UK west coast main line fiasco

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Oberon if it was broken up because it was a money pit doesn't the fact that seperated it is a bigger money pit show that the break up wasn't the solution.
Remaking a four system system negates the benefits of an integrated system.
Given the huge increase in money thrown into it plus the huge buybacks due to complete failure shouldn't you be able to say something other than......but truth be told the service was no better or worse than it is today, in fact it was probably slightly worse....... as a huge increasing expenditure over that time period shouldn't deliver a possibly slight sort of maybe improvement

Indeed, and I can't disagree with you at all, and in an ideal world I'd love to see BR come back, although for me it'd be more for nostalgia reasons than anything else, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Even when BR was around the government was loathe to give it the money it needed to perform at its full potential, certainly the British government spent a lot less on the rail network than the French or German governments of the time.
A case in point is the APT project and the failure there-of. The APT was one of the most advanced trains to run on British metals at the time, it was the most powerful passenger train as well, enabling it to set a UK rail speed record that held for 23 years. However it suffered from technical faults which plagued the project throughout its testing period...however instead of sticking with it and ironing those bugs out, the whole project was cancelled and the bogie designs sold to Fiat, who stuck with it, incorporated it into their tilting train design...and then sold it back to us twenty years later in the Pendolinos that are running on the WCML now.
If APT had been allowed to run its full course, we could have had 140mph services on the WCML twenty years early, furthermore it would have been a better service than the Pendolinos today because the APT sets had more carriages to them (14 to the Pendolinos 11) and the APT was originally designed to go faster than the Pendolino (155mph to the Pendolinos 140mph). However, again, the government was reluctant to put in the money needed for both the APT project to continue, and to upgrade the WCML to the standard needed for 140-150mph running. Like TSR-2 in the military, we created an advanced machine that could have put us on a level with the continent but it was canned due to lack of government funding.
Now, with this age of austerity and government spending cutbacks, do you really think the government would be willing to take on such a massive spending project as the rail network? And even if it did, do you think it would spend more on it than the current operators do?
I didn't like privatisation when it was announced, and I still don't like it, but I can't honestly see the government spending any more money than the private companies have on the rail network, if anything it would probably try to spend less, because at the end of the day, what the government and the private companies have in common is that they tried to run the railways for profit and not just for service and availability, and when the government couldn't do that, it tried different schemes (like sectorisation) and when that didn't work it flogged them.
I hear where you're coming from Tribesman, I honestly do, and as someone who grew up in the era of BR Blue/Grey and Network South-East, I would dearly love a return to the days of BR...curly sandwiches and all, but realistically I don't see any government, Tory or Labour, willing to shoulder that cost and responsibility.