There are to be no rail reopenings considered except at local authority level for the next seven years, the electrification decision has been postponed again, there will be no decision on a new north-south high speed line until 2012 at the earliest, and there is little forward thinking and guidance from the Department for Transport in these matters. It, therefore, comes, also, as no surprise that ‘investment’ in roads is talked about quite a lot.

The Times ran a very interesting article detailing this phenomenum: the road network is growing fifteen times faster than the railway network. According to The Times, “In five of the past eleven years, no track was added to the domestic rail network, and in the peak years for rail growth, in 2001 and 2002, the network grew by only six miles a year.” Reopenings have happened in Wales and Scotland, however. The Highways Agency has 40 new projects in the planning stages and the only seriously considered railway project is Crossrail which only benefits London and the surrounding area.

It may come as another surprise that London is already quite well served by railway connections. What about the rest of the country? As usual, it seems like it doesn’t exist or is not of sufficient importance. A very sad situation. This is despite the fact that rail passenger miles have increased by fifty per cent compared to twelve per cent for roads.

This is hot on the heels of the announcement that BAA wishes to build a second runway at Stanstead and the third runway at Heathrow seems to be a given making domestic flying even more of an option. Flybe announced several new domestic routes recently all of which, there is no doubt, will cost less than the equivalent train journeys.

As the BBC recently highlighted in one of their news reports, it is now cheaper for two people to take a taxi from Bristol to London during peak hours as it costs £137 for a return ticket on the day, if you happen to have to attend an important business event in London, or some other short notice event. Similar prices open up opportunities for airlines to run fifty thousand seats between Manchester and London, despite train services operating every thirty minutes.

The changes to CrossCountry have enabled domestic flights to take off as there have been a massive reduction in the number of through trains to many destinations, almost doubling the duration of some journeys. It is quite absurd that it takes eight hours from Preston to Penzance, for example – and for quite a price too! Due to this, there are now 1,200 domestic flights per day, or 454,000 per year offering something in the region of fourty million seats. This is compared with thirty million in 2001.

The changes to CrossCountry and the changes to the portion now served by First Transpennine Express are starting to really affect people’s choice in how they travel. It seems absurd that a three car commuter train is operating InterCity services that people could be on for up to five hours from Manchester to Glasgow or Edinburgh. These trains are not suitable for such journeys and consequently when they reach top speed they feel like they are going to come off the track, the journey is horrendous according to some reports.

These problems are not going to go away over night. But what can we, the taxpayer and passenger, do about it? The answer is as usual: not a damn thing.

There are, of course, many who are not and cast assertions about a wide range of issues affecting the railway companies today.

We sometimes find commentary in response to articles in various corners of the internet so way off the mark that it just has to be amusing – otherwise you’d cry. Here’s our take on some of the more wild comments.

“The only way an organisation like this will understand their incompetence is by sacking the senior responsible personnel and having ALL bonus payments linked to independently reviewed performance. ”

This is quite an interesting concept. One wonders how it is possible to run anything when you sack everyone responsible for everything that went wrong at Rugby and Liverpool Street. In fact, since this comes up so much in response to project failure, people would be being sacked left, right and centre and you’d never find anyone to run the railway network, especially with the problems of recruiting skilled engineers and project managers in the United Kingdom today.

“Friends of the Earth and co, take note. Planning a holiday around rail travel is impossible!”

This, we assume, is a shot at environmental groups for justification for flying from Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool to London. There are always alternative routes available when there is madness going on at Rugby. So, this is not strictly true.

We hardly think this is a good reason for almost half a million domestic flights this year with all of the sad environmental damage that causes. That certainly makes a complete mockery of the government saying it wants to reduce carbon emissions. However, it has to be recognised that these flights are, in fact, cheaper, so it’s to be understood why people fly when people can’t book advance tickets for one reason or another. ATOC take note – £130 for a single ticket to London from Preston, for example, is just ridiculous.

“They should fine them a million a day and keep doing it until they guarantee that they will carry out all engineering work during the night when no trains are running and so no network closedowns are needed at all.”

This is an interesting concept. Instead of £14m being removed from the railway improvement budgets and returned to the treasury for them to spend on new desks and pens, let’s return £356m instead! Maybe then we can have a complete termination of the West Coast Route Modernisation programme and go back to the old BR trains for long distance journeys taking four hours for 250 miles instead of two. That has to be good for the railways, right?

“As the government/taxpayer pays the fine why not make the fine £1Trillion. That would impress the fools that that don’t notice what is going on and still would make no differrence financially.”

Another interesting concept, that fining Network Rail £1 trillion would make no difference. Actually, you may as well dismantle the entire railway network at that point because it would be about a thousand years in the red. This of course assumes that fines levied on Network Rail return to it later. The money, however, transfers to the treasury and is not available to Network Rail any longer.

“The West Coast line isn’t situated to the south of Birmingham.”

Really? This is a new one on us. Perhaps London has moved a hundred miles north after the earthquake we had recently but somehow possibly not! Just to clear up any doubt, there are plenty of significant towns and cities served by the West Coast Mainline south of Birmingham.

“I love seeing train compnaies suffer…. hey charge ridicoulous prices for a train journey … and then they wonder why people dont use public transport….. aha… i hopeFirst Capital Connect and Midlane Mainline suffer aswell…. and the employees of these companies get wages around the figure of 30k – 40k (if not more) a year… and this is all from charging stupidly HIGH Prices…. ood on you watchdog, and keep up the good work.”

This is certainly an interesting take on the railway network. Now, unless we have been sleeping under a rock recently, we weren’t aware that Network Rail charges anything for train journeys. This is, primarily, because they don’t run any! Hating to be the bearer of bad news to this particular commentator, First Capital Connect and Midlane [sic] Mainline will not be being fined for overrunning engineering works since they had no part in them – they run trains, not track. Also, since Midland Mainline no longer exist, fining them would present a few problems.

“Simple solution, scrap network rail and let the train operators run and maintain their own lines and infrastructure like we had pre nationalisation.”

Simple solutions are sadly not always the best. How would this particular commentator decide which of the twelve or so Train Operating Companies would be working on the West Coast Mainline this weekend that use the line? Instead of one infrastructure company making all of the profit for reinvestment into the railway, there would be a huge melee and we seriously doubt anything would get done this side of the apocalypse. Reading a bit of railway history would also inform that this didn’t often work to passenger’s benefit in the past.

“The directors and executives should be fined personally or imprisoned.”

Imprisoned for engineering overruns? We think that’s a little harsh! We’re not quite in China, just yet.

That completes this article, we hoped you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed writing it!