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I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it

by wtcactus 11mo ago

I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it it was quite fine. Lots of trains and they arrived on time (and they were fairly clean). It was much, much better - by any account of imagination - than the public railway we have here in Portugal. And I’m guessing they cost the taxpayers a lot less too (but that part I didn’t check).

drcongo 11mo ago
(Nearly?) all of the the "private" rail operators in the UK are actually the national operators of other countries - Germany, France, Italy and I think Netherlands. The national rail operators mostly know how to run a decent service, but in the UK passengers pay multiples of what those operators charge in their home country and the service is definitely not as good.
- martinald 11mo ago
  You are aware National Express (UK company) operates a lot of train routes in NRW in Germany, too? Equally Ariva (UK company, was owned by DB, now UK) in the Netherlands? The EU basically mandates privatisation of railways. They require track and trains to be run by different operators (DB InfraGO in Germany, ProRail in NL, etc) to the train operators. They then require (nearly?) all passenger rail operations be available to private companies to bid on. The EU is taking the Netherlands to the ECJ over the fact the Netherlands won't allow it: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1648 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_... Also the EU requires open access operators access to said separate tracks. That's why you're seeing all the competition in high speed routes (especially) in the EU. They have to pay a track access fee but are free to request to run whatever route it is. The last point (well, all are really) is a big problem for many national operators as they make a lot of revenue from 'premium' intercity operations that cross subsidies the local trains. A lot of that "margin" is going to be eroded by the competition.
  - drcongo 11mo ago
    Technically Arriva is now American owned.
phobotics 11mo ago
I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country. There's some annoying things like having to go to a hub to go back the way you came sometimes. But without a sprawling expensive network that's somewhat unavoidable. And obviously some lines are worse than others re delays and cancellations. Most complaints in the UK are about cost of tickets. They are very valid complaints imo, the cost of getting a train in this country can be absurd. There would be a really positive attitude towards train travel in the UK and our rail system if it wasn't trying to bankrupt you every time you use it.
- graemep 11mo ago
  I prefer rail but public transport is very limited where I live, in Cheshire, and it is very expensive. It is fast for long distances, but it is a lot more expensive than driving, especially if you have more than one person in the car.
- hexbin010 11mo ago
  > I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country In the South East, or if you're employer is paying for 1st class, definitely agree.
jermaustin1 11mo ago
I also go there rather frequently (much more before covid, though), and agreed, compared to the rail I'm using in the US (NYC, Boston, Amtrak), it is pretty good, but I've had some VERY bad experiences on it. As a whole though, at least out of major cities London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, the rail system is great.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
pm215 11mo ago
I think there's a couple of things about typical foreign experiences of UK public transport to note (some of this may not apply to you in particular, of course): (1) Most tourists visit largely London and its near surroundings. Public transport in (and to) London is generally much better than other parts of the country. (2) A lot of the downsides don't manifest if you're a relatively infrequent user and you're largely travelling at off-peak times. As a UK resident who doesn't commute on the railway, this also includes me -- my experience of trains is generally good because I travel at quieter times and I don't travel so often that unreliability is a regular experience. (3) If you ignore the costs (by not being a taxpayer or because you're less price sensitive for infrequent travel and especially for holiday travel), then you're ignoring the large part of the argument which is "this privatization had massive inefficiencies and costs". FWIW, the UK government pays about half of the 25 billion/year cost of the "operational rail industry" (source: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/ https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-indust...). I couldn't find the equivalent stats for Portugal with a quick search, so I don't know how that compares.
- tialaramex 11mo ago
  London is particularly notable because it escaped forced privatisation of e.g. bus services. In London all the buses are red and work the same. You do not care whether your bus is a "Big Corp" bus or a "Tiny New Outfit" bus, they're both red, they both take Oyster, or credit cards or whatever, they're the same, the bus service is controlled by Transpot for London which responds to an elected Mayor. In most UK cities by contrast there are multiple, privately owned bus companies. The local government can try to persuade them to run services it wants but they don't have to, and indeed if the local government won't do what they want they can just fold up the service and go home, too bad, the government have to contract with a for-profit business and if nobody wants to do it then too bad no buses. Until relatively recently (things have improved in Scotland especially and now increasingly in English cities) it would have been illegal to do what London does anywhere else. My city really wanted a single card that works on a bus or a train anywhere in the city, they couldn't persuade anybody involved to actually do that and the cards went away without ever being actually useful.
haritha-j 11mo ago
the service is often plagued by strikes, but the real problem is the cost. In what universe does it make sense for the train to be more expensive than a single person driving?
- hardlianotion 11mo ago
  Without commenting on the sense thing, the user is being asked to pay for upgrading the infrastructure of the railways.
- Symbiote 11mo ago
  Rail travel is one of the few things that's cheaper now I live in Denmark compared to the UK. A ticket for the next direct train (16:42, peak time) from Copenhagen to Århus is 449kr, £53. That's 300km in 3 hours. London to Manchester is the same distance, 2¼ hours, and £193.
  - wtcactus 11mo ago
    Hum, there are a lot of trains from London to Manchester today for between 42-47£. Those do take 3h45m. But there are also trains for £80 that take 2h11m. https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/journey-planner/?type=single&origin=182&destination=115&leavingType=departing&leavingDate=131125&leavingHour=15&leavingMin=15&returnHour=&returnMin=&adults=1&extraTime=0#O https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/journey-planner/?type=single&...
    - Symbiote 11mo ago
      Yes. I didn't see the slow trains, it looks like they were hidden from my search. (Also bear in mind the median income after tax is 50% higher in Denmark.)
      - hexbin010 11mo ago
        > it looks like they were hidden from my search I don't blame you. They do make it VERY hard to find and buy that particular cheaper ticket Ticket websites generally assume you have unlimited funds and want the fastest route, always.
bluehatbrit 11mo ago
I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am). Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average. But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day. They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay. The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet. All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK. Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.
- aembleton 11mo ago
  > Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average. That £8.40 will be £6.30 after claiming the delay repay for 30 minute delay. Only happening 30% of the time so that would work out to £7.77 Still it would be better if they were always on time.
rsynnott 11mo ago
British trains are _terribly_ expensive, and get cancelled a lot, has been my general impression (from next door in Ireland, another country with a notoriously bad rail system, though it is at least cheapish). As someone else mentioned, London (and really urban commuter services in general) are essentially separate; the problems are _primarily_ around the regional/intercity stuff. One specific consequence of the privatisation. Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train. I mean, no-one can tell me that’s a sensible way to run a railway. (Mind you, this still beats Dublin airport, which currently has no rail at all, and under current plans will have _two_ separate rail lines around 2040-2050, and maybe a tram. Though, if that happens, at least the same ticket will work for both…)
- hexbin010 11mo ago
  > Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train. As of June 2025, there is automatic ticket acceptance rules between those operators now in the case of cancellations and disruption, as both Northern and TPE are owned by the DfT. Great British Railways will continue these kind of sensible changes (though not cheaper tickets, that's for sure!)
  - rsynnott 11mo ago
    Huh, this was in August, and there were signs warning _not_ to do that. May’ve been old signs, I suppose.
    - hexbin010 11mo ago
      Oh, yeah, such changes take months or years. I'm sure even today barely half the staff know about the change. Give it another 6 months... The railways in England and Wales are very adversarial. You have to do a lot of research and fight for your rights. It's about maximal revenue-extraction, not a customer-friendly experience.
williamdclt 11mo ago
Mostly repeating what others have said but... Trains get delayed and cancelled very frequently. They leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere because there's a technical issue fairly regularly: it's not a daily occurrence, but it's frequent enough that people will just go "ahhh classic british rail". Trains are often packed, with literally nowhere to sit for hours-long journeys. And this poor quality of service is very expensive. I know adults in their late 20s - early 30s with a fulltime job that choose to take the coach even though it's twice as long, because it's much cheaper. An ex-colleague was living outside of london, and spending £16k a year on train for commuting (you'd expect a big bill, but £16k is insane). I'm sure there's plenty of countries that do worse, and as an infrequent traveller you'd probably be fine, but it's just... not great
hexbin010 11mo ago
Which part of the UK out of curiosity?
- wtcactus 11mo ago
  Around Manchester.

drcongo 11mo ago

(Nearly?) all of the the "private" rail operators in the UK are actually the national operators of other countries - Germany, France, Italy and I think Netherlands. The national rail operators mostly know how to run a decent service, but in the UK passengers pay multiples of what those operators charge in their home country and the service is definitely not as good.

martinald 11mo ago
You are aware National Express (UK company) operates a lot of train routes in NRW in Germany, too? Equally Ariva (UK company, was owned by DB, now UK) in the Netherlands? The EU basically mandates privatisation of railways. They require track and trains to be run by different operators (DB InfraGO in Germany, ProRail in NL, etc) to the train operators. They then require (nearly?) all passenger rail operations be available to private companies to bid on. The EU is taking the Netherlands to the ECJ over the fact the Netherlands won't allow it: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1648 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_... Also the EU requires open access operators access to said separate tracks. That's why you're seeing all the competition in high speed routes (especially) in the EU. They have to pay a track access fee but are free to request to run whatever route it is. The last point (well, all are really) is a big problem for many national operators as they make a lot of revenue from 'premium' intercity operations that cross subsidies the local trains. A lot of that "margin" is going to be eroded by the competition.
- drcongo 11mo ago
  Technically Arriva is now American owned.

phobotics 11mo ago

I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country. There's some annoying things like having to go to a hub to go back the way you came sometimes. But without a sprawling expensive network that's somewhat unavoidable. And obviously some lines are worse than others re delays and cancellations. Most complaints in the UK are about cost of tickets. They are very valid complaints imo, the cost of getting a train in this country can be absurd. There would be a really positive attitude towards train travel in the UK and our rail system if it wasn't trying to bankrupt you every time you use it.

graemep 11mo ago
I prefer rail but public transport is very limited where I live, in Cheshire, and it is very expensive. It is fast for long distances, but it is a lot more expensive than driving, especially if you have more than one person in the car.
hexbin010 11mo ago
> I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country In the South East, or if you're employer is paying for 1st class, definitely agree.

jermaustin1 11mo ago

I also go there rather frequently (much more before covid, though), and agreed, compared to the rail I'm using in the US (NYC, Boston, Amtrak), it is pretty good, but I've had some VERY bad experiences on it. As a whole though, at least out of major cities London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, the rail system is great.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

pm215 11mo ago

I think there's a couple of things about typical foreign experiences of UK public transport to note (some of this may not apply to you in particular, of course): (1) Most tourists visit largely London and its near surroundings. Public transport in (and to) London is generally much better than other parts of the country. (2) A lot of the downsides don't manifest if you're a relatively infrequent user and you're largely travelling at off-peak times. As a UK resident who doesn't commute on the railway, this also includes me -- my experience of trains is generally good because I travel at quieter times and I don't travel so often that unreliability is a regular experience. (3) If you ignore the costs (by not being a taxpayer or because you're less price sensitive for infrequent travel and especially for holiday travel), then you're ignoring the large part of the argument which is "this privatization had massive inefficiencies and costs". FWIW, the UK government pays about half of the 25 billion/year cost of the "operational rail industry" (source: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-industry-finance/ https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-indust...). I couldn't find the equivalent stats for Portugal with a quick search, so I don't know how that compares.

tialaramex 11mo ago
London is particularly notable because it escaped forced privatisation of e.g. bus services. In London all the buses are red and work the same. You do not care whether your bus is a "Big Corp" bus or a "Tiny New Outfit" bus, they're both red, they both take Oyster, or credit cards or whatever, they're the same, the bus service is controlled by Transpot for London which responds to an elected Mayor. In most UK cities by contrast there are multiple, privately owned bus companies. The local government can try to persuade them to run services it wants but they don't have to, and indeed if the local government won't do what they want they can just fold up the service and go home, too bad, the government have to contract with a for-profit business and if nobody wants to do it then too bad no buses. Until relatively recently (things have improved in Scotland especially and now increasingly in English cities) it would have been illegal to do what London does anywhere else. My city really wanted a single card that works on a bus or a train anywhere in the city, they couldn't persuade anybody involved to actually do that and the cards went away without ever being actually useful.

haritha-j 11mo ago

the service is often plagued by strikes, but the real problem is the cost. In what universe does it make sense for the train to be more expensive than a single person driving?

hardlianotion 11mo ago
Without commenting on the sense thing, the user is being asked to pay for upgrading the infrastructure of the railways.
Symbiote 11mo ago
Rail travel is one of the few things that's cheaper now I live in Denmark compared to the UK. A ticket for the next direct train (16:42, peak time) from Copenhagen to Århus is 449kr, £53. That's 300km in 3 hours. London to Manchester is the same distance, 2¼ hours, and £193.
- wtcactus 11mo ago
  Hum, there are a lot of trains from London to Manchester today for between 42-47£. Those do take 3h45m. But there are also trains for £80 that take 2h11m. https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/journey-planner/?type=single&origin=182&destination=115&leavingType=departing&leavingDate=131125&leavingHour=15&leavingMin=15&returnHour=&returnMin=&adults=1&extraTime=0#O https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/journey-planner/?type=single&...
  - Symbiote 11mo ago
    Yes. I didn't see the slow trains, it looks like they were hidden from my search. (Also bear in mind the median income after tax is 50% higher in Denmark.)
    - hexbin010 11mo ago
      > it looks like they were hidden from my search I don't blame you. They do make it VERY hard to find and buy that particular cheaper ticket Ticket websites generally assume you have unlimited funds and want the fastest route, always.

bluehatbrit 11mo ago

I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am). Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average. But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day. They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay. The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet. All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK. Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.

aembleton 11mo ago
> Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average. That £8.40 will be £6.30 after claiming the delay repay for 30 minute delay. Only happening 30% of the time so that would work out to £7.77 Still it would be better if they were always on time.

rsynnott 11mo ago

British trains are _terribly_ expensive, and get cancelled a lot, has been my general impression (from next door in Ireland, another country with a notoriously bad rail system, though it is at least cheapish). As someone else mentioned, London (and really urban commuter services in general) are essentially separate; the problems are _primarily_ around the regional/intercity stuff. One specific consequence of the privatisation. Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train. I mean, no-one can tell me that’s a sensible way to run a railway. (Mind you, this still beats Dublin airport, which currently has no rail at all, and under current plans will have _two_ separate rail lines around 2040-2050, and maybe a tram. Though, if that happens, at least the same ticket will work for both…)

hexbin010 11mo ago
> Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train. As of June 2025, there is automatic ticket acceptance rules between those operators now in the case of cancellations and disruption, as both Northern and TPE are owned by the DfT. Great British Railways will continue these kind of sensible changes (though not cheaper tickets, that's for sure!)
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  Huh, this was in August, and there were signs warning _not_ to do that. May’ve been old signs, I suppose.
  - hexbin010 11mo ago
    Oh, yeah, such changes take months or years. I'm sure even today barely half the staff know about the change. Give it another 6 months... The railways in England and Wales are very adversarial. You have to do a lot of research and fight for your rights. It's about maximal revenue-extraction, not a customer-friendly experience.

williamdclt 11mo ago

Mostly repeating what others have said but... Trains get delayed and cancelled very frequently. They leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere because there's a technical issue fairly regularly: it's not a daily occurrence, but it's frequent enough that people will just go "ahhh classic british rail". Trains are often packed, with literally nowhere to sit for hours-long journeys. And this poor quality of service is very expensive. I know adults in their late 20s - early 30s with a fulltime job that choose to take the coach even though it's twice as long, because it's much cheaper. An ex-colleague was living outside of london, and spending £16k a year on train for commuting (you'd expect a big bill, but £16k is insane). I'm sure there's plenty of countries that do worse, and as an infrequent traveller you'd probably be fine, but it's just... not great

hexbin010 11mo ago

Which part of the UK out of curiosity?

wtcactus 11mo ago
Around Manchester.