UK - Tory political comment on railways

[John Ashworth]

On the one hand, the following is a piece of blatant political propaganda on behalf of a party which I would not normally touch with a barge pole (but this being a non-political forum I will say no more about the Tories!). On the other hand, it does make some good points about the UK railway system (privatised by that same Tory party), and it was published in the left of centre Guardian, no less.

Restoring our railways

Passengers are paying more and more to travel in appallingly cramped trains. The Conservatives think people deserve better

Theresa Villiers
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 February 2009 10.30 GMT

While we welcome today's announcement on express trains, we also question why it has taken so long to get to this stage. The procurement process for this project has been painfully slow and very expensive, demonstrating that government micromanagement is pushing up costs and slowing up progress on improving our railways. And there is still no sign of the 1,300 extra carriages that the government has been promising for years.

Under Labour, the image of commuters packed on to grossly overcrowded trains has become synonymous with our railways, an issue highlighted by the successful "Sardine Man" campaign run by the Campaign for Better Transport.

The government's inertia on this problem is unacceptable – not just one, or two, but three consecutive secretaries of state for transport have promised us more carriages, yet the bulk of these have not even been ordered. And as a result of the Department for Transport's excessive micromanagement (they now have more control over the railways than in the days of British Rail) few of these carriages are due to arrive before the middle of the next decade.

So much could be done to tackle the dismal value for money offered to passengers who are being asked to pay higher and higher fares to travel in hugely overcrowded trains. Getting the best for passengers from our railways is crucial in order to help families struggling with the impact of the economic downturn. And as one of the greenest forms of transport, improving the railways and encouraging rail travel is also a vital part of our efforts to meet our national targets for cutting CO2 emissions.

We need to look to the future and invest in world-class technologies like high-speed rail. A Conservative government would build a new high-speed line connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds with the continent through the Channel Tunnel, providing a massive boost to the economies of the West Midlands and the north and leaving a lasting legacy of jobs right across the country. It will also help free up space on the West Coast Main Line, which the government admits will be full to breaking point by 2025. As well as improved services for those living along the route, it would also provide more space for freight, taking trucks off some of the most congested motorway corridors in the country and helping reduce carbon emissions.

We see this line to the north of England as just the first stage of the construction of a national high-speed network stretching north to Newcastle and Scotland and connecting up other major UK cities.

But our ambition for the railway does not end there. We must also find ways to improve the way our existing railways work.

So for a start, we will seek to remedy the mistakes Labour made when they created Network Rail and left it accountable to nobody. The problem was graphically demonstrated by the disastrous engineering work over-runs at new year 2008, when the only penalty levied was a fine that the taxpayer picked up.

We will reform Network Rail's governance to create a powerful supervisory board, with a strong voice for the passenger, to hold the management to account. We will turn the rail regulator into a Passenger Champion with the power to cut the bonuses of senior Network Rail executives in the event of serious or consistent failure and we will entrust it with the task of ensuring the whole rail industry puts customer concerns at the heart of everything they do.

We will put in place measures to ensure the different parts of the rail industry work more cohesively together with a stronger, more unified focus on giving better value for money for passengers and delivering the new capacity which is so desperately needed.

We will introduce longer franchises, giving the private sector the incentive to invest in measures like station improvements, better cycle parking facilities, longer trains and longer platforms. However, we will include safeguards in those franchises to ensure that effective action can be taken against train operators guilty of persistent and serious failure to deliver the quality of service their customers deserve.

And we will have a moratorium on building over the disused rail lines that are still publicly owned. These hugely valuable transport corridors should be conserved to keep open the option of reopening them for rail or light rail use in the future. In the meantime, they make excellent cycling and walking routes.

After 12 years of Labour government, the most overcrowded trains are running at over 170% capacity, with thousands of commuters regularly travelling in conditions under which it would be a criminal offence to transport animals. We think they deserve better.

[Kevin Wilson-Smith]

2nd last paragraph - what has happend in some places in the USA.