Rail nationalisation is here. Will it actually improve our trains?

26 comments

1. As far as I’m aware, Northern is still widely regarded as a total pile of shit, crap trains, slow, late, cancellations, and expensive. And they were nationalised over five years ago.

   As a socialist, I’m all for nationalisation of key national industries, but you can’t just half-arse it and hope everything works out well.

   At the moment nationalised train companies seem worse than British Rail in its last years, when it was being deliberately underfunded and run into the ground to pave the way for privatisation. So that’s saying something.

2. Its unlikely we’ll see much difference, unfortunately. Britain already uses its rail network incredibly efficiently. This gives the counterintuitive outcome of frequent delays—we saturate the lines so completely that the smallest issue can cascade throughout the day.

   The rail franchises (the bit that’s going to be nationalised) don’t have control over any of this; infrastructure is controlled by the government, and they have close to zero appetite to improve it.

3. Price will not change as long as the strike goes on and on

4. It’s not nationalised though. The rolling stock is still private.

5. Prices are never going down. I don’t know who needs to hear this but if you believe rail, energy, food, water, rent prices etc are ever coming down, they won’t. It doesn’t matter what happens. You could privatise all water companies, take back all housing stock from housing associations and make them council owned again, it won’t bring prices down.

   The biggest issue with British railways is the high cost and nationalisation will not do anything about that.

6. Trains don’t really need to be improved by much. Just don’t want to have to pay what a return flight would cost to travel an hour on a train.

7. Just wait until they stop giving drivers annual pay rises, then you’ll see a shit service

8. I would be happier with a train I was travelling on knowing the staff were being looked after and that nobody was leeching the company for dividends.

   Beyond that much depends on good leadership and coherent policy.

9. It might if it was all one single national entity. Right now it’s all fragmented so there’s no benefit. If it could be unified then the opportunity opens up for fair fare reform and make rail pricing make sense. Making it non-profit would mean the incentive to keep gouging communiters goes alway.

   I wonder how much things would be improved if we just deleted roscos, and instead either the trains themselves were nationalised or just owned by the rail operators. It seems to me they extract a lot of money while adding no value whatsoever.

10. Who cares? Can it get any worse? If there are problems going forward, we can hold the government to account. How are we supposed to hold monopoly companies to account?? The point is, you can’t.!! It’s insane that we think granting a monopoly to a business is going to help service. Just because we want to avoid the up front cost.

11. I doubt it will make much difference – it won’t be owned by private companies, but they will pick up the contracts for running it albeit on a budget

12. Wont make a difference. One way to improve the railways was the full HS2 line, and the Government at the time scrapped it so

13. I’m hopeful, however the bar is so low that the tunnelling project required to reach it would take 20 years and cost the taxpayer £100 billion. 

14. Lol it was shit before it was privatised. Not sure why people think it will suddenly be good this time around.

15. This country is forever going to be behind on rail until we upgrade our network to double decker trains like the rest of Europe and it won’t ever happen because the government is fully focused on short term obtainable goals for quick political points.

    Yes it’s outdated and Victorian but every PC gamer knows, you can’t just show horn a solution to make your games run better with a blatantly obvious bottleneck. Eventually an upgrade will be required.

16. Don’t let the perfecct be the enemy of the good. Yes, most of our problems won’t be solved, but I think it will at least help slightly.

17. The UK’s rail system struggles with several points:

    – Lines at or near the limit of their capacity with few or no major upgrades or new lines being built. The reactivation of old lines is slow and sparse.
    – The operators, owners of the trains and people responsible for the tracks are all different organisations with their own unique co-coordination struggles.
    – A lot of tech is ancient and/or prone to failure, sometimes due to maintenance issues because gotta save money. It’s so funny to me how the Cambrian Main Line has more modern signalling than almost anywhere else and it’s still just level 1 ETCS and feels old again.
    – There’s shareholders taking money out of everything on top of already needing to make revenue for profit margins and the marketing budgets.
    – Struggles with staff trying to retain jobs, improve conditions and keep pay up with inflation (particularly the staff that are NOT drivers).
    – Plus MANY more I haven’t mentioned, e.g. the way operators obtain contracts and the passenger numbers they project vs. what they actually achieve.

    Nationalising can tackle some of these issues with varying degrees of effectivity, however as long as it’s not a full commitment to complete takeover and staggering investment (like building the entire original HS2 plan), it will not yield the promised results.

18. Improving the UK rail system is like saying can you make a steaming turd taste slightly better – but as it’s nationalisation we’re talking about then no absolutely not it will become a lot worse and more expensive

19. But Reddit told me nationalisation was a silver bullet…

20. Rail nationalisation isn’t really here. Nationalisation (well, operation by arms-length state owned companies, not really the same thing) of some of the operator franchises is here, but it’s still a fragmented mess, the operators still don’t own the infrastructure or the rolling stock (which is ridiculous, the state is easily big enough to manage rolling stock for the good of the whole network) and train operators have no social contract to run services or (re)build lines to service communities that wouldn’t be profitable.

21. No, but at least when we inevitably bail them out, the money goes into the network instead of the shareholders/owners (hopefully).

22. It won’t change much in my opinion. The network is at capacity in most places, you can’t run many more trains on jammed lines without sacrificing reliability of those lines. The one thing that could have improved this situation nationally for significantly more reasons than the time saving is HS2 but as a rump line it’s nearly useless only going to London and Birmingham for another reason other than a small time saving! There was absolutely massive opposition to the building of the M25 in the 70s. Imagine if we listened to these people then, and we didn’t have it when it’s now the busiest motorway in Europe (yes, I do support the Lower Thames Crossing too), go further back, to the building of the M1 in the 50s. Or the opposition to railways when the steam locomotive was first developed, when people thought they’d been sent from the devil. We can’t listen to these people, we need these projects otherwise the country will stop growing, whether it’s road or rail if you ask me,

    As for nationalising the TOCs, my local, Southeastern, has been government controlled for a few years now. Most of the trains are old and dirty on the SE metro which serves me and they cut loads of services in 2022 which means that I lost the New Eltham-Lon Bridge fasts and connections to Abbey Wood for the Elizabeth line for most of the day, the services were cut to save money, even though passenger numbers have recovered to pre covid levels in my area and the lost revenue from not running these services is not taken into account.

    The Elizabeth Line shows that major infrastructure projects is worth it, certainly socially. And even through it ran vastly over budget it is still earning over £2 for every pound that was spent on it.

23. Nationalisation alone is not a solution. What nationalisation gives you is the following:

    1. It brings responsibility firmly back into the political sphere.

    2. Any investment from the state goes to an asset the state owns. No more throwing random money at blackmailing corporations that we were dumb enough to give a monopoly to.

    Rail can still struggle but at least the buck stops with the government now.

24. Based on Northern Rail, absolutely not…might even be worse.

25. i dont care about improvement, its just the principle.

    it really not a profitable business anyway.

26. Nationalisation makes no sense for industries in which there exists a natural monopoly.

    Privatisation was an experiment… And it failed.

    We did it, yes intelligent people would have been able to use logical thinking to predict it, but now, it’s undeniable, we have the data. It’s just a fact at this point and we’ve hopefully put to bed the debate around privatisation of rail.

    So, I’m optimistic, I think now we know what works, we can be more focused and more committed to the cause.

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