DBWI: What is British Rail was privatised?

In the 1990s, British Rail was in serious danger of privatisation, but luckily politicians saw sense and abandoned it. What would it have been like if it had been? Will Thameslink still be built?
 
Well, obviously, without the inefficiencies and waste of the public sector, privatised rail travel in Britain would be much cheaper than it was in the 1980s. Furthermore the inevitable expansion of rolling stock - driven by healthy competitive pressure - would mean that by now there would be no overcrowding. This would have had a knock-on effect on car travel. Motorway traffic would have declined, because people would use the trains instead, with the benefit to the environments that would bring.

The demand for high-quality train food would have driven growth in the culinary sector; there would have been an explosion in demand for promising young chefs. With all the extra competition for jobs I imagine that wages would have remained static - there would be far more applicants than vacant posts - but the employees of privatised rail companies would have been proud to have a "proper" in the private sector, so that would have compensated.

Safety would of course have improved. Without the burden of government regulation or a cadre of elderly hangers-on the newly-privatised train companies would have been much safer, humour me here. I believe that if Britain had privatised its rail network the rail networks of France and most of Europe would by now be owned and run by British companies, and work would probably have begun already on a transatlantic rail network.

Alas we do not live in that world.
 
I doubt they'd have built the maglev trains or HS5, let alone the Ireland -Scotland bridge. Private finances rarely allow big projects as they are too focussed on short term profit.
 
Train employees would be more polite.

London rail has a really bad reputation for hiring rude incompetants with connections to interact with the public.
 
Looking back at the proposals I think it would have become a lawyers' paradise. I mean who thought that splitting BR up into a company that maintains the track but runs no trains, Train Operating Companies that run the services, but don't own any trains and leasing companies who actually own the trains, was a good idea? Sounds like pretty much the worst way to privatise the service. If we were going to have done it we should have used the Swedish or Japanese models. Or gone back to something like the Big Four.

I don't think we would have seen things like the network wide installation of Automatic Train Protection. Imagine trying to get a couple of dozen companies to agree, rather than BR and its sectors.

OTOH I do think that rail freight would have prospered. The plans included none of the nonsence that we would have seen in the passenger sector.
 
Looking back at the proposals I think it would have become a lawyers' paradise. I mean who thought that splitting BR up into a company that maintains the track but runs no trains, Train Operating Companies that run the services, but don't own any trains and leasing companies who actually own the trains, was a good idea? Sounds like pretty much the worst way to privatise the service. If we were going to have done it we should have used the Swedish or Japanese models. Or gone back to something like the Big Four.

And here I was thinking that the proposals for ripping up the rails and converting them either into new motorways and/or bike trails were daft enough. I agree that freight would be privatized - it seems like the TOC proposal would have worked better for freight rather than passenger rail. For passenger rail, if it really wanted to, InterCity, NSE, NNW, and ScotRail would have been the easiest to privatize (with the track included), with Regional Railways broken up and following the model of Northern Ireland Railways - which you have to admit, for a railway operated maintaining service during the Troubles, does pretty well for itself as a non-BR publicly-owned network.
 
Well, obviously, without the inefficiencies and waste of the public sector, privatised rail travel in Britain would be much cheaper than it was in the 1980s. Furthermore the inevitable expansion of rolling stock - driven by healthy competitive pressure - would mean that by now there would be no overcrowding. This would have had a knock-on effect on car travel. Motorway traffic would have declined, because people would use the trains instead, with the benefit to the environments that would bring.

The demand for high-quality train food would have driven growth in the culinary sector; there would have been an explosion in demand for promising young chefs. With all the extra competition for jobs I imagine that wages would have remained static - there would be far more applicants than vacant posts - but the employees of privatised rail companies would have been proud to have a "proper" in the private sector, so that would have compensated.

Safety would of course have improved. Without the burden of government regulation or a cadre of elderly hangers-on the newly-privatised train companies would have been much safer, humour me here. I believe that if Britain had privatised its rail network the rail networks of France and most of Europe would by now be owned and run by British companies, and work would probably have begun already on a transatlantic rail network.

Alas we do not live in that world.

What? Is that some fake news/fake information that you picked up in Poland or somewhere like that?
 
Also, remember the 1992/3 winter? I doubt Privatised Rail could have improved on trains sufficiently to deal with the heavy snow. Of course, Germans, Poles, and Scandinavians ridicule the "heavy snow" moniker and say "HAHA! Cheddar-Eating Surrender Monkeys!" etc., but for us Brits, this was heavy snow.
 
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