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Why Britain has ‘ghost trains’
- bloat 11y agoThen he said, she came from the country, he saw? To which she answered in the affirmative. ‘By Parliamentary, this morning. I came forty mile by Parliamentary this morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon. I walked nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back to-night. That’s pretty well, sir, at my age!’ said the chatty old woman, her eye brightening with exultation. Dickens - Hard Times
- waqf 11y agoThe idiot who, in railway carriages, Scribbles on window panes, We only suffer To ride on a buffer In Parliamentary trains. — W. S. Gilbert, "The Mikado"
- EwanToo 11y agoI think BBC journalists run this story out whenever they're low on other work to do, here's basically the same feature, exactly 3 years ago... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18644343 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18644343
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoIt's not just BBC journalists. I think they learned the technique from HN.
- innguest 11y agoWhich is a shame because this ghost train story isn't as interesting as the real fake jobs story going on in the UK right now (real people working fake jobs). But perhaps the BBC doesn't want to cover that story for some reason.
- WalterBright 11y agoBefore airline deregulation in the US, when routes and schedules and fares were regulated, I often found myself on nearly empty flights. After deregulation, when airlines were free to set routes, schedules and fares, the flights are nearly always packed. Looks like the same situation with British trains. I also recall back in the 70s when the DOE regulated which gas stations got how much gas to sell. The result was a patchwork of gluts and shortages across the US. That ended immediately when Reagan abolished those regulations.
- misterbwong 11y agoYes, but the other side of the coin of airline deregulation is that there fewer routes to smaller airports and/or they are more costly. There is a large fixed cost associated with providing service to each airport and because of this, airlines have decided to either hike up prices to make the route semi-viable or stop service altogether. While this may be good for the airline, it's not necessarily good for the people that are now forced to drive multiple hours to the nearest airport. I would think that something similar would happen if the trains were deregulated.
- WalterBright 11y agoHaving lots of big jets flying 75% empty would mean much higher ticket prices overall. The economics of airliners is such that they need to be full to make money. I don't have figures handy, but airline fares (adjusting for inflation) are much, much lower today than when the government set routes, schedules and fares. The hub and spoke system common today evolved out of the deregulation. Smaller airports are served by small "commuter airlines" today, not big empty jets.
- kevin_thibedeau 11y agoSome bigger airports don't have the luxury of being a hub to any airline and get crappy service as a result. Indianapolis has a nice new facility but you're lucky to get a direct flight from other major cities outside the surrounding region. The few that exist are punitively priced at often 2x the cost of connecting through a neighboring hub.
- te_platt 11y agoIn the late 80s I flew from Santiago, Chile to Antofagasta on a quite nice LAN Chile 737. There were about 10 passengers. One of the best flights I've ever been on. I'm not sure what the need was to the government to keep that flight going or if it's still like that.
- privong 11y agoNowadays a lot of those flights between Santiago and Antofagasta stop in La Serena. When I was on it a few months ago, the flight was full both ways. I assume that flight is important for mining operations, and nowadays for tourism.
- chiph 11y agoIt may be that the plane needed to be in Antofagasta because the return flight was full(er). So a partial ferry flight. I had a flight like that in the late 90's to Minneapolis. The flight crew wouldn't let the few of us sit in the 1st class section. :(
- ISL 11y agoBuried within the article is an argument in support of wilderness: “It has to be one of the maddest places we have both been to,” he says. “No words can describe how isolated this place was.” The closest road was three miles away; the only nearby structures were a shuttered pub and an old windmill. In the American West, Canada, Russia, and myriad places throughout the world, it's not hard to get three miles away from a road. Wild places are good for the soul.
- lfowles 11y agohttp://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/roadless/roadless-usgs.pdf http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/roadless/roadless-usgs.pd... Average Distance to the Nearest Road in the Conterminous United States Surprised to actually find something while checking your claim!
- javert 11y agoThat map is so bad because the "spectrum" of colors goes from lighter to darker to lighter to darker. So it's not much of a spectrum. (Still, thanks for providing the link.)
- ghaff 11y agoThe shading is one problem. I'm also not convinced the logarithmic scaling for the coding is the best approach; it may be but I'd have to see it with a better color scheme. It probably also depends on what point you want to emphasize.
- cdcarter 11y agoAnd why on earth is a map of the US scaled in km?
- jessaustin 11y agoIf it had a pub and a windmill, I expect there was at least a jeep trail running through. Otherwise how would the pub have resupplied or farmers gotten grain to the mill? This would count as a "road" in the parts of North America and Asia you're talking about. Therefore the "three mile" claim is bogus.
- jacalata 11y agoHalf of this article focuses on the tautological notion that since the term ghost train is a made up one with no meaning that nobody in the railways recognises, then it must be about a hidden thing that nobody knows about, and you can tell this is so because nobody knows the term. Even the attempted definition of "so infrequent as to be useless" appears not to fit the headline run, which is once a day six times a week - I know packed commuter lines that are less frequent!
- jon-wood 11y agoIt seems that no one knew the term because the one used in the industry is a Parliamentary Train.
- jloughry 11y agoThinking tactically, rather than strategically, has anyone asked the dispatchers? Rail networks are usually not partitioned (in the graph theory sense); moving equipment around for reasons of wear levelling, capacity, maintenance, replacement, or traffic control might account for some ghost trains. After a major snowstorm, airlines need to reposition equipment to meet schedules; they hate to fly aircraft empty, but they do it. The same reasoning applies to road freight, pipelines, and probably fresh fruit and cut flowers too.
- jcranmer 11y agoThe article is talking about revenue runs whereas the kind of movements you're talking about are non-revenue runs (or deadheading). On non-revenue runs, there's no need to provide service, unlike these ghost trains, where service still needs to be provided even if there is little or no uptake.
- tobylane 11y agoThe main partitioning is franchise which is somewhat tied to the single London terminus they have. Some of the ghost trains, eg Paddinton to Ruislip, cross these boundaries. https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a6/3b/45/a63b45c481bac3afe3589e41bc7fc85b.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a6/3b/45/a63b45c48...
- deckiedan 11y agoAs a Brit, personally, I reckon it's because the train system lost the ball significantly last century. Train tickets now are often more than the cost of petrol to drive across the country. So if you'd spend more on a train ticket, why not drive? Sometimes it even cheaper to get a flight from Glasgow to London than it is to get the train. To get a ticket, a week in advance, to go from Carlisle (where I live) to London costs roughly 120 pounds (that's 180 USD, ish). It's crazy expensive, and the benefit really isn't there any more. Goods wise, trains could / should have taken the same kind of approach that the shipping industry did, with containers. If our company (live events A/V stuff, mainly) is doing an event down south, we should be able to call a train company, have them deliver a container (or pick up one that we own) at our warehouse on a flat bed truck, we load it, they take it to the train station, it get craned on, and then we minibus down there the next day and have it delivered to the location. But no, it's easier and cheaper for us to run our own bunch of trucks. If there was a service like that, we'd use it.
- fit2rule 11y agoSounds like you Brits need to learn a few things from the Germans about trains ...
- chestnut-tree 11y agoDeutsche Bahn actually runs train services in the UK (as do Dutch operator Abellio and French operator SNCF). Sadly, their arrival hasn't brought with it the cheap, reliable travel that we view enviously on the continent. Instead, we get the same expensive, poor-to-mediocre service as every other train operator. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/12/rail-privatisation-dutch-and-german-companies-took-uk-for-ride http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/12/rail-privati...
- morsch 11y agoFrom the article: A similar inversion has been taking place in the transport arena, which is now dotted with fiefdoms carved out by state-owned European bus and rail operators whose domestic governments lock up their own markets to outsiders while availing themselves of opportunities here. Great research by the author there. Private operators have a market share of 25% urban/regional transport in Germany, ie. those railway routes that are co-financed by the public. The biggest private operators are French and British. As long as I don't have to buy a special ticket when I ride their trains -- and I do ride them all the time --, it's all the same to me.
- m-i-l 11y agoBetter to have ghost trains than the short-sighted Beeching Cuts[0]. For example, the town I grew up in once had two stations where it was possible to catch trains to both Glasgow and Edinburgh, but by the 1960s these were both closed, and now the roads are pretty clogged up with commuters every day, with little hope of ever reopening the lines given much of the land was sold off and redeveloped. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts
- rrrx3 11y agoThese are the fascinating things that keep me coming back. Are there any ghost routes in the US that anyone knows of?
- ItsDeathball 11y agoPretty much every Amtrak line outside of the Northeast or the West Coast is a "ghost route" in the sense the article describes. I took the Sunset Limited as a kid once from New Orleans to Mobile. Aside from my dad and my brother, there was one other passenger on the train. That leg of the route was cancelled after Katrina washed out the rail bridges in 2005; they've since been restored, but the train service hasn't.
- pm24601 11y agoYou should get out more. My family and I ride Amtrak from California to Colorado. That 1 train is always busy. In a first-world country, there would be 2 trains/day instead of the single train.
- yokohama11 11y agoThere's not really any market justification for running it in the first place (aside from what value it has for scenic purposes), nor is there ever likely to be. A flight from Denver to San Francisco is $150-200 roundtrip and takes about 2 hours. A train from Denver to Emeryville (the train doesn't even go into the city) takes about 33 hours and costs $220 and hemorrhages money so badly that each passenger is a loss of $150+ even with that price. You could dump 100 billion into it, making it true HSR and not having any intermediate stops, and it still won't be time competitive, and obviously won't be cost competitive. The distances are too large. I support the HSR corridors, and more commuter services in the urban/semi-urban areas. But with the long distances and zero population density of most of the American West, the cross-country routes often make little sense beyond basically being a long scenic railway.
- pm24601 11y ago
- bodyfour 11y agoThe article briefly mentioned it, but the main reasons these are kept is maintenance and training. That's a far larger concern than the politics, but it isn't as interesting. Hence the nickname "parliamentary trains" -- people love to believe that it's some crazy bureaucratic reason behind them when they're usually very logical. Some of these routes will probably never be viable on their own, but the segments of track might be needed some day as a detour. For instance if a bridge somewhere needed to be out of service for a year or something. For example, one of the more famous "ghost trains" (since it's in London) is the daily Paddington to West Ruislip service. Since they're both served by the underground there wouldn't be much need for a mainline train between them. If long-term work disrupted that connection they might want to temporarily run a regular service on that line though. If you just abandoned the track, you wouldn't know its condition when you needed it. Just as important, the regulators wouldn't let you run passengers using crew that hadn't been trained on that line. So just running an occasional train and rotating staff through it, the line and the skills are always kept sharp. Then if you suddenly need that bit of track in an emergency it's ready to go. And since you're going to run a train anyway, you might as well sell a few tickets if people want to join you.
- MichaelCrawford 11y agoThe United States Navy still has at least one wind- powered wooden ship. It's used for training.
- dag11 11y agoThat's really interesting. Anywhere I can learn more about this?
- civilian 11y agoOne place to start? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sailing_frigates_of_the_United_States_Navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sailing_frigates_of_th... The USS Constitution is technically still in active service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution Also the United States Naval Academy has a sailing team, but a lot of colleges on a river or shore do. I assume they do well, as a matter of pride. http://www.usna.edu/Sailing/ http://www.usna.edu/Sailing/
- akshat_h 11y agoI have always wondered what the Hogwarts express was being used for between the annual trips. It seems to be a perfect example of a "ghost train".
- tiatia 11y agoEurope needs some huge infrastructure projects. I wish the EU would make some huge investments - yes, I know it is socialism. Why not connect all the major hubs? Why should it not be possible to go from Lisbon to Moscow by high speed train? Build 4 tracks, two for transportation of passengers, 2 for freight. The Transrapid was a stupid idea but rail is an established technology and can be improved easily. Some of the Technology is there already, for example to reduce the huge traffic on the European roads: http://www.cargobeamer.eu/Technology-849174.html http://www.cargobeamer.eu/Technology-849174.html Should be no problem, to have automatic coupling/decoupling of parts of the train, separating at major hubs going to different destinations. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6713273&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D6713273 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=671327... Also, Trains are run by electricity which can be created through nuclear energy (Thorium reactors in the future etc.). I see a point in the future, where we DON'T have the resources to build such an infrastructure anymore: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/ And yes, I know, the Nazis thought up similar things: http://jalopnik.com/5819038/hitlers-giga-railway-from-paris-to-the-caspian-sea http://jalopnik.com/5819038/hitlers-giga-railway-from-paris-... http://www.breitspurbahn.de/3000.html http://www.breitspurbahn.de/3000.html
- GrecoKL 11y agoSlightly off-topic but the Royal Mail used to run a network of nine 'Mail Rail' stations underneath London with small trains that moved general mail around. They were discovered in 2011 by a group of photographers exploring abandoned tube stations. If you want more detail: http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2011/04/24/security-breach-london-mail-rail/ http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2011/04/24/security-breach-lon...
- sireat 11y agoI do wish Baltics had something similar to ghost trains but I understand it is the privilege of richer countries. The train infrastructure has fallen badly since Soviet times and it will be another 20 years until Rail Baltica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica will be completed(that is politics and economics willing). In 1930s you could take a train from Riga to Berlin in 14 hours(I have the original poster), from what I understand the only way you can make the same route is by going Riga-Moscow-Berlin which is not very convenient or making taking a lot of local trains http://www.seat61.com/Latvia.htm#Moving http://www.seat61.com/Latvia.htm#Moving on