5 ms·

This is incorrect. The biggest accidents - Potters Bar, Hatfield, Southall - happened in the years immediately after privatisation, before passenger numbers had

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/13/most-of-great-britains-major-rail-operators-are-back-in-public-hands-is-it-working 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.

xnorswap 1y ago
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/4/1/15/7029744?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/jrssig/article-abstract/4/1/15/7029... but I don't have access.
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  It says there’s no evidence for that hypothesis.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- graemep 1y ago
  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.1740-9713.2007.00213.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j....
  - croes 1y ago
    > as measured by accidents Suspiciously specific denial. What about other metrics?
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      Like what? Accidents are the only source of danger in the system.
      - nandomrumber 1y ago
        Accidents aren’t a cause of danger, they’re the result of it.
        thaumasiotes 1y ago
        That is meaningless nonsense.
      - alwa 1y ago
        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.
        1y ago
LexiMax 1y ago
> 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?
dash2 1y ago
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_British_Rail#/media/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2023.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
- buellerbueller 1y ago
  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.
  - dash2 1y ago
    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.
    - buellerbueller 1y ago
      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.
      - dash2 1y ago
        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.
fransje26 1y ago
> 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.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  The difficulty is quantifying the relationship between risk and organizational knowledge. Otherwise bloated, inefficient companies look the same as those retaining institutional knowledge.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > 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).
  - Ekaros 1y ago
    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.
  - deanishe 1y ago
    I don't think you can make management take a long-term view when shareholders have a short-term one, tbh.
card_zero 1y ago
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 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.
Aloisius 1y ago
> 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).
- dijit 1y ago
  > 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.
  - razakel 1y ago
    She also stole a bank.
Reason077 1y ago
> ”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.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
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.

xnorswap 1y ago

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/4/1/15/7029744?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://academic.oup.com/jrssig/article-abstract/4/1/15/7029... but I don't have access.

selimthegrim 1y ago
It says there’s no evidence for that hypothesis.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
graemep 1y ago
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.1740-9713.2007.00213.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j....
- croes 1y ago
  > as measured by accidents Suspiciously specific denial. What about other metrics?
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    Like what? Accidents are the only source of danger in the system.
    - nandomrumber 1y ago
      Accidents aren’t a cause of danger, they’re the result of it.
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        That is meaningless nonsense.
    - alwa 1y ago
      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.
      - 1y ago

LexiMax 1y ago

> 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?

dash2 1y ago

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_British_Rail#/media/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2023.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

buellerbueller 1y ago
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.
- dash2 1y ago
  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.
  - buellerbueller 1y ago
    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.
    - dash2 1y ago
      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.

fransje26 1y ago

> 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.

ethbr1 1y ago
The difficulty is quantifying the relationship between risk and organizational knowledge. Otherwise bloated, inefficient companies look the same as those retaining institutional knowledge.
palmotea 1y ago
> 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).
- Ekaros 1y ago
  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.
- deanishe 1y ago
  I don't think you can make management take a long-term view when shareholders have a short-term one, tbh.

card_zero 1y ago

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 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.

Aloisius 1y ago

> 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).

dijit 1y ago
> 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.
- razakel 1y ago
  She also stole a bank.

Reason077 1y ago

> ”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.

johnnyanmac 1y ago

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.