7 ms·

Yes, what you are describing is basically the UK railway. Network rail (government) subcontract out maintainence and build to the private companies (Alstom etc.

Yes, what you are describing is basically the UK railway. Network rail (government) subcontract out maintainence and build to the private companies (Alstom etc..) and then lease track access to private companies (Virgin trains etc...). The UK has possibly the most overpriced railway in the world, at least in this instance it fair to say 'it didnt work' unless you want to pay 300usd to get from london to glasgow in economy.

pjc50 9y ago
Note that the system was fully private for a while (Railtrack PLC), until they went bankrupt. I think it's going to be expensive whether it's public or private, for complex reasons probably related to "legacy" hardware. If it was fully deregulated then the operators would immediately shut down all the tracks within 100 miles of London to build houses on them. I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail. It's just that most of them manage it better than the UK. The UK telecoms industry was privatised and has ended up with BT Openreach operating most of the wires, leased out with local loop unbundling (LLU) to a variety of broadband providers. It works OK although not brilliantly.
- RobertoG 9y ago
  "I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail." Not really, in some countries the railway and train operators is the same company, strongly controlled by the government and operating without big problems. It's my understanding that the problems in the UK started when they stopped using that model.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  In Japan the railway companies (which are pseudo private in the way a lot of things are in Japan) run the railways effectively at or below cost and the profits are made on property development and leasing on the surrounding land. In the UK the railway companies try to run profits on railway operation while the taxpayer subsidizes them and the surrounding land is owned by property developers who are making profits that are staggering. The Conservative government is also doing stuff like donating 38 million pounds to govia thameslink in profit compensation for a strike they triggered. It's taxpayers and passengers subsidizing property developers' and TOC profits, and the government/TOCs seems to be trying to get the TOC wage bills down so that TOCs and property developers can make even more.
- grahamm 9y ago
  And it went bankrupt at the cost of fixing some fundamental problems that contributed to at least two nasty rail accidents. The government decided it didn't want to continue to be responsible for the maintenance. Would rather feed subsidies to a company that would take the heat for issues.
- walshemj 9y ago
  100 times better than the states where local monopolies where allowed to remain and you get insane things like receiver plays for mobile.
- jernfrost 9y ago
  No, the most sucessful train company in Europe, the swiss doesn’t. And those who have go e for separate companies have just bad experience with it. This separation is mostly ideologially driven with no proven benefits. Right wing parties will push through anything their economic text books say is smart regardless of pracrical results and experiences.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Switzerland is part of the Single Market but not part of the EU or EEA, just to complicate matters. I agree with the rest of what you're saying.
pas 9y ago
Are there non-subsidized railways that break even, what's their quality? The problem with rails is the same with roads. Yes, AnCaps/Libertarians/Voluntarists/goldbugs think that "yeah, if the State weren't meddling in the market, people would form a corporation to build a [toll] road/rail", but of course, the same network effects would lead to very fine roads between major population centers and abso-fucking-lutely nothing else, because why would anyone connect a mining town in Wyoming anywhere? The mining company will use big all-terrain vehicles on dirt roads and that's it. Maybe they'll lay a track for the coal itself. And I'd even argue, that yes, even if rail operates at a net loss according to GAAP, that doesn't mean socially it is a negative. The same applies to broadband. However, maybe ... maaaybe not everyone should live so far from each other, so infrastructure TCO and commute times and energy use (and GHG emissions) would be lower.
- stuaxo 9y ago
  Have a look at Thailand for the effects of way-less effective regulation. Street furniture and cables all over the pedestrian areas and cars and bikes everywhere else. Huge concrete overpasses, litter and pollution.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    In the railway context I believe SRT is government operated including track and trains so they follow a mandate rather then regulation. I took a new train from BKK to Hua Hin a few months ago, quite a pleasant ride to be fair. The cables are a problem, but I suspect it led to faster broadband and FFTH rollout, to give an example I was one of the first True customers and they ran a coaxial cable about 0.25km to the house, it took less than two hours, you couldnt do that if it was underground. Sometimes these things work.
isostatic 9y ago
> The UK has possibly the most overpriced railway in the world The UK railway is still subsidised by the tax payer -- while some routes like Manchester-London make a profit, this profit is reinvested into loss making routes like the Welsh Valleys which help keep communities alive (the operating companies take about 3%, so a £100 ticket without a private company taking money would at cheapest be £97) There is plenty of competition on the Glasgow-London route, including two Coach companies, Plane - multiple companies and routes, driving, two direct train companies (albeit with similar branding) and a third overnight. The $240 peak time one way fare comes out at 58 cents per mile. It's valid on any train, just walk up and go. For almost all trains it's actually $183 return, or 22 cents per mile - valid on any train other than the first arrival into London in the morning and the first couple out of London in the morning. A train from Washington to New York will set you back $1.14 per mile, with less flexibility.
- briandear 9y ago
  I could fly Glasgow-London for far cheaper than the train ticket. Yet an airplane is far more expensive to operate. I wonder why that is.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    No, the railway "permanent way" is far more expensive to operate. That's the problem. The UK railway network has rather a lot of 100+ year old bridges in it, along with some less ancient but still pretty old signalling equipment. (extremely high detail PDF on costs: http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/4933/toc-benchmarking-report-2012.pdf http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/4933/toc-bench...)
  - frereubu 9y ago
    That (plane operating costs > rail operating costs) may not be the case when you take into account the cost of maintaining the physical infrastructure (hundreds of miles of railroad) compared to that of airports (a few hundred metres of tarmac).
    - 9y ago
cjrp 9y ago
Part of the problem is that you can't have "real" competition, e.g. two train companies can't operate competing franchises on the same line, at the same time. I get terrible service and pay high fares on my Southern Railways route, but I can't opt to use a different carrier without moving house. But if my broadband provider decides to raise their prices by 5% next year, I can move to a different provider with a single phone call and a few minutes of downtime.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  Most people in the country can not realistically switch internet providers. Even when you have a choice you're often limited to two.
  - lhopki01 9y ago
    Which country? If you have a phone line to your house you can pick between more than 2. Under what circumstances do most people only have a choice of two.
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      Switching to DSL is not a realistic option when most of the country has broadband.
      - lhopki01 9y ago
        Again which country are you talking about? The majority of UK broadband is ADSL2+. There is cable in some areas but not all. In all areas with phone lines there are multiple providers giving around 20Mb/s. They all use the same phone lines because of local loop unbundling. In areas with fibre to the cabinet there are again multiple providers all using the same fibre. The only service in the UK that doesn't have local loop unbundling is cable.
        arethuza 9y ago
        "In all areas with phone lines there are multiple providers giving around 20Mb/s." I don't know about the rest of the UK but I don't think that is the case in Scotland - once you are any distance from a city or town the speeds can drop dramatically and that's not even in the Highlands or Islands. Certainly when we were looking at houses about a year ago there were quite upmarket new houses in Perthshire that had no broadband at all.
belorn 9y ago
Government maintained track system that lease track access to private companies is problematic system because of several points where that relationship breaks. 1: Rail maintenance dictate quality, but is shared between all competitors. 2: Rail is located on ground owned by the government. There is no practical or legal option to operate a private rail network. 3: Lack of distinguishable features to compete, high barrier to entry, and a limited number of companies create an environment thats prime for oligopolies. High price, low service. In contrast to Internet service providers which: 1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by the back bone network. 2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first. 3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP.
- welterde 9y ago
  > 1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by the back bone network. If by that you mean that it is not the only thing that matters, then yes. But if the backbone is bottlenecked then of course quality will suffer. > 2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first. Is that actually the case? Getting a dedicated line between any two buildings tends to be no problem, so why would doing the same on a larger scale be a problem all of a sudden? > 3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP. That's only really possible if the last mile can be leased from either the municipal or some other company (sort of like the government maintained track system). Otherwise the barrier is exactly this last mile, which is the most expensive part of the whole thing (which is also why a lot of small rural ISPs use wireless as last mile access instead of wired connections).
CaptainZapp 9y ago
Virgin Trains at least are nice and if you book well in advance very reasonable deals are to be had. We paid ~42 quid from London to Manchester in first class, one way. Alas we bought the tickets month' in advance and, of course, non-refundable. For shits and giggles I tried to figure out what the same ride costs like when you buy the ticket 30 minutes in advance. And there we come to 280£ each, which is completely ridiculous. It's not that good (2nd ist still ~90quid) Now, don't get me started on Northern. Filthy, Expensive, Clueless and slathered with a heavy dose of disorganisation. I think you can honestly say that privatizing trains in the UK was an experiment going horribly wrong.

pjc50 9y ago

Note that the system was fully private for a while (Railtrack PLC), until they went bankrupt. I think it's going to be expensive whether it's public or private, for complex reasons probably related to "legacy" hardware. If it was fully deregulated then the operators would immediately shut down all the tracks within 100 miles of London to build houses on them. I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail. It's just that most of them manage it better than the UK. The UK telecoms industry was privatised and has ended up with BT Openreach operating most of the wires, leased out with local loop unbundling (LLU) to a variety of broadband providers. It works OK although not brilliantly.

RobertoG 9y ago
"I believe all European countries are required to have separate track and train operators for railways with some structure for competition in rail." Not really, in some countries the railway and train operators is the same company, strongly controlled by the government and operating without big problems. It's my understanding that the problems in the UK started when they stopped using that model.
crdoconnor 9y ago
In Japan the railway companies (which are pseudo private in the way a lot of things are in Japan) run the railways effectively at or below cost and the profits are made on property development and leasing on the surrounding land. In the UK the railway companies try to run profits on railway operation while the taxpayer subsidizes them and the surrounding land is owned by property developers who are making profits that are staggering. The Conservative government is also doing stuff like donating 38 million pounds to govia thameslink in profit compensation for a strike they triggered. It's taxpayers and passengers subsidizing property developers' and TOC profits, and the government/TOCs seems to be trying to get the TOC wage bills down so that TOCs and property developers can make even more.
grahamm 9y ago
And it went bankrupt at the cost of fixing some fundamental problems that contributed to at least two nasty rail accidents. The government decided it didn't want to continue to be responsible for the maintenance. Would rather feed subsidies to a company that would take the heat for issues.
walshemj 9y ago
100 times better than the states where local monopolies where allowed to remain and you get insane things like receiver plays for mobile.
jernfrost 9y ago
No, the most sucessful train company in Europe, the swiss doesn’t. And those who have go e for separate companies have just bad experience with it. This separation is mostly ideologially driven with no proven benefits. Right wing parties will push through anything their economic text books say is smart regardless of pracrical results and experiences.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Switzerland is part of the Single Market but not part of the EU or EEA, just to complicate matters. I agree with the rest of what you're saying.

pas 9y ago

Are there non-subsidized railways that break even, what's their quality? The problem with rails is the same with roads. Yes, AnCaps/Libertarians/Voluntarists/goldbugs think that "yeah, if the State weren't meddling in the market, people would form a corporation to build a [toll] road/rail", but of course, the same network effects would lead to very fine roads between major population centers and abso-fucking-lutely nothing else, because why would anyone connect a mining town in Wyoming anywhere? The mining company will use big all-terrain vehicles on dirt roads and that's it. Maybe they'll lay a track for the coal itself. And I'd even argue, that yes, even if rail operates at a net loss according to GAAP, that doesn't mean socially it is a negative. The same applies to broadband. However, maybe ... maaaybe not everyone should live so far from each other, so infrastructure TCO and commute times and energy use (and GHG emissions) would be lower.

stuaxo 9y ago
Have a look at Thailand for the effects of way-less effective regulation. Street furniture and cables all over the pedestrian areas and cars and bikes everywhere else. Huge concrete overpasses, litter and pollution.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  In the railway context I believe SRT is government operated including track and trains so they follow a mandate rather then regulation. I took a new train from BKK to Hua Hin a few months ago, quite a pleasant ride to be fair. The cables are a problem, but I suspect it led to faster broadband and FFTH rollout, to give an example I was one of the first True customers and they ran a coaxial cable about 0.25km to the house, it took less than two hours, you couldnt do that if it was underground. Sometimes these things work.

isostatic 9y ago

> The UK has possibly the most overpriced railway in the world The UK railway is still subsidised by the tax payer -- while some routes like Manchester-London make a profit, this profit is reinvested into loss making routes like the Welsh Valleys which help keep communities alive (the operating companies take about 3%, so a £100 ticket without a private company taking money would at cheapest be £97) There is plenty of competition on the Glasgow-London route, including two Coach companies, Plane - multiple companies and routes, driving, two direct train companies (albeit with similar branding) and a third overnight. The $240 peak time one way fare comes out at 58 cents per mile. It's valid on any train, just walk up and go. For almost all trains it's actually $183 return, or 22 cents per mile - valid on any train other than the first arrival into London in the morning and the first couple out of London in the morning. A train from Washington to New York will set you back $1.14 per mile, with less flexibility.

briandear 9y ago
I could fly Glasgow-London for far cheaper than the train ticket. Yet an airplane is far more expensive to operate. I wonder why that is.
- pjc50 9y ago
  No, the railway "permanent way" is far more expensive to operate. That's the problem. The UK railway network has rather a lot of 100+ year old bridges in it, along with some less ancient but still pretty old signalling equipment. (extremely high detail PDF on costs: http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/4933/toc-benchmarking-report-2012.pdf http://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/4933/toc-bench...)
- frereubu 9y ago
  That (plane operating costs > rail operating costs) may not be the case when you take into account the cost of maintaining the physical infrastructure (hundreds of miles of railroad) compared to that of airports (a few hundred metres of tarmac).
  - 9y ago

cjrp 9y ago

Part of the problem is that you can't have "real" competition, e.g. two train companies can't operate competing franchises on the same line, at the same time. I get terrible service and pay high fares on my Southern Railways route, but I can't opt to use a different carrier without moving house. But if my broadband provider decides to raise their prices by 5% next year, I can move to a different provider with a single phone call and a few minutes of downtime.

Larrikin 9y ago
Most people in the country can not realistically switch internet providers. Even when you have a choice you're often limited to two.
- lhopki01 9y ago
  Which country? If you have a phone line to your house you can pick between more than 2. Under what circumstances do most people only have a choice of two.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Switching to DSL is not a realistic option when most of the country has broadband.
    - lhopki01 9y ago
      Again which country are you talking about? The majority of UK broadband is ADSL2+. There is cable in some areas but not all. In all areas with phone lines there are multiple providers giving around 20Mb/s. They all use the same phone lines because of local loop unbundling. In areas with fibre to the cabinet there are again multiple providers all using the same fibre. The only service in the UK that doesn't have local loop unbundling is cable.
      - arethuza 9y ago
        "In all areas with phone lines there are multiple providers giving around 20Mb/s." I don't know about the rest of the UK but I don't think that is the case in Scotland - once you are any distance from a city or town the speeds can drop dramatically and that's not even in the Highlands or Islands. Certainly when we were looking at houses about a year ago there were quite upmarket new houses in Perthshire that had no broadband at all.

belorn 9y ago

Government maintained track system that lease track access to private companies is problematic system because of several points where that relationship breaks. 1: Rail maintenance dictate quality, but is shared between all competitors. 2: Rail is located on ground owned by the government. There is no practical or legal option to operate a private rail network. 3: Lack of distinguishable features to compete, high barrier to entry, and a limited number of companies create an environment thats prime for oligopolies. High price, low service. In contrast to Internet service providers which: 1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by the back bone network. 2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first. 3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP.

welterde 9y ago
> 1: Quality of service is generally not dictated by the back bone network. If by that you mean that it is not the only thing that matters, then yes. But if the backbone is bottlenecked then of course quality will suffer. > 2: Government tend to grant permission and funding to the first ISP that want to dig into government land to plant cables, but then deny completion afterwards and allow natural monopolies of those that were first. Is that actually the case? Getting a dedicated line between any two buildings tends to be no problem, so why would doing the same on a larger scale be a problem all of a sudden? > 3: Low barrier to entry could allow for many ISP. That's only really possible if the last mile can be leased from either the municipal or some other company (sort of like the government maintained track system). Otherwise the barrier is exactly this last mile, which is the most expensive part of the whole thing (which is also why a lot of small rural ISPs use wireless as last mile access instead of wired connections).

CaptainZapp 9y ago

Virgin Trains at least are nice and if you book well in advance very reasonable deals are to be had. We paid ~42 quid from London to Manchester in first class, one way. Alas we bought the tickets month' in advance and, of course, non-refundable. For shits and giggles I tried to figure out what the same ride costs like when you buy the ticket 30 minutes in advance. And there we come to 280£ each, which is completely ridiculous. It's not that good (2nd ist still ~90quid) Now, don't get me started on Northern. Filthy, Expensive, Clueless and slathered with a heavy dose of disorganisation. I think you can honestly say that privatizing trains in the UK was an experiment going horribly wrong.