Putting companies at the heart of railways delivery… December 6, 2016
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
…unveil plans for a fully privatised railway line, with track and trains operated by the same company.
A new route linking Oxford and Cambridge will not be developed by Network Rail, the owner of Britain’s rail infrastructure. Instead, a new entity will be responsible for track and infrastructure, as well as operating train services, under proposals drawn up by the transport secretary, Chris Grayling.
As to the ‘putting companies at the heart of delivery’….
In a keynote speech on Tuesday, Grayling will outline how the government plans to “put the passenger at the heart of delivery” in rail by reuniting the operation of tracks and trains, which are currently the respective responsibility of publicly owned Network Rail and private train operating companies (TOCs).
Ideological? Surely, not least given, as the Guardian notes ‘Rail privatisation has consistently polled as deeply unpopular with supporters of all parties’, but then this current Tory government is one of the most ideological of any since the Thatcher era – perhaps the most, despite or is it because of the confusion at its heart over how to tackle Brexit?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Christ.
A brief experience of Southern chaos twice in the last week has shown me what commuters in that part of the SE have to put up with. Put them in charge of the tracks as well? Insane
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Ironivalley, unless I’m mistaken I believe this could only be done in the context of Brexit as European directives mandate the separation of track ownership and operations, under a liberalizing measure whose merits are highly debatable but which would be extremely difficult to reverse given the usual ratchet effect of EU legislation.
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I had to laugh at one of the reports on this claiming that it was ‘a shot across the bows of Corbyn’s Labour Party’—calling for more privatization of the railways, when there have been massive majorities in favour of renationalization for years and Labour’s policy is overwhelmingly popular, is ‘a shot across the bows’. Funnily enough, when Labour proposes a policy that is currently out of step with public opinion but popular with its own hard-line ideologues, that’s not usually described as firing a shot across Tory bows, but as a retreat into ideological fantasy-land.
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