5 ms·

I never understood why trains are so expensive in England: when I lived in Bristol I liked to spend time in Bath, it's just a ~10 minutes ride but it costed 10

by pera 3y ago

I never understood why trains are so expensive in England: when I lived in Bristol I liked to spend time in Bath, it's just a ~10 minutes ride but it costed 10 pounds each way if I remember correctly... but at least you could bring your bike for free :p

philipwhiuk 3y ago
Simple, they're run by European train operators to subsidise their national networks.
- williamdclt 3y ago
  > to subsidise their national networks Do you have a source? That's an extraordinary claim, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in Nigel Farage's bag of lies
  - domh 3y ago
    Here's one article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-all-british-train-lines-are-now-owned-by-other-eu-countries/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-a... I believe it's a little out of date now, as some of the lines have been renationalised due to failures of the private sector.
  - drcongo 3y ago
    It's not an EU-bash, it's true. We sold off the railways to private companies, most of which are actually the nationalised rail operators of other countries.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    "to subsidise their national networks" is a framing, but "for profit" is the simple truth of train operators in a privatized system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriva_UK_Trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriva_UK_Trains : subsidiary of DB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2c : subsidiary of Trenitalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_West_Coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_West_Coast : part owned by Trenitalia And so on. (Don't forget that the real profit ends up with the "train landlords", the ROSCOs: https://www.leasinglife.com/features/who-owns-the-trains-roscos-and-repatriated-profits/?cf-view https://www.leasinglife.com/features/who-owns-the-trains-ros... ; all of them are parented in Luxembourg for tax reasons)
  - dspillett 3y ago
    It is effectively true. Many European firms own chunks of the rail franchises in the UK and charge a shed load more than their local rail services are able to. Similar to the power franchises with the likes of EDF owning a large stake and charging a lot more here than they can get away with in France. It isn't an EU thing, though it has at times been something Farage and his ilk have banged on about as if it is an EU thing, it is the way the Tories setup the privatisation of the railways (running them into the ground first as part of making the case for taking them away from the public purse (which it isn't as there are still significant subsidies involved)).
    - blibble 3y ago
      > it is the way the Tories setup the privatisation of the railways which they did to implement... EU Directive 91/440 ("First Railway Package") yes, the UK tended to gold plate EU regs, but the spark was the EU
- pera 3y ago
  Bristol <-> Bath is GWR, which is owned and operated by the British company FirstGroup; they're mostly known for First Bus but they do trains too.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Because the government decided to stop subsidising the railways. Everywhere you see very cheap train fares it's because they are subsidised.
- willyt 3y ago
  Also in the UK the way the railway system is set up is incredibly inefficient and bureaucratic so it costs us a lot more to run our system and build improvements than comparable EU countries. The railways were privatised for ideological reasons seemingly by people who didn't actually understand free markets. The privatisation was done in way that generated a lot of complicated contractual interfaces between a network of various private companies most of which can only make a profit with government subsidy. As Boeing is finding out now with the 737 max and their Spirit subcontractor, every time you need to organise something across a contractual boundary, like who's responsible for making sure the doors don't fall off your aeroplane, it adds a lot of cost and time in contract negotiations, paperwork, inspections and inflexibility if you want to enforce what you have asked the other party to do and to understand what still remains your responsibility. Therefore when you go to a subcontractor for something you try to make sure it is very clearly defined what they are responsible for. For example, when an architect designs a skyscraper, they will try to design the cladding in a way that makes sure that watertightness is solely the responsibility of the one cladding subcontractor. If it leaks they are on the hook, simple. If you create complicated interfaces between systems then subcontractors can get out of responsibility for problems by blaming each other or the design of the interface. So back to the railways. The government specifies where, when and how many seats a train service should have, they let contracts to train operating companies who then pay another (now government owned after it went bankrupt) company, Network Rail, to access the track. These train operating companies don't own the trains, they lease them from one of three other government created private (and now highly profitable) companies that provide all rolling stock. The train operating companies are generally responsible for light maintenance while the leasing companies are responsible for heavy maintenance. The train operating companies also provide staff for stations and branding but they don't own or maintain the stations although they are responsible for some maintenance and keeping them clean (or they used to be, it's complicated). All the money for this comes from the government as subsidy and from fare revenue paid to the train operating companies through a central clearing house. Train fares are for the most part dictated by government. Train operating companies have a little bit of freedom to sell discounted tickets to fill spare capacity, but there isn't really any on our main intercity routes and on commuter routes when people need to travel so most people are paying the government capped fares. Here's an example of why this system is crazy. If we want to upgrade a rail line to electronic moving block signalling to increase the number of trains that can run per hour there are negotiations between the department of transport, the track owner, all the train operating companies that run on that route and their leasing companies about who is paying for the equipment to be fitted to the track and the trains, the specification to make it all compatible, when this will happen and who is responsible if things go wrong. On a complicated route like the West Coast mainline, this could involve multiparty negotiations between say 10 operators, 4 leasing companies, network rail and the department of transport. It could involve hardware and software modifications to more than 20 different types of train, some of which are up to 40 years old. Guess who is actually paying for all this anyway? The taxpayer and government dictated fares from rail passengers. There is no real free market incentive operating anywhere here to drive cost efficiencies in providing these modifications and all these negotiations need to be documented, have responsibility assigned and have procedures agreed. Guess who you need to do this? Lots of corporate lawyers... Guess how long this takes, fucking ages. That is why we have a system where a ~350 mile journey from London to Glasgow takes more than twice as long and typically costs more than twice as much for half the legroom compared to a ~350 mile journey from Paris to Bordeaux. A train network is like the mechanism of a clock, the trains are like the teeth on the cogs; they have a place they should be and they need to move in sync with perfectly with each other. We've designed a system that makes organising this insanely complicated with no overall coordinated strategy for improvements. A densely populated country like ours can't function properly without an efficient train network to allow its workforce to be flexible and move around easily and it affects our productivity and our ability to remain competitive globally. </rant ends> Edit: corrected missing word
Mvandenbergh 3y ago
There's a policy decision to cover as much as possible of the operating costs of the network from fares rather than government funding. The operating costs of UK trains per passenger-km is actually pretty competitive to European comparators but many countries fund a large part of the operating costs of their train networks from general taxation.
secretsatan 3y ago
I'm so disappointed every time I go back there, and the bloody tickets now, ffs, it shouldn't be like air travel, the whole thing was setup by someone who's never used public transport.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The whole thing was set up by people who don't like public transport. They don't like public anything. They don't want the peasants to have nice things, because only extra-special wealthy people should have nice things. The rail network was cut right back in the 60s by the then transport minister, who happened to have a large share in the corporation building out the motorway network. And so on. Completely dysfunctional politics. Utterly unsuited to the 21st century.
arethuza 3y ago
My commute into Edinburgh is about 35 mins each way by train and it's £9.60 for a return (reduced for a bit because of a subsidy by the Scottish Government) normal price is about £15.00.
- octopusRex 3y ago
  I'm in the US. We wanted a commuter train in my city - instead we got a very expensive toll lane built by a Spanish company. The tolls are so expensive by the mile that only the wealthy or those with a business that can write them off as an expense use the lane. If the company doesn't make enough, our taxes have to pay for the shortfall.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    I actually like my commute into Edinburgh - it's very scenic, you go over the Forth Bridge and I always get a seat. There was a while when the trains were less reliable but since the Scottish government took over direct management of the rail company things seem a lot better.
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    Is this Dallas or Houston?
    - octopusRex 3y ago
      Piedmont of NC... When I visited Dallas, I found it very similar.
petercooper 3y ago
Public transport in the UK is trapped in a vicious cycle. The system is poor, so people buy cars, which means fewer people use the system, which means less investment, which means the system gets even worse, so more people buy cars. Despite all its ills, driving is, for enough people, a more pleasant experience than tackling strikes, standing on a train for two hours, or being unable to travel at certain times at all. I have to go on a cross country journey this Sunday which would suit the use of the train, except there are none at all on my section of the main line early in the morning, so I shall drive all the way into London. The data may make it look as if no-one needs or wants to use the train early on a Sunday, except we might, if we had the option.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  More people use trains than in the 1990s.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    More people have cars too though. Working on gut here rather than having checked any figures, but I'd wager that the proportion of rail journeys compared to car/bus journeys, for any given distance long/med/short, has fallen.
    - pmyteh 3y ago
      I thought this was an interesting question, so I looked it up. I don't have figures going back to the 1990s, but I've looked at the DfT's dataset on modal share NTS0409 [1] which has data 2002-2018. Looking at number of trips/head, surface rail was 13 in 2002, rose to a pre-pandemic peak of 22 in 2018 and fell back to 15 in 2022. Bus (London + non-London local + long-distance) was 74, 48, and 37 respectively; motoring (car driver + car passenger + motorbike + taxi) was 694, 614, 512. Overall was 1074, 986, 862. So rail had a modal share of 1.2%, 2.2%, and 1.7% in 2002, 2018 and 2022. The distance measure looks similar for rail: 482, 683, 493, from 7193, 6530, 5373. Modal share 6.7%, 10.5%, 9.2%. (I haven't done separate sums for buses and motoring. So at least since 2002, it looks like rail has had a small but growing modal share of a steadily declining travel market, until disrupted by Covid to a place below peak but still considerably ahead of where it started. Caveats: I haven't included the tube, and these data don't disambiguate light rail systems from 'other' (including flights). Rail remains dominated (like bus travel) by London & South East commuting, at least in number of trip terms. [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-modal-comparisons#mode-share https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-m...
jen20 3y ago
Indeed, Bath to Oldfield Park was (is?) the most expensive train journey on a per-mile basis possible in the UK.
- walthamstow 3y ago
  I always thought it was Covent Garden to Leicester Square on the underground. It's about 250 metres.
  - jen20 3y ago
    Yes, seems that my info there is well out of date (though when I last lived in the UK, the underground is on a different fare regime).
    - walthamstow 3y ago
      You may well be correct anyway to be honest, people usually consider trains and underground as different things, and the underground is a bit of a cheat here because the stations are so close.
sambeau 3y ago
The British Rail system is so ridiculously over-complicated, my only conclusion is that it is deliberately designed to add as many layers of profit and obfuscation as possible. For instance, Southern Railway is owned by Govia Thameslink Railway, which is part of Govia which also operates Gatwick Express, Great Northern and Thameslink services. However, Govia is a partnership between the Go-Ahead Group and Keolis. Keolis is a French transportation company owned by SNCF, the French national railway, and CDPQ (a crown company of Canada). Go-Ahead is owned by Globalvia, a Spanish multinational transport infrastructure company, and Kinetic Group (formerly known as AATS Group) which is an Australian-based multinational bus company. Globalvia are owned by OPTrust, one of Canada's largest pension funds; PFZW, the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands; and USS, a large UK Pension scheme. Kinetic Group are also owned by OPTrust, but also by Foresight Group Holdings plc a British private equity and venture capital business, supposedly focused on clean energy generation and associated infrastructure (*cough* Go-Ahead spends £100 million a year on Diesel *cough*). Now, try to imagine how many small subsidiaries those companies have where transfer-pricing can occur and how many layers of profit are being extracted. France's SNCF trains are run by SNCF (owned by the French Government) who also do all the track and maintenance. Germany's Deutsche Bahn (owned by the German Government) runs Germany's trains. Deutsche Bahn also own Arriva and were nearly banned by the UK government for how badly they ran the trains in the north of England (spoiler: they weren't). Avanti West Coast are part owned by Trenitalia, who are mostly owned by the Italian Government. Trenitalia also owns c2c who run the London, Tilbury and Southend franchise. The northern railways were run by a succession of similarly named companies before being returned to the UK Government as operator of fast resort. The whole thing is a tangled mess of the worst kind of vampire capitalism: sucking up subsidies, bleeding companies dry by overloading them with debt, providing terrible service, then handing the drained husk back to the government once they've bled them to death. I've concluded that the private companies that replaced the UK publicly owned companies are run to be a front for borrowing money and sucking up subsidies to pay to shareholders. The train companies are no better than the water companies, though they seem to be better at obfuscating what they are doing. It's the same formula over and over again: you borrow; pay as much of it as you can out to shareholders; run a minimal service to bring in just enough money to pay the debt payments; invest the minimum to allow you to keep operating and if possible, you do it through transfer pricing with other companies in the parent companies' structure. When your creditors eventually catch up with you, you go cap in hand to the government looking for a bailout and if that fails, you hand the franchise back before forming a new company to bid again. Southern Water, for instance, uses 1/3 each bill to pay debt payments. Even Network Rail, who are owned by the British Government, are paying 1/3 of their income to service their debts. This is very similar to the "hollowed-out firms" of the UK who distribute more to shareholders than they generate in net income—1/5 of FTSE 350 paid out on average 178% of their net earnings after tax in 2010-1019. It's all a con and we are chumps. Further reading This unfathomable financial overview of the rail system in England: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financial-overview-of-the-rail-system-in-England.pdf https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financia... This summary of who owns the British Railways: https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways This article about water profits: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/dec/18/how-much-of-your-water-bill-is-swallowed-up-by-company-debt-interactive https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/... Hollowed-out firms: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Transfer%20pricing%20and%20artificial%20profit%20generation%20AL%2019%202%2021%20FINAL.pdf https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Tran...
gandalfian 3y ago
<I never understood why trains are so expensive in England> Given passenger numbers increasing in the last couple of decades have given trains huge economies scale reducing their costs and yet fares go up, public subsides go up and train companies bust. The only answer I can think of is UK trains are expensive because we are really bad at running them.
rjh29 3y ago
The Bristol to Bath journey is the UK's most expensive ticket by £/km. (Although it's £10 for a return if both trips are on the same day)

by pera 3y ago

philipwhiuk 3y ago

Simple, they're run by European train operators to subsidise their national networks.

williamdclt 3y ago
> to subsidise their national networks Do you have a source? That's an extraordinary claim, the sort of thing I'd expect to find in Nigel Farage's bag of lies
- domh 3y ago
  Here's one article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-all-british-train-lines-are-now-owned-by-other-eu-countries/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-a... I believe it's a little out of date now, as some of the lines have been renationalised due to failures of the private sector.
- drcongo 3y ago
  It's not an EU-bash, it's true. We sold off the railways to private companies, most of which are actually the nationalised rail operators of other countries.
- pjc50 3y ago
  "to subsidise their national networks" is a framing, but "for profit" is the simple truth of train operators in a privatized system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriva_UK_Trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arriva_UK_Trains : subsidiary of DB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C2c : subsidiary of Trenitalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_West_Coast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_West_Coast : part owned by Trenitalia And so on. (Don't forget that the real profit ends up with the "train landlords", the ROSCOs: https://www.leasinglife.com/features/who-owns-the-trains-roscos-and-repatriated-profits/?cf-view https://www.leasinglife.com/features/who-owns-the-trains-ros... ; all of them are parented in Luxembourg for tax reasons)
- dspillett 3y ago
  It is effectively true. Many European firms own chunks of the rail franchises in the UK and charge a shed load more than their local rail services are able to. Similar to the power franchises with the likes of EDF owning a large stake and charging a lot more here than they can get away with in France. It isn't an EU thing, though it has at times been something Farage and his ilk have banged on about as if it is an EU thing, it is the way the Tories setup the privatisation of the railways (running them into the ground first as part of making the case for taking them away from the public purse (which it isn't as there are still significant subsidies involved)).
  - blibble 3y ago
    > it is the way the Tories setup the privatisation of the railways which they did to implement... EU Directive 91/440 ("First Railway Package") yes, the UK tended to gold plate EU regs, but the spark was the EU
pera 3y ago
Bristol <-> Bath is GWR, which is owned and operated by the British company FirstGroup; they're mostly known for First Bus but they do trains too.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

mytailorisrich 3y ago

Because the government decided to stop subsidising the railways. Everywhere you see very cheap train fares it's because they are subsidised.

willyt 3y ago
Also in the UK the way the railway system is set up is incredibly inefficient and bureaucratic so it costs us a lot more to run our system and build improvements than comparable EU countries. The railways were privatised for ideological reasons seemingly by people who didn't actually understand free markets. The privatisation was done in way that generated a lot of complicated contractual interfaces between a network of various private companies most of which can only make a profit with government subsidy. As Boeing is finding out now with the 737 max and their Spirit subcontractor, every time you need to organise something across a contractual boundary, like who's responsible for making sure the doors don't fall off your aeroplane, it adds a lot of cost and time in contract negotiations, paperwork, inspections and inflexibility if you want to enforce what you have asked the other party to do and to understand what still remains your responsibility. Therefore when you go to a subcontractor for something you try to make sure it is very clearly defined what they are responsible for. For example, when an architect designs a skyscraper, they will try to design the cladding in a way that makes sure that watertightness is solely the responsibility of the one cladding subcontractor. If it leaks they are on the hook, simple. If you create complicated interfaces between systems then subcontractors can get out of responsibility for problems by blaming each other or the design of the interface. So back to the railways. The government specifies where, when and how many seats a train service should have, they let contracts to train operating companies who then pay another (now government owned after it went bankrupt) company, Network Rail, to access the track. These train operating companies don't own the trains, they lease them from one of three other government created private (and now highly profitable) companies that provide all rolling stock. The train operating companies are generally responsible for light maintenance while the leasing companies are responsible for heavy maintenance. The train operating companies also provide staff for stations and branding but they don't own or maintain the stations although they are responsible for some maintenance and keeping them clean (or they used to be, it's complicated). All the money for this comes from the government as subsidy and from fare revenue paid to the train operating companies through a central clearing house. Train fares are for the most part dictated by government. Train operating companies have a little bit of freedom to sell discounted tickets to fill spare capacity, but there isn't really any on our main intercity routes and on commuter routes when people need to travel so most people are paying the government capped fares. Here's an example of why this system is crazy. If we want to upgrade a rail line to electronic moving block signalling to increase the number of trains that can run per hour there are negotiations between the department of transport, the track owner, all the train operating companies that run on that route and their leasing companies about who is paying for the equipment to be fitted to the track and the trains, the specification to make it all compatible, when this will happen and who is responsible if things go wrong. On a complicated route like the West Coast mainline, this could involve multiparty negotiations between say 10 operators, 4 leasing companies, network rail and the department of transport. It could involve hardware and software modifications to more than 20 different types of train, some of which are up to 40 years old. Guess who is actually paying for all this anyway? The taxpayer and government dictated fares from rail passengers. There is no real free market incentive operating anywhere here to drive cost efficiencies in providing these modifications and all these negotiations need to be documented, have responsibility assigned and have procedures agreed. Guess who you need to do this? Lots of corporate lawyers... Guess how long this takes, fucking ages. That is why we have a system where a ~350 mile journey from London to Glasgow takes more than twice as long and typically costs more than twice as much for half the legroom compared to a ~350 mile journey from Paris to Bordeaux. A train network is like the mechanism of a clock, the trains are like the teeth on the cogs; they have a place they should be and they need to move in sync with perfectly with each other. We've designed a system that makes organising this insanely complicated with no overall coordinated strategy for improvements. A densely populated country like ours can't function properly without an efficient train network to allow its workforce to be flexible and move around easily and it affects our productivity and our ability to remain competitive globally. </rant ends> Edit: corrected missing word

Mvandenbergh 3y ago

There's a policy decision to cover as much as possible of the operating costs of the network from fares rather than government funding. The operating costs of UK trains per passenger-km is actually pretty competitive to European comparators but many countries fund a large part of the operating costs of their train networks from general taxation.

secretsatan 3y ago

I'm so disappointed every time I go back there, and the bloody tickets now, ffs, it shouldn't be like air travel, the whole thing was setup by someone who's never used public transport.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The whole thing was set up by people who don't like public transport. They don't like public anything. They don't want the peasants to have nice things, because only extra-special wealthy people should have nice things. The rail network was cut right back in the 60s by the then transport minister, who happened to have a large share in the corporation building out the motorway network. And so on. Completely dysfunctional politics. Utterly unsuited to the 21st century.

arethuza 3y ago

My commute into Edinburgh is about 35 mins each way by train and it's £9.60 for a return (reduced for a bit because of a subsidy by the Scottish Government) normal price is about £15.00.

octopusRex 3y ago
I'm in the US. We wanted a commuter train in my city - instead we got a very expensive toll lane built by a Spanish company. The tolls are so expensive by the mile that only the wealthy or those with a business that can write them off as an expense use the lane. If the company doesn't make enough, our taxes have to pay for the shortfall.
- arethuza 3y ago
  I actually like my commute into Edinburgh - it's very scenic, you go over the Forth Bridge and I always get a seat. There was a while when the trains were less reliable but since the Scottish government took over direct management of the rail company things seem a lot better.
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Is this Dallas or Houston?
  - octopusRex 3y ago
    Piedmont of NC... When I visited Dallas, I found it very similar.

petercooper 3y ago

Public transport in the UK is trapped in a vicious cycle. The system is poor, so people buy cars, which means fewer people use the system, which means less investment, which means the system gets even worse, so more people buy cars. Despite all its ills, driving is, for enough people, a more pleasant experience than tackling strikes, standing on a train for two hours, or being unable to travel at certain times at all. I have to go on a cross country journey this Sunday which would suit the use of the train, except there are none at all on my section of the main line early in the morning, so I shall drive all the way into London. The data may make it look as if no-one needs or wants to use the train early on a Sunday, except we might, if we had the option.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
More people use trains than in the 1990s.
- dspillett 3y ago
  More people have cars too though. Working on gut here rather than having checked any figures, but I'd wager that the proportion of rail journeys compared to car/bus journeys, for any given distance long/med/short, has fallen.
  - pmyteh 3y ago
    I thought this was an interesting question, so I looked it up. I don't have figures going back to the 1990s, but I've looked at the DfT's dataset on modal share NTS0409 [1] which has data 2002-2018. Looking at number of trips/head, surface rail was 13 in 2002, rose to a pre-pandemic peak of 22 in 2018 and fell back to 15 in 2022. Bus (London + non-London local + long-distance) was 74, 48, and 37 respectively; motoring (car driver + car passenger + motorbike + taxi) was 694, 614, 512. Overall was 1074, 986, 862. So rail had a modal share of 1.2%, 2.2%, and 1.7% in 2002, 2018 and 2022. The distance measure looks similar for rail: 482, 683, 493, from 7193, 6530, 5373. Modal share 6.7%, 10.5%, 9.2%. (I haven't done separate sums for buses and motoring. So at least since 2002, it looks like rail has had a small but growing modal share of a steadily declining travel market, until disrupted by Covid to a place below peak but still considerably ahead of where it started. Caveats: I haven't included the tube, and these data don't disambiguate light rail systems from 'other' (including flights). Rail remains dominated (like bus travel) by London & South East commuting, at least in number of trip terms. [1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-modal-comparisons#mode-share https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/tsgb01-m...

jen20 3y ago

Indeed, Bath to Oldfield Park was (is?) the most expensive train journey on a per-mile basis possible in the UK.

walthamstow 3y ago
I always thought it was Covent Garden to Leicester Square on the underground. It's about 250 metres.
- jen20 3y ago
  Yes, seems that my info there is well out of date (though when I last lived in the UK, the underground is on a different fare regime).
  - walthamstow 3y ago
    You may well be correct anyway to be honest, people usually consider trains and underground as different things, and the underground is a bit of a cheat here because the stations are so close.

sambeau 3y ago

The British Rail system is so ridiculously over-complicated, my only conclusion is that it is deliberately designed to add as many layers of profit and obfuscation as possible. For instance, Southern Railway is owned by Govia Thameslink Railway, which is part of Govia which also operates Gatwick Express, Great Northern and Thameslink services. However, Govia is a partnership between the Go-Ahead Group and Keolis. Keolis is a French transportation company owned by SNCF, the French national railway, and CDPQ (a crown company of Canada). Go-Ahead is owned by Globalvia, a Spanish multinational transport infrastructure company, and Kinetic Group (formerly known as AATS Group) which is an Australian-based multinational bus company. Globalvia are owned by OPTrust, one of Canada's largest pension funds; PFZW, the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands; and USS, a large UK Pension scheme. Kinetic Group are also owned by OPTrust, but also by Foresight Group Holdings plc a British private equity and venture capital business, supposedly focused on clean energy generation and associated infrastructure (*cough* Go-Ahead spends £100 million a year on Diesel *cough*). Now, try to imagine how many small subsidiaries those companies have where transfer-pricing can occur and how many layers of profit are being extracted. France's SNCF trains are run by SNCF (owned by the French Government) who also do all the track and maintenance. Germany's Deutsche Bahn (owned by the German Government) runs Germany's trains. Deutsche Bahn also own Arriva and were nearly banned by the UK government for how badly they ran the trains in the north of England (spoiler: they weren't). Avanti West Coast are part owned by Trenitalia, who are mostly owned by the Italian Government. Trenitalia also owns c2c who run the London, Tilbury and Southend franchise. The northern railways were run by a succession of similarly named companies before being returned to the UK Government as operator of fast resort. The whole thing is a tangled mess of the worst kind of vampire capitalism: sucking up subsidies, bleeding companies dry by overloading them with debt, providing terrible service, then handing the drained husk back to the government once they've bled them to death. I've concluded that the private companies that replaced the UK publicly owned companies are run to be a front for borrowing money and sucking up subsidies to pay to shareholders. The train companies are no better than the water companies, though they seem to be better at obfuscating what they are doing. It's the same formula over and over again: you borrow; pay as much of it as you can out to shareholders; run a minimal service to bring in just enough money to pay the debt payments; invest the minimum to allow you to keep operating and if possible, you do it through transfer pricing with other companies in the parent companies' structure. When your creditors eventually catch up with you, you go cap in hand to the government looking for a bailout and if that fails, you hand the franchise back before forming a new company to bid again. Southern Water, for instance, uses 1/3 each bill to pay debt payments. Even Network Rail, who are owned by the British Government, are paying 1/3 of their income to service their debts. This is very similar to the "hollowed-out firms" of the UK who distribute more to shareholders than they generate in net income—1/5 of FTSE 350 paid out on average 178% of their net earnings after tax in 2010-1019. It's all a con and we are chumps. Further reading This unfathomable financial overview of the rail system in England: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financial-overview-of-the-rail-system-in-England.pdf https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financia... This summary of who owns the British Railways: https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways This article about water profits: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/dec/18/how-much-of-your-water-bill-is-swallowed-up-by-company-debt-interactive https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/... Hollowed-out firms: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Transfer%20pricing%20and%20artificial%20profit%20generation%20AL%2019%202%2021%20FINAL.pdf https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Tran...

gandalfian 3y ago

<I never understood why trains are so expensive in England> Given passenger numbers increasing in the last couple of decades have given trains huge economies scale reducing their costs and yet fares go up, public subsides go up and train companies bust. The only answer I can think of is UK trains are expensive because we are really bad at running them.

rjh29 3y ago

The Bristol to Bath journey is the UK's most expensive ticket by £/km. (Although it's £10 for a return if both trips are on the same day)