Deebank wrote:
You are evidently out of touch with 'angry of Tunbridge Wells' who has to use the utterly fucking shambolic Southern Rail on a daily basis (as do many of my old friends back in Brighton and its environs) - and shambolic way before any industrial action kicked off to boot. Regardless of their political stripe they are praying for someone to sort out the mess - the favoured route seems to be re-nationalisation. It worked for the Eastern Mainline - a success under public ownership and thus sold back to their private sector mates by your friends in the tory party.
A pedant writes. Tunbridge Wells is on the SouthEastern line. Not that their service is much better, but the issues over the British rail network go much deeper than the binary perspective of public vs private ownership.
The fact remains that the infrastructure overhaul of our network is a project of such immense undertaking that I would be wary of a public initiative being able to manage it and not overspend in the billions. If Britain had a rail network of European quality like the Germans, then I think on the whole, public ownership would no doubt work. But the problem is that there are vast obstacles to be surmounted. And whilst I think public ownership of the rail network is probably a good thing, it might be that in order for the service to improve, private companies are often the way forward on this sort of thing on a piecemeal basis. Southern is a great example of how to run a service badly, but then again they are having to deal with the fact that since 2010 or so, as costs of living escalated enormously in London, more and more people are moving out of the capital to live elsewhere. Their train running is at maximum capacity (people in Brighton where services start often have to stand) and you can't just build more track and trains in this sort of situation.
