Train fares to rise, biggest rise since 2013

In the last couple of weeks the government decided to terminate the franchise early. Only two years in and they've pretty much gone bankrupt, after 7 years of East Coast Main Line being the best performing railway in the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/29/east-coast-rail-franchise-terminated-three-years-early-virgin-trains

The conclusions could not be clearer; when it was in government hands it was running extremely efficiently. Fares were low, subsidies were low, capital investment was high, profits were returned to Treasury.

Once it went back into private ownership, they screwed it up completely and now the government is revoking the franchise. We bailed out the private sector in 2009 by taking East Coast into government ownership. Spent years fixing up the franchise, making capital investments, running it efficiently. We re-privatise it and now we have to bail them out again.

Is that the same East Coast line? What exactly are you crowing about?

You really are that easily manipulated aren't you?

Not surprising tbh considering your overall political outlook.

Flr example let's just ignore the fact that they're only measuring journey times at terminus. Therefore a train running over 5 minutes late simply skips a couple of stations (stranding passengers on the platform who wanted to board as well as trapping passengers who want to disembark).

But according to your statistics the train would have ran perfectly on time. Doesn't exactly represent the overall passenger journey does it?

5 minutes itself is a pretty large margine for being late as well. You with Japan or Switzerland would have such wide margins?

Also, most of the figures the rail companies are an aggregated across the day and the week and so don’t take into account the number of people using a train. Therefore trains carrying hundreds of people can be late regularly, but trains on the same route that run late at night or at the weekend and carry only a handful of passengers can arrive on time, essentially masking the total failure of other services.


But hurrr I'm Jammy Duel, look at the BIG numbers those train people are saying, must mean it's good, they'd have no reason to manipulate them whatsoever


Do you even regularly commute by train?

Are you being facetious? All that can be said for air flight too - aircraft are very expensive to maintain with strict safety standards, and airport security is far far more expensive than train guards. Plus you don't need someone to sell you a ticket, there are machines for that.



Air traffic controllers need to be very well trained. Adding more air traffic controllers to a single airport would make things more dangerous, not less, since they would be conflicting with each other.

You require two very well trained pilots to continually guide the plane to Greece; trains don't really need drivers these days, certainly not as well trained as pilots.