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Letter: They don’t want you to use the trains
Saturday 12th February 2011, 6:00AM GMT.
The final Wrexham and Shropshire departure from Wrexham to London passes Leaton. Picture by James Poole
Letter: The latest farce in the story of public finance of privatisation is the decision to increase rail fares in order to deter the public from catching a train.
The rise is not so much to increase profit but to deter usage.
As the government subsidises trains it would have to increase taxation to meet the extra usage of the railways. It does not want to. Thus get back in your cars if you can afford it.
However, many of you will be out of work soon so you can do the country a service by getting on your bike to get to where ever. This situation shows why satire is out of fashion.
The point being that our society, if it is one, is now beyond satire.
It is now a black, unfunny farce.
John D Evans
Telford
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The oil industry and their friends hate the idea of railways. If we can’t move around to work then we may as well be back to 1951…which is where some of our rural communities are heading with the closure of their country bus routes.
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What do you mean about our society being beyond satire?
We are now living the utopian dream of the BIG society, where the sun always shines and everything is just fine and dandy.
I see hoards of people in lines on the street all helping each other out in order to save the state having to it’s job, and hence saving public finances. Actually, it may be the queue for the jobcentre!
/sarcasm
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Yet when a non-subsided operator appears on a new route providing a better, cheaper, through service it is quite obvious that those with the subsidy in the area make sure that the so called ‘Open Access Arrangement’ is really a ‘Controlled Access Arrangement’ to routes, passengers, stations. With this control the subsidised companies effectively control the revenue of the ‘New Kid on the Block’ and ultimately their profitably.
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This has gone far beyond the realms of satire and farce into the wilder and stranger area of surrealism.
The “brave little independent” Wrexham & Shropshire company was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn – who also own the competing (and state-subsidised) Arriva Trains Wales and Chiltern Railways franchises.
Add the two other competitors (Virgin Trains and London Midland) and who knows what is really going on?
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For the record the other ‘open access’ companies are 1. First Hull Trains, which was a joint venture between Renaissance Trains and GB Railways to become Hull Trains which eventually was bought out by the FirstGroup to become First Hull Trains. 2. Grand Central which was formed in the early 1990’s then bought by the Fraser Eagle Group, which in turn was bought by a private equity group. Those two operate on the Eastern side of the country without losses, now which subsidy rich companies don’t operate in that region?
The argument is not that the little Wrexham & Shropshire was on its own, we all knew that it was part of DB Regio which is a subsidiary Deutsche Bahn AG who operates German Railways. However the W&S as we all know was not government subsided and appeared to have trouble from UK subsided companies when it came to stations, routes, passenger access and when they seemed to be making a go of it. Rather more ‘controlled access’ than ‘open access’.
Now are we expecting a German company or the German State to give a subsidy to W&S to allow continuation of the service? Would it not have been fairer to allow the non subsidy ‘open access’ true ‘open access’ whilst the subsidy rich operators gave way to allow W&S to continue to operate and develope an excellent service?
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Although it started as an independent operating without subsidy, its still a bit rich that the Rail Regulator / Monopolies and Mergers allowed this open access service provider to pass into the hands of the subsidy rich competition and curtailed. The only losers are the travailing public – again.
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What must be remembered is although the Wrexham & Shropshire was at its commencement an independent rail operator; it became a byword for a through service, a level of service and in customer recognised reports a premier service even when ownership changed. Its final owner even with its grip on rail services and subsidies appeared not even willing to maintain a through London service for the region. One wonders if the final owner found that the excellent levels of customer service by the W&S cast a shadow of excellence over the rest of the group’s passenger operations and that of other providers in the region that could not be equalled. By removing the W&S service, it appears that the ‘excellence bar’ has been dramatically lowered.
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