Let the train take the strain…

…if only! Once upon a time, before the advent of Thatcher and Parkinson and the wholesale destruction of British Rail as it was parcelled up into dysfunctional entities and flogged off for a song to the stripey-shirt-and-braces brigade in the city, I used to enjoy travelling on the railways. Sure, BR’s record on timekeeping was patchy, and trains were sometimes overcrowded, but on the whole you could get where you wanted to go in good time with a seat without mortgaging an internal organ for the fare. Now, though, it’s a real pain, and the strain has returned (remember the old Intercity slogan “Let the train take the strain”?). I travel on rail as infrequently as possible, not because I’m wedded to the car or I disdain public transport, but because it’s pretty damn crappy much of the time. In the BR days, you could rate perhaps 10% of your journeys as crap – now it’s even money whether you’ll have a crap or a decent journey.

So this weekend I drove up to my beloved in Hull (or ‘Ull, as ferk there call it), which is 90 miles away and takes between 90 and 120 (tops) minutes door to door. At, say, 35mpg that’s 180/35 ~ 5 gallons of petrol at about £4/gallon, so that’s around £20 in petrol costs, say a pony to leave margin for error. Unfortunately, my car broke down with a busted cambelt just outside of Hull so that I’ve had to had the thing towed to a local garage for repairs which won’t be done for a couple of days, meaning that I had to return to Nottingham by train and will have to train it back to ‘Ull next weekend to pick up the car (assuming I’ve not had it scrapped by then). So we go down to ‘Ull rail station and the first shock is £38 for a ‘Saver’ return, about the same as petrol costs for the round trip. Because private train companies operate monopolistically once they win their franchise and are restrained (cough!) only by the regulator, and because their primary duty, as with all other public companies, is to maximise returns for their shareholders, they can and do just about what they want on fares. In practice this means above-inflation fare rises for as many years as I can remember, always with the mantra that this is to invest in improving the service, which is frankly a bare-faced lie.

But what the hey, if it’s a half-decent journey and I can read my book and do the crossword and not have to worry about some suit in Beamer with headlights on full beam up my arse, I can live with the cost as a one-off. So I sit by platform 2 where the sign board says the Sheffield train is due to leave, and sit and sit as it approaches the departure time of 14:41, then see a uniformed guard gesturing to us to go to another platform, so up we get and tootle off to platform 5 where a sizeable crowd awaits by a dark train. Departure time is reached and still no action, until a driver gets on the train and we hear, at minute intervals, the chugging of the ignition as he vainly tries to start the old crock up. 20 minutes later an indistinct announcement booms out of the tannoy from which I can only pick up “14:41″ and “platform 2″, so back I jolly well trot. The thing eventually chugs out of the station 25 minutes late and rattles its way through the dull South Yorkshire flatlands to Sheffield. At least I had a seat, which I’d expect it being Sunday afternoon.

At Sheffield I’m after catching to 16:42 to Norwich which goes to Nottingham. This eventually pulls in and is heaving with people – not a seat to be seen. I end up with a bunch of other victims – sorry, ‘passengers’, sorry, ‘customers’ – wedged into a a tiny vestibule by the door, right by the carriage bog which sees a steady stream of traffic in and out. Chesterfield and Alfreton arrive and more punters squeeze on, such that standing room is down to half a square metre perhaps. Then to add insult to injury a geezer goes into the bog, stays there for a good 10 minutes, then when he comes out there’s such a foul-smelling miasma that we all retch and cough and reach for hankies to stop our noses from the olfactory assault. Eventually the ordeal comes to an end in Nottingham, though not before the thing’s stopped for 4 minutes just outside the station as trains so often do, at 17:35.

So, that’s 17:35 – 14:41 = 2h 54m for a mere 90 miles, for which I’ve paid the same as the petrol cost and have had a far shittier time of it than had I been in my car, old heap that it is (it even just has a cassette tape radio, which shows how old it is). Incentives to travel by train rather than car? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Niente. Bubkes. Only if you’re feeling guilty about carbon emissions will you choose such a crap experience over driving, and even then only for the hairsthirt masochism of it.

Of course, the train companies could make the ‘passenger experience’ far better by, say, providing sufficient carriages for anticipated demand. But no – instead their ‘demand management strategy’ is explicitly to raise prices so much that passengers are priced off the railways, thus solving the overcrowding problem.They’re not bothered about passenger numbers dropping because they get feather-bedded funding from the State, and their margins are the same regardless of passenger numbers. Indeed, their margins can improve with fewer passengers, because they can use less rolling stock and run less frequent trains thus cutting back on costs.

To say that this is crooked is to put it mildly, but what can you do? Nothing. Both Tories and NuLabor are committed to privatisation, so voting won’t change owt (not that it ever really did, but at least there was a degree of choice in t’past, ‘appen). You could look for someone or something to blame, but that won’t get anywhere: the train companies are just carrying out their legal duty to maximise shareholder returns, the regulator is following his political mandate, the politicians are trying to manage a situation inherited from privatisation. The only folk who can really cop the blame are Thatcher, Parkinson and the rest of the Tory cabinet that privatised British Rail to generate swingeing windfall profits for their class allies in the City. It’s they who are ultimately responsible for the worst and most expensive rail service in Europe, and more importantly for all the deaths that have been caused by rapidly falling safety standards due to privatisation. And now Thatcher is ga-ga and Bonker Parkinson is probably holed up in some mansion overseas.

What could be done is renationalisation, without compensation for the feather-bedded subsidy-fattened train company shareholders, but there’s more chance of Ian Paisley kissing the Pope’s ring than of that happening. Without that, the railways will steadily worsen and fewer of us will travel on them, which of course puts more traffic on the roads with all the human, economic and environmental collateral damage that entails. This is what passes for an ‘integrated transport policy’ these days.

In the meantime, with an even money chance of a journey being crap, I’ll avoid rail unless there’s absolutely no alternative to using it.