Railways: privatise or nationalise?

[Pienaar's gloves]

Tomorrow morning the East Coast Inter City line will pass back into private ownership, to be 90% owned by Stagecoach and 10% by Virgin. It will be branded as Virgin and their trains will eventually adopt Virgin livery.

http://news.sky.com/story/1435872/unions-protest-as-east-coast-line-goes-private

There is plenty of debate at the moment as to whether we should be doing just the opposite and nationalising them.

Discuss.

 

[Reidy's Bottle Of Grecian]

Just give me a job on 'em ffs, Northern Rail preferably.

 

[chicoazul]

nationalise EVERYTHING and kick the UKIP bells out of the UK in the process.

Send the bigoted racist trombones to somewhere similar like Israel.

 

[Pienaar's gloves]

Just give me a job on 'em ffs, Northern Rail preferably.

Woeful to deal with as a customer when they cock up, awful old trains too.

 

[Seanjd]

Well, the argument for privatisation is to encourage competition which will drive standards of service higher and prices lower. This clearly hasn't happened, particularly with price. Everyday public transport users are being priced out of going to work on the train and it makes more economic sense to drive a car to work in many instances, which is not right.

Nationalise the railways, keep prices low and create more sustainable jobs.

 

[Tubey]

I'm not automatically against privatising certain things, but the rail is one of those where I believe it should be nationalised, simply because private enterprise on the rails has, in my opinion, seen chronic underinvestment combined with unjustified fare rises.

 

[toffee matt]

Use the car

 

[chicoazul]

The tories promised all these things that quegs with graphs and powerpoints manipulated data and projections to show things would get better.

Instead the average working lid has less money in his pocket, is taxed without pity and the most basic of things are priced upwards so the majority are surviing pay cheque to pay cheque.

The only ones winning from the tories and their privatisation blag are the big companies. Strange that.

And yet some utter weapons amongst you voted them in last time, and will continue to do so again. Or even worse, the UKIP.

 

[Allezfan]

Oh, god. I'm swerving the living hell out of this thread.

 

[Pienaar's gloves]

The tories promised all these things that quegs with graphs and powerpoints manipulated data and projections to show things would get better.

Instead the average working lid has less money in his pocket, is taxed without pity and the most basic of things are priced upwards so the majority are surviing pay cheque to pay cheque.

The only ones winning from the tories and their privatisation blag are the big companies. Strange that.

And yet some utter weapons amongst you voted them in last time, and will continue to do so again. Or even worse, the UKIP.

Spot on that.

Examples of privatisation working for rail users are few and far between, and when it's not working for the big companies then we end up coming in and bailing them out.

 

[Tubey]

I'm from Kirkby - there's more chance of someone on Twitter being in the know about Everton than anyone but Labour winning, so I effectively have no vote.

 

[Azzurri]

Nationalise everything under a Communist government.

 

[Foot Long Hot Dog]

In terms of operational efficiency I'd say leave the actual train operators as private companies.

However, why is it in this country that we view money spent of roads as investment but money spent on rail networks as subsidy?

We need to increase the quality and speed of the rail network, but at the same time reduce the cost, so that it becomes a genuine alternative both in terms of cost and efficiency to the car. At the minute it's way too expensive and it's a bit [Poor language removed], hence the reason most of us seldom use it.

 

[Seanjd]

I think it's amazing how the Deutsch Bahn, the nationalised German transport system, owns Arriva and most of the public transport services in London. Something is very wrong with the privatisation of public transport, when another nationalised service owns it all.

 

[Seanjd]

Tomorrow morning the East Coast Inter City line will pass back into private ownership, to be 90% owned by Stagecoach and 10% by Virgin. It will be branded as Virgin and their trains will eventually adopt Virgin livery.

http://news.sky.com/story/1435872/unions-protest-as-east-coast-line-goes-private

There is plenty of debate at the moment as to whether we should be doing just the opposite and nationalising them.

Discuss.

Nice thread by the way lid, Saturday night was crying out for one of these since the general election thread went quiet.