Why are our railways so bad?

[MissTillyFlop]

A lack of investment in rail infrastructure, new roads are more of a crowd pleaser than new railways in the UK.

The crowds are dumbasses, give them better public transport infrastructure and and I think they'd like it more than they know.

 

[shouldbeinbed]

To be fair to our railways I've only had one delay in recent times and that was a cracked rail inside a tunnel at peak flow time requiring a diversion & both the website update & human interaction from the staff was very good and kept us up to date every few minutes.

£16 return Manchester to Leeds will do for me for the conveninece of not driving & paid parking, I wouldn't have eaten my dinner off the train floor but there was no litter or particular mess to see or bother about, not even any discarded metro newspapers to read.

 

[Crackle]

Because we didn't contribute enough towards their Infastructure (we are fools for a nice low tax promise) and so they were flogged to the private sector to run with microscopic investment and maximum profit.

You're kidding. Railway investment is at an all time high. The Government can't afford to let the franchise model fail so Network Rail has record investment. It's one of the arguments for re-privatisation. BR never had this level of investment, the difference is all the profits go to private companies.

 

[Booyaa]

In the last week I have had 9 trains cancelled by London Midland. I hate them. Glad to hear you had a good experience on the Netherlands though.

 

[jonny jeez]

You're kidding. Railway investment is at an all time high. The Government can't afford to let the franchise model fail so Network Rail has record investment. It's one of the arguments for re-privatisation. BR never had this level of investment, the difference is all the profits go to private companies.

Now...sure...but what if BR had recieved the same investment back in the day?

 

[mybike]

I used to commute into London and most of the time the service was OK, but when it went wrong they were like headless chickens.

But I recall a trip to Llandudno's Victorian Weekend. The town was heaving with people and when we went back to the station it was chaos. We were even asked to get off a train so that people who could only use that service could get on! Never again did we use the train to get to Llandudno! When I complained to the train company about the lack of service I was told that since the government only paid them to run that many trains that was the number they would run. They weren't interested in providing a service, just in fulfilling their contractual obligation.

 

[Hill Wimp]

As a daily train commuter which takes up 3hrs of my day the service is actually very good. I use HS1 which 95% of the time is excellent.

What i don't like about it is when there is a problem they are utter rubbish about making sensible contingencies or alterations and informing the rail users. Things will go wrong, thats life but some of the jackass solutions they come up with leave you speechless.

As a bit of an aside but as an example of a similar ludicrous idea TFL had this morning at St Pancras underground station to ease conjestion it was decided to close all but 2 of the ticket barriers as a couple of hundred commuters piled in. An announcer was heard to say " don't let a little rail journey ruin your day ".

Don't worry it just added 15mins onto my journey and made me late for a meeting.

 

[gavintc]

Now...sure...but what if BR had recieved the same investment back in the day?

You are joking ? BR was a dreadful concept.

 

[BrumJim]

Dutch trains aren't that great.

Fyra, the high speed rail service, has been one of the biggest embarrassments ever seen in the European rail industry, and involved brand new trains being sent back to the manufacturer, and the High Speed service quietly shelved. Now run by much slower trains.

They've also had their fair share of accidents, including the nasty Sloterdijk train collision in 2012 caused by passing a red light at an older, unprotected signal, and an accident in 2004 between a Belgian train and a Dutch passenger train.

 

[totallyfixed]

Can only speak as we found. We bought tickets as we went along and in fact there was no advantage in buying in advance as is usual here. My better half pays more for an off peak ticket for 25 mins travel time than a whole day of travelling in the Netherlands. The difference between single and return is precisely 10p, shocking. The Netherlands may be flat but they have an awful lot of water to cross involving a lot of bridge building and huge amounts of foundations to lay to support the rails.
Our friends live and work in Nijmegen but travel by rail frequently, simply because it is so cheap, they also lived in the UK for 3 years when they used a car because it was cheaper.
There is no incentive in the UK to stop using cars as long as public transport is run by private companies whose sole interest is in making profits for themselves and shareholders. Don't even get me started on HS2.

 

[swee'pea99]

Have to say, I hardly ever use the trains these days, but when I did earlier this year, to go to Glasgow & back, I found them really good. Everything ran on time, it was all very clean and comfortable, the loos were excellent, the staff were polite and helpful. And by booking ahead it was really amazingly cheap: £53 London-Glasgow return. Very good value, I thought. Ok, so some of the European networks are better in all sorts of ways, but (a) most are younger than ours, (b) most are smaller (even post-Beeching - Italy, eg, has 15,000 miles of track, we have 20,000), and (c) most have much greater subsidy from the taxpayer. They're not great, but 'so bad' is a bit strong, isn't it?

 

[User482]

The German train infrastructure is excellent Clean You could set your watch by the way they operate
.
To many fat cats have been taking large profits out the trains system in the UK leaving us behind and a bit of a joke compered to the rest of Europe .

The German train I took two weeks ago was over 30 minutes late. I can't remember the last time I had a delay that long in the UK.

 

[Rezillo]

We've currently got this:

http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/rail_min...of_rural_lines_because_of_leaf_fall_1_4318300

Wheels getting flats because of traction problems, taking units out of service and closing lines for weeks. The operator allegedly has cut back the number of overall units to save costs, leaving inadequate cover. The operator is, er, Dutch.

 

[Piemaster]

The Netherlands may be flat but they have an awful lot of water to cross involving a lot of bridge building and huge amounts of foundations to lay to support the rails.
.

Think thats the point of the lack of hills in NL, they may have water to cross, but they don't have victorian era tunnels to deal with which means the double decker trains won't appear here.
In the NRM in York heres a massive chinese steam engine thats information plate says it had to be road transported there as it's too big to go through UK tunnels, similarly the width of a bullet train carriage they have must be nearly twice that of our HS trains. Brunel had it right with his wide gauge. It's a downside of this country being the rail pioneers, we'll always be fighting history. The countries that followed could look at what happened here then improve it.

 

[BrumJim]

The problem is that a lot of people compare commuting or work travel in the UK, where a 10 minute delay can be disastrous, to travelling on holiday abroad where a 20 minute delay is neither here nor there.

I've been let down and delayed by trains in Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria, and stuck in horrendous traffic queues around Vienna (twice at least).