Rising demand in Britain

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jul/2 ... railtravel

Rising demand despite highest fares in Europe - even higher than Ireland's which used to be higher. Increasing capacity will need more trains and track improvements, as well as longer platforms.

Decades of underinvestment finally catch up to British railways. Something we can relate to here in the US

This article should be required reading for the people here that want to impose Britain's privitisation solution on the US.

Jon

jonnhrr wrote:Decades of underinvestment finally catch up to British railways. Something we can relate to here in the US

This article should be required reading for the people here that want to impose Britain's privitisation solution on the US.

Jon

The current system is getting a lot more money than BR did. But despite what both Tories and so-called New Labour say, BR was the most efficient user of what it had in Europe. If BR had been given more money they could have done much better than the present set-up. I suspect Amtrak is in fact very efficient, despite having almost nothing to keep it going. Splitting it up would be disastrous.

The one feature of the present system that might be considered an improvement is the train leasing - though the ROSCOs charge too much for trains that surely have long made their money, which makes them hard to use on new services.