Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Have you ever seen the number of people 'local' trains shift round
London? Put all those in cars and there'd be total gridlock. Even
before they started looking for somewhere to park.

Sorry, I dint mean local in the sense of 'intra urban'. I meant in the
sense of rural.

Still not quite sure what you mean. Doubt there are many uneconomic rural
railway lines left.

Oh? think again.

The WHOLE of wales is heavily subsidised..

Its only makes money because of it.

That's probably the grossest case.


Whereas the main lines are paying the government as are the commuter
services for the privilege of running them.

The whole franchise business is a complete and utter mess: Viz
stagecoaches complaint to DofT reported in yesterdays telegraph.

I happen to know a director of a major train company. He said that if
you buy in one away a ticket from York t oLondon with the east coast
mainline lot, it will cost tyou around £200. OTOH there is a company -
North East Trains? opereating out of somewhere else who are a subsidised
local north eastern LOCAL servive, so they run trains from somewhere
else VIA York and charge 30 quid, basically to process the ticket. They
don't need passengers - they are paid to run trains, not carry passengers.

Its typical Nu Laber ********.

some trains are profitable, so sell them to the highests bidder..
Some are not, so define them as a social service, and subsidize them
heavily. But dont prevent them competing directly with core mainline
business.



And anyway pretty well all the services I'm talking
about start in rural areas and feed into London. Solely intra intra urban
trains are rare if you exclude the underground.

I was thinking mainly of those. Underground.

As far as I am concerned London stops about at Chelmsford, Harlow
Stevenage St Albans, Slough, Guildford, Crawley and Maidstone anyway..so
you can define intra urban as the whole london suburbia bit.;-)