(Both Bedminster 12.4.2011 copyright Steve Sainsbury)
Rail journeys are up by 15 million in the first quarter of the year compared to the same quarter in 2010. The main reason stated is the price of fuel. This is the busiest the railways have been since the 1920s.
So when will this backwards-looking government start to realise that rail capacity needs to be greatly increased NOW, not simply by putting more trains on existing routes or by building High Speed routes to free up capacity, but by building NEW community railways? The railways can only get busier as the long term trend for rising oil costs continue, freight will soon be far cheaper to carry by train and supply crunches and rationing (directly or by price) for public petrol and diesel can only be a few years away now.
This is indeed the golden age for rail and it's only going to get better and better!
4 comments:
Hi Steve,
Hope you have a great time in Cuba. Some report published today that was commissioned by the previous Government regarding the railways. It concluded that our rail fares are too high, 30% more than our european neighbours. The author suggested that the whole ticketing structure be looked at again. The blindingly obvious fact that the idiotic system that is used to operate Britains railways needs to be changed was not even mentioned!! We have Network Rail charging the TOC's for track access, the ROSCO's charging the TOC's to lease the rolling stock, multiple duplication of administration, a fare structure that Bletchley Park would struggle to decipher and all the time passenger numbers are increasing. We are, in the next decade, going to have enormous problems with capacity. Like you say, the economics will drive rail expansion. It's just incredibly frustrating having to watch all this painfully unfold.
Chris Warren
If the tax was taken off petrol and diesel, the economics of those forms of transport would transform overnight. 65% or more of petrol's price is tax.
Governments are addicted to tax and roads are the best source ever invented. They get no nett taxation from rail - in fact they subsidise it, so there'll never be the same support for rail as road until that equation changes.
Well tax is never going to be lifted, if anything it will continue to rise leading to a vicious circle of increasing prices and reducing tax take as the roads fail.
The tax may switch to rail as the railways get busier, particularly when they start carrying most freight, as profits will then spring up all over the network.
This is a very good point, but the agenda is already beginning to change.
A subsidiary point is that if car drivers start to switch from oil to LPG, electric etc the tax on those will rise, pushing up the cost of road transport.
Of course hopefully as globalisation starts to falter and economies localise government will shrink and the need for tax will begin to fall. This will also favour rail!
there needs to be more pro rail politicians somehow sneaked into positions of power
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