeed most of the western world) to build large projects, a lot of corruption, a lot of outsourcing, and an infinite money tap.
By Reason077 2025-11-1318:50 > “It is not efficiently run (see HS2!).”
Sure, but HS2 has little to do with Network Rail, the government entity that owns and operates most of the UK’s existing rail infrastructure.
There’s a whole other inefficient bureaucracy (HS2 Ltd) behind HS2!
By woodpanel 2025-11-1316:56 > This is misleading
Well, what do you expect? Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is a far-left NGO (the N stands for "Near"), the official trust of the German political party Die Linke.
By johnjames87 2025-11-1315:19 Great reply
By MangoToupe 2025-11-1314:561 reply [flagged]
By MangoToupe 2025-11-1318:16 Yes; absolutely.
By brookst 2025-11-1315:33 Profit is literally the return on investment. Would you invest your money in a startup that guaranteed no profit?
Profit is essentially interest. The only reason new and growing companies get funded is because the EV of future profits (including the probability of losing everything) is higher than just stuffing that same money in S&P 500.
By FridayoLeary 2025-11-1314:395 reply [flagged]
> It's not a stressful job and like you said they get paid pretty well
I’m curious as to the criteria there. A train driver must, surely, be more stressed than a software engineer? They’re in charge of a moving vehicle that carries hundreds of people. And yet software engineers will still often make more than train drivers do.
Salaries don't tend to be strongly correlated with bad working conditions or stress. In most industries (like software development) it's just supply and demand, and I imagine there are more people willing and able to work for £65k as a train driver than as a software developer. It's a bit different for train drivers because of the strong unions; my guess is that explains their high salaries more than lack of supply.
(Median total reward for TOC train drivers is £66,043) https://www.orr.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/review-of...
By afavour 2025-11-1314:55 Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking. Saying "it's low stress therefore shouldn't attract a high salary" doesn't add up to me.
I don't necessarily know what the right salary is but it's shift work (and you don't get to choose your hours), you're in charge of a lot of people's safety, there's a non zero chance you'll watch someone die in front of you (if they jump on the tracks). It's... not nothing. And if we're looking at how much economic benefit a given job provides a country a train driver is surely a large multiplier.
By FridayoLeary 2025-11-1315:051 reply The reason i made a point about low stress conditions is because i do actually appreciate that driving a train is not as simple as i imagine. I might have said that they are basically truck drivers (just without 90% of the driving part) whose entire job is sitting all day sometimes pressing a button that says go and pressing a button that says stop and a 12 year old could do it. But that would be overly uncharitable and wrong. They are after all responsible for hundreds of lives and thousands of tons moving at great speed. Are they good people? No. Are they overpaid? I believe so.
Just to clarify a point. My main complaint isn't even that they are overpaid. If their bosses want to fleece everyone, why can't they? It's more the absolute selfishness of their actions that bothers me.
By afavour 2025-11-1315:26 > Are they good people? No.
?!? You're saying they're bad people because they take a salary offered to them? Is a software engineer that takes a higher salary a bad person too?
By 1718627440 2025-11-1315:20 And you are nearly always driving with a broken train. In such a complex system, something is always broken.
By touristtam 2025-11-1315:091 reply Of course strikes are usually put when they incommodate the most users. Otherwise what's the point. They are not begging, they are in a wrestling match with the Govt over their industry.
Thatcher was probably right about needing a reform of the Unions, but unfortunately for Britain she identified the wrong solution to for the right problem.
By FridayoLeary 2025-11-1315:20 >Of course strikes are usually put when they incommodate the most users. Otherwise what's the point.
That is exactly why people despise trade unions. Doctors and nurses won't strike on busy season. The trains need to run either way. Strike during off season if you have to. Don't maximise misery for political gain.
By igleria 2025-11-1315:09 muh shareholders!!!!!
on a more serious note, why is it always (ok, not every time, but too many times) a software developer (or adjacent) looking down on categorically more stressful and lower paid jobs? Must be some "huh they deserve it for not knowing bubblesort" type of mentality
By 0ct4via 2025-11-1314:51 > It's not a stressful job
Ignoring the tremendous amount of route training, rules, regulations, etc. — plus if they're delayed (generally through no fault of their own), they're worrying about the per-minute fines levied for delays to the service, and whether they can make the time up. That aside,
— try reporting that comment to any driver who has suffered a fatality... someone appearing on the tracks in front of them and there is no way whatsoever for them to stop in time.
Many drivers end up having to give up their careers after experiencing a "one-under", and don't get back into the cab.
It can be a lot more stressful than you think.
By mschuster91 2025-11-1314:521 reply > But then they timed their strikes for the Xmas season in order to maximise the suffering and economic damage it would cause.
Well, that's the point of going on strike. Don't blame the drivers, blame the rail company.
> It's not a stressful job
It actually is, there aren't that many jobs where you are literally responsible for hundreds if not nearly a thousand (ICE-4 has 918 seats alone plus probably 100-200 standing people) lives behind your seat. Even your A380 has only half of that as capacity. The only comparable job is being captain of a cruise liner ship.
> I am increasingly convinced that the second part of making rails great again, after putting rail companies in their place is driverless trains.
Driverless trains in practice only work on a closed system with no at-grade crossings of any kind. There's a reason we only see them in "peoplemover" style systems or in subways that usually have full-height doors preventing unauthorized access.
The only actual full-size railway running ATO is the Rio Tinto ore train in Australia... with large sections of the 800 km long drive having the advantage of being in the utter desert with no one and no thing besides kangaroos posing any sort of danger to the train.
By 0ct4via 2025-11-1315:56 Hear, hear. Couldn't have put it better myself. 73.
By dickiedyce 2025-11-1314:207 reply As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencekirk). But still plenty more to do. I visit the south semi-regularly, and worked in London in the 90's. Rail around London seems to have really improved over the last few years. Swiss Rail (SBB) is still the poster child for a decent rail system. Clean, on time, reasonably priced (compared to UK rail), and easy to use. What was eye-opening for me was recent travel in Germany (München to Basel in CH)... DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair.
By mentalgear 2025-11-1314:333 reply Fun fact: DB (Germany public-private national rail company) has become one of the UK's biggest train service providers - even the Queen's train was under their service.
DB (Schenker) buys stakes in transportation all over the world - with German tax payer money: A fact that many Germans do not like given the very poor train service in their own country.
By luesterklemme 2025-11-1315:321 reply DB Schenker was sold recently. So your point is not entirely correct anymore. Also yes, it did invest tax payer money but was profitable doing so.
By fransje26 2025-11-1318:03 > DB Schenker was sold recently
Ah, the traditional privatize the profit, and nationalize the losses then. Great.
Just looked through DB's annual report. There's no mentioning of any passenger rail operations in UK. It's "just" DB Cargo. So I don't understand what this "fact" has anything to do with passenger transportation in Germany.
By the way, Cargo is the mode of operation where most profitable rail companies are. Hence the dualism of loss-incurring Amtrak and profitable North Amercian freight operators as well.
DB Cargo is producing more losses than the other branches, i.e. passenger rail. It doesn’t generate profits like in the US (shorter trains, more single rail car traffic, shorter distances, infrastructure held up to higher standard thus more expensive, lower priority compared to passenger rail)
By woodpanel 2025-11-149:31 You're missing the point: it is still less loss incurring than passenger rail (and has been at least profitable sometimes, or in some markets).
> the very poor train service in [Germany]
Amtrak has entered the chat.
(It was originally scheduled to enter the chat at 2:42 AM, but was delayed until 6:01 AM.)
By ant6n 2025-11-1318:07 3 hours, that’s not even a drlay.
By arethuza 2025-11-1314:26 Scotrail was shockingly bad when Abellio were running it - much better now and certainly much better than the likes of Avanti West Coast...
By brianmcc 2025-11-1316:18 Plus the Scottish Govt have removed the peak/off-peak ticket split, everything is now priced at off-peak - i.e. cheaper - rates.
Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.
By wongarsu 2025-11-1314:44 > DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair
DBs state is probably too unique to draw any conclusions (attempted privatization stopped just before IPO, so now it's lot of different state-owned private organizations with degraded infrastructure). But the stations are actually fairly straight forward: the platforms and the means to get there are still publicly owned, but 80% of the station buildings have been sold off to private operators. The bigger ones are glorified malls that are exempt from laws about shopping hours, the smaller ones mostly just decay
By thebruce87m 2025-11-1318:04 My wife uses ScotRail to commute and has no complaints. Yes, there’s the usual weather related stuff but nothing too bad. She probably has the same number of issues with her commute as I do by car - my journey was twice as long tonight as the road was covered in chickens after a crash.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-1317:30 It's a mystery to me how Germany, known for its high efficiency in many industries, cannot get the trains to run on time. It's almost as bad as Italy.
By ixtli 2025-11-1315:54 This is great to hear.
The problem with this assement is that it misunderstands the role of the private sector.
Yes, those crashes happened, and they were disasters, but they were only partially down to rail track being privatised. They were a result of systemic under investment both pre and post privatisation.
THe _other_ key thing that needs to be remembered is that rail is highly regulated. To the point that both price, timetables profit and pay are controlled by the deparment of transport.
The bigger issue is that actually the department of transport doesn't have the specialists needed to run the railways, they are hired in as consultants.
If you compare that to TFL, which operates both private (DLR and some of the overground) and public (most of the tubes, not sure about elizabeth line) and buseses (which are entirely private)
The railways are in the state they are because of poor governance from central government. and poor investment, also from government.
IF they had been publicly owned, we'd be in the same state, because the UK government is not currently able to run services effectively. Unless and until the political classes are willing to pay civl servants competitive rates of pay and trust data, then we will continue to be in a mess.
Yes, privatization is bad, but the lack of effective governance is the hidden crisis here.
By VBprogrammer 2025-11-1317:152 reply I'm just not convinced that privatisation of natural monopolies is ever sensible. Especially when failure isn't option, you can't just stop the trains running because some operator spent all of their budget on executive bonuses. It's privatised profits and public liability.
By ndsipa_pomu 2025-11-1318:271 reply England's water companies are a classic example of why you don't want a natural monopoly to be privatised.
By KaiserPro 2025-11-1413:58 Yes, and the way that they were privatised was markedly different to the railways. The failure point was subtly different (regulatory capture and incorrect powers to say "fuck off thats fraud")
I think the issue is that there you need infra to be at arms length, so that they can make long term decisions free of political interference. (for example can you imagine the noise if "rates" went up by as much as the water bills went up to fund the modernisation of the water system?)
But if you're at arms length, how can you have enough oversite to correct for regulatory capture (ofwat) or failure to build future proof infrastructure (defra). That requires industry experts, who are in government and are trusted to advise. It also require politicians who are willing to take such advice and evangelise it to a skeptical public.
By skippyboxedhero 2025-11-1318:23 You can see that it is highly effective even within the UK. Ofgem publish components of the energy price, of the average annual cost of £1300 I recall that profit was £40. Government subsidies are now £200-300 and are growing (I believe I read a story the other day that said that if the wholesale cost of energy fell to zero over the next few years, the cost of energy would not fall...that is how expensive the government's corporate subsidies to high-cost suppliers is...for some reason, no-one talks about this).
If you compare to the 70s when the government was throwing cash at these industries (largely because of the political incentives), it is unbelievable how low costs are. The problem is that the political intervention has been very bad, the public liability comes from bad regulation (which was just as true in the 70s).
For example, in energy the regulator has encouraged operators, like Tomato Energy the most recent failure, who are very clearly not operating in a financially sustainable way. If you look at who works for regulators (and look at what they get up to outside of regulation, in other parts of government), I am not sure how you can conclude that it could ever be any other way. We are paying for people who are largely unemployable outside of government to attempt to govern companies that are responsible for powering the whole of the country. Why does anyone think is wise?
Another example mentioned in the OP is retaining much in public ownership and then privatizing ROSCOs...it isn't just this is a bad idea, it is so clearly a bad idea that it is unclear who could have thought this is a bad idea. Again, this happened because of very ineffective regulation/political leadership.
Finally, what profits? One of the issues with most regulated industries is that the profits are very low because of the politics (for some reason, people think that public ownership will fix this...rather than make it much worse...we don't need to imagine, the UK has tried this several times, it has failed every time but the politics mean that there is no option but to keep trying it). The result has led companies to do things that are not wise because, otherwise, investors will pull capital. If you read any article about this is any paper in the UK, you would assume that the profits on offer in these industries are wild...they are not, share prices are collapsing, the reason why the government is taking over rail operating companies is because they are going bust, there is massive demand destruction in almost all of these areas because prices are sky-high, profits are non-existent, demand is being destroyed, and no-one wants to deal with the lack of supply because it would require admitting that the world isn't divided into Monopoly Man and a Victorian urchin.
There are countries that have made it work but the UK will never be one of them because of the political environment (significantly more raucous than the European style of managed democracy).
By skippyboxedhero 2025-11-1318:06 For some reason, people also tend to ignore the many other cases where this is also true: telecoms, energy, water, etc.
The problem is that there is massive political gain to both sides so we will likely keep rotating through the same options. In either case, the exact same people are in control, and no-one will ever ask whether the issue might be the people.
I also think that people fundamentally misunderstand why they were privatized: the public cost was massive, it was ever growing, and there was no capacity to fix this. Any discussion around money was completely impossible. Can you think of any part of the government where this is true? Actually, can you think of any part of the government where this isn't true? The government struggles to do bin collections, they struggle to police effectively, nothing works...and people assume that the problems will magically be fixed if they are given more control.
I think the lack of investment is a side-effect btw. There is a massive issue in the UK with management, it stretches across government, the larger public sector, and the private sector. It is true that in regulated industries, regulators have created bad incentives for the private sector, this is true generally of the incentives that government creates for the private sector...but even outside of those areas, it is generally quite bad. One of the sources of this problem is the complete and total obsession with politics outside of the outcomes that it creates i.e. the purpose of politics is politics, not running things effectively.
There is no real way to fix this (and we have done almost everything possible to make it worse).
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-1317:331 reply > lack of effective governance is the hidden crisis here
but privatization makes that worse, by adding profit-seeking (which tends to minimize investments) to the lack of effective governance
the solution is improving governance and public investments, not privatization
(not to mention the problem with infrastructure paid for by the public over decades being sold off on the cheap to private companies who can reap the benefits thereof)
> by adding profit-seeking
apart from in this instance, the amount of profit was dictated by the government as part of the franchise.
By insane_dreamer 2025-11-1321:40 Not the ROSCOs at least, which is a big part of the problem.
