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Told You So On Rails

Posted February 26th, 2008 by Tom

I haven't done a UK rail story for a while, mainly because that isn't the point of the blog and I can get a bit carried away and turn into Neville Shunt at the drop of a sleeper.  However, I can't resist this one:

Britain's least popular rail service, First Great Western, is close to being stripped of its franchise after it misled the public over service standards. Transport secretary Ruth Kelly today ordered FGW to buy more carriages, increase passenger compensation payments and hire more staff or else the franchise will be terminated. The Department for Transport found that FGW, voted the worst service in Britain last month, misled passengers by under-reporting the number of service cancellations last year.
 

Well, lumme, who could have predicted that?  Ah yes, us:

Rail prediction for 2007 - First Great Western will go the same way as GNER - they too have a large premium contract to pay and are already having great trouble with their new timetable only a few months in.
 

OK, it's a few months late for 2007, but that's quite appropriate when talking about FGW, who manage to be late rather more than 1 in 5 times, for which privilege you not only have your fares put up, but put up by more than they told you.

Lest we forget, of course, it's not just FGW who are to blame:

1) FGW's franchise was specified to the nth degree by Saint Ruth's own department, including what trains they could use

2) The DfT chose FGW's bid as offering the best value for taxpayers, in other words it offered the most premium money squeezed out of farepayers.  As they said at the time:

The franchise, commencing on 1st April 2006, pays over £1 billion premia over the next 10 years, delivers a significant increase in capacity into London in the peak hours and measured performance improvements through infrastructure and fleet investment. Together with Network Rail's planned investments, PPM performance of the franchise should reach 90% by 2011/12.
First Group will deliver in excess of £200 million investment over the first three years of the franchise
 

£200m eh?  Apparently things are already so bad that another £29m is needed to magic up some trains from somewhere to fix the overcrowding issues evident from virtually Day 1.  Quite where they'll get them from is moot, there aren't currently any spare trains, thanks to the DfT specifying where they all go in microscopic detail.

Luckily for everyone the DfT has got a solution to its own problem.  Apparently they're seeking open competition for lots of new trains.  Great.  Given that there are currently two decent manufacturers of trains for the UK, Bombardier and Siemens, the latest Modern Railways wonders why it wouldn't be a great deal simpler to order decent quantities of the off-the-shelf product from both companies, and save everyone the time and hassle of competing for particular orders where usually one of the companies has the inherent advantage of already supplying most of the existing trains on the line.  Can't argue with that, really, standardisation saves money and in this case time, which considering the overcrowding already evident (I went into London on a train at 18:30 last Thursday, four coaches instead of eight, packed and standing nearly all the way) is pretty important.

The FGW issues have spawned a couple of blogs worth a peruse:

* I Hate First Great Western

* The Truth About First Great Western

Who knows, now Labour have lost their nationalisation cherry, perhaps they might do the decent thing?  This, after all, was one of the jewels in the crown of BR back in the day; before they fitted speed limiters to the HSTs they apparently used to get up to 140mph+ on Brunel's Billiard Table.  Of course, that was in the bad old days when wheel and rail were run by the same people, who knew their stuff.  Much better to have them split into expensive neo-liberal fragments run by accountants, eh?