links for 2008-01-08

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One response to “links for 2008-01-08”

  1. Re: Bring back BR.

    I don’t know if you listened to Broadcasting House on Sunday but there was an item on there on this subject but from a different view point.

    They had an ex-BR signalman on there who pointed out another problem with the whole fragmentation of the railway system. During the BR era if a train broke down the signalman could get a rescue loco onto the site and have the blockage cleared within 15 minutes. Today, because the track operation and the rolling stock are operated separately he can’t. i.e. it’s up to the train operator to remove the blockage on the line and the train operators will generally not have spare locos hanging around. Actually, the passenger operators will not have ANY locos as they’re exclusively used by the frieght operators, e.g. EWS, and so there’s no rescue service for broken down trains.

    You can blame all of this on John Major. The whole of the rail privatisation was devised over one weekend at Chequers by a subset of the then cabinet of which none had any knowledge or experience of any form of transport (other than possibly driving their car). It was rushed through so as to make sure that it was a fate accomple by the time of any subsequent election when Labour might get in. Total madness!

    (As was the 2 year embargo on any maintenance, including critical safety maintenance, previous to the sale of Railtrack so as to make the figures look good to the City.)

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