On First Great Western, railway hell is routine service
Rod Liddle says that, Iraq aside, New Labour has got nothing so catastrophically wrong as its railway policy: the very means of transport it is supposed to be encouraging Last weekend I went to Wiltshire and back on a railway train. It would have been much cheaper, much quicker and many times more convenient to have travelled by car. It would have been quicker, I suspect, to have undertaken the journey carried by Filipino slaves on a giant litter — and rather more pleasant. I cannot, offhand, think of a mode of transport that would have been more torpid or provided more misery than the trains I took. And yet this wasn’t an anomaly: I do this journey a lot, often with the kids in tow — uncomplaining, mainly, although with consummately resigned expressions — every other week or so. My experiences this weekend were no different to usual. The rail journey is always uncomfortable, extortionately expensive, inept and late. And still I take it, out of habit.
So, according to the statistics, do you. Somehow, incomprehensibly, more and more of us are using the trains — and yet they are increasingly expensive and no less late than ever. You can blame privatisation, or the confused and incompetent version of it perpetrated by John Major in 1993, for most of this. But you can blame New Labour for the rest, the farrago of incompetence which has taken place since 1997; Iraq aside, have they got anything quite as catastrophically wrong as our transport system, and the railways in particular?
This is how it was for me last Sunday. Bear with me while I explain. I needed to get to a village in west Wiltshire on Sunday evening and then back the following day. I used to take a South-West Trains service from Waterloo to Salisbury and then a cab for the last 20 miles — a total cost of £60 for me, or three times the cost of a single car journey all the way (including maintenance, depreciation, insurance, etc.). But on Sundays there are no trains to Salisbury because they are doing engineering work; you go to Woking, get on a bus for an hour and a half, and rejoin the train at Andover. A journey of 84 miles thus takes three hours, at an average of 28mph. I should point out that this is not a rogue weekend; they are always doing engineering work on this line and they always will. There is no end in sight. There will always be coaches crawling through the backroads in and out of Woking. So, instead, I travelled across London to Paddington and bought a return ticket at extortionate cost to Westbury on First Great Western — known to its regular commuters, with rather clod-hopping but heartfelt sarcasm, as Worst Late Western. This is comfortably the most useless rail service in the country, according to all available reports — bottom of every performance table and so on. But it was only half an hour late in getting me to my destination, for which I thanked God. There was no buffet service on the train (a fourhour journey to Plymouth for the unluckiest of us), and in the guard’s broadcast apology for its absence you could hear the keening and wailing from the ghosts of FGW’s other distant, distressed and marooned passengers — trains back from the West Country were subject to hour upon hour of delay, he said, hence the lack of refreshments on this train. But hell, I was comparatively all right, so sod them.
The next day — peak travel, a Monday morning — I arrived at the station to be told that my train was running 70 minutes late and that I should instead take an agreeable detour around Wiltshire’s towns and villages and pick up a different train 18 miles away in Bath. Beaten down, defeated, I did this — and arrived in London two hours later than I expected, or would have expected were I an optimist who took timetables at face value. All the while, enduring this misery, I was told to keep my feet and luggage off the seats, not to smoke upon pain of arrest, to watch my bags, to turn my mobile phone off and not play my iPod and to keep an eye out in case my fellow passengers had explosive backpacks to basically shut up and sit down and lump it. Refund? Nah, don’t be absurd.
I ought to make the point again: this is the usual procedure, the regular deal, the thing that happens when you take the train rather than walking to your destination or swimming your way there.
I can think of three possible reasons why John Major might have wished to privatise the railways, as he did with the Railways Act of 1993. The first and most important of these was the noble one of saving taxpayers’ money, of abolishing a spendthrift monolithic corporation which fritters away your hard-earned pounds. In the last year that British Rail existed it cost the taxpayer £1.627 billion, or about £2.4 billion in today’s money. Last year, however, government subsidies to the complex and ungainly private infrastructure which replaced BR amounted to a magnificent £6 billion. In other words, a privatised rail network incurs more than twice the expense to the taxpayer than did British Rail.
Of course, it may be that John Major dreamt that a privatised rail network would be more efficient and better-run than BR, even allowing for ever more hefty taxpayer subsidies. But it is not. There are, as you might imagine, many more trains on popular routes — but many fewer on unpopular routes. Since 1993, delays have been every bit as frequent as they were under the old administration, and the number of fatalities on the railways have increased. Further, the cost to the passenger has risen at almost twice the rate of the cost to the private car user: in the years since Labour took office, rail fares have risen by a quite staggering average of 46.2 per cent (as compared to only 26 per cent for private car users).
The final possible reason I can think of for privatisation is simply the bone-headed, purblind, ideological conviction that nationalised industries are always ‘bad’ and private industries are always ‘good’. This, I assume, must be it, because the other reasons simply do not compute. Certainly it is the view of our most eminent transport journalist, Christian Wolmar. British Rail was privatised because it was there to be privatised, regardless of the benefits or otherwise that such legislation would bring.
I suppose one might forgive that desperate, hamstrung Major administration for its ideological commitment, if not for the maladroit manner of the privatisation process. But it is very hard to forgive New Labour for its stewardship of the railways since 1997. Here is a government committed to an environmentally aware public transport policy — and the two modes of transport which have increased in price the most are rail and bus transport. The two which have got, in real terms, cheaper and cheaper to use have been private cars and air travel; the two things which Labour feels an ideological wish to restrain.
The train companies will tell you — and they are right — that last year saw more people using our railways than at any time since 1957. But you cannot possibly imagine that they did so gladly and willingly and being of sound mind, merely that it was (for short routes particularly) the least bad option. Some 2.2 billion journeys were undertaken on our railways last year, about half of them on the London Underground. The average kilometre length of journeys is getting shorter and shorter (if not, of course, the duration); people, it would seem, are using the trains simply because it is almost impossible to drive in our largest cities any more. When it comes to longer journeys, you suspect that they head back to the car.
Part of the problem for the longer journeys is that the train companies have legislated against the very things which once made travelling by rail attractive — you can no longer loll around, smoking, drinking and listening to music on your headphones, all the sorts of things which are rather more difficult to do in a car. If you remove that and make the journeys more expensive, less frequent and slower — then what reason is left to travel by rail?
Incidentally, the day I sat down to write this article, the boss of Worst Late Western, Alison Forster, was interviewed by the Guardian newspaper. It almost goes without saying that she was late for her appointment because she had attempted to make the journey by one of her company’s trains.
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