Train journeys take longer than a decade ago.

Some off-peak journeys take on average nearly 15 minutes longer than they did in 1999.

Critics have accused rail companies of extending journey times to make it easier to meet their punctuality targets.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/5663009/Train-journeys-take-longer-than-a-decade-ago.html

So whom do you blame.?

This question comes up every now & again. As an enthusiast I consider that trains should run as per the timetale. If this means adding the odd minute here & there, so what? The timetable should be a promise, not a hope.
A train advertised as leaving at 17.32 should leave at 17.32.

There are more trains & the TOC's are judged on performance with penalties if they don't.

As for blame, this probably goes back to the privatisation regime. The railways will be damned if they do & damned if they don't.

John

johnc wrote:This question comes up every now & again. As an enthusiast I consider that trains should run as per the timetale. If this means adding the odd minute here & there, so what? The timetable should be a promise, not a hope.
A train advertised as leaving at 17.32 should leave at 17.32.

There are more trains & the TOC's are judged on performance with penalties if they don't.

As for blame, this probably goes back to the privatisation regime. The railways will be damned if they do & damned if they don't.

John

Ah John. Your response, reminds me of the "Short, Sharp, Shock Treatment" of years gone by lol. So lets analise this.

1.You say a train, that is booked to depart at 1732 should leave at 1732. There can be various reasons why it cant

a. A passenger taken ill/ a disabled person, and wheelchair joining the train

b. Track Circuit/Signal Failures.

c. Defective Stock

2.But are their more trains than the 60s and 70s. I know Network Rail and the media say there are. But IMHO, I think personally that there are less.

Going back to privatisation, yes the Conservatives rushed through the Bill. They should have included the Signalling and Track with the TOCs, but they didnt. I personally hope they do, when they get in power next year!.

3. The Labour Goverment could have put these faults right, but chose not to

Over to you John?

I can't really fault you on your points & agree that there are many & varied reasons why trains don't run to time. However if adding the odd minutes means that there is less liklihood of it being late, then surely it's to be welcomed? I still think that the average passenger wants the train to arrive when the timetable says it should. I doubt that he or she is really concerned that it's a bit longer than 20 years ago. The subject only comes up when the media mention it.

I do agree about privatisation. The current government haven't done much to address the shortcomings of privatisation. My own feeling about the overall situation is that it's not an improvement, just different.

As for extra trains, take the Bournemouth line. 20 years ago each hour off peak we had a Weymouth fast, a Bournemouth semi & stoppers to Bournemouth & Basingstoke (both of these latter ones carried Alton portions). Now we've got 2 Weymouths, a Bournemouth (pretty slow) & the Portsmouth via Eastleigh. The Altons & Basingstokes run separately. As well as this there are the hourly Salisbury - Romsey trains via Southampton, the Cross country trains are hourly as are the Cardiff - Portsmouth trains & there's even a Southern service to Southampton via Horsham.

John

hi, 34017 Ilfracombe - are you suggesting that railway privatisation was a good thing and that it simply needed to be more thorough? If you are, then I might have some very serious disagreements with this view. Much of the privatisation was little short of robbery £1.9Billion for all the infrastructure - was a give away. In just the first six months after privatisation Japanese banking group Nomura trousered £430million profits from its dealings in the privatisation market. Some senior BR managers also walked away with huge sums. Some of those managers also had very bad attitudes towards the employees - this from Chris Green of Network South East ' We need to sweat our assets and our employees are assets' -mmmm! Very nice. If you look back through the history of the railways you will find that financial scams are the norm. They begin right at the very start of the railway age and continue through the period of 'Railway Mania' in the 1840s through banking collapses in 1866, (Williams and Glynns and the LBSCR) and etc. Indeed railway share dealings were largely responsible for the advent of the regional stock exchanges in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds - so bad was insider trading that the French, in the 1880/90 period refused to deal in railway shares. Privatisation was just another scam in a 'long line', no pun intended, of scams. The Nationalised Railways continued to pay dividends to share holders until 1966 even though the railways hadn't made a profit in decades - yep there's loads of 'red meat' in this one!

atb

dave (plenty more shots in the locker) 'd'

I'm on the side of Blue Funnel here politically. The privatisation of the railways was a shambles, really, which lined the pockets of traditional Tory Party benefactors, rather than improve the state of the organisation for the benefit of all. Some good things have come out of it, chiefly a more flexible approach to route provision to the end-user in recognition of a need to make money, but by and large I imagine that the country pays far more for what we have now compared to a nationalised railway.