Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The end of the line for the rail franchise fiasco

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Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of the travelling public might say it should long ago have been put out of its — and, more pertinently, their — misery. The complex scheme to privatise British Rail launched by the Major government in 1993 defied those who said it couldn’t be done and was designed by the Treasury to maximise proceeds to itself. In doing so, it fractured the industry into a myriad of separate owners, operators and service providers that rarely worked in harmony or created competition for the benefit of users.

The consequences of this structural fiasco were as random as they were unsatisfactory. Unintended fortunes were conferred on owners of obscure rolling-stock leasing companies. Railtrack, the company created to own lines, land and stations, was confiscated by the Labour government. The whole system was perpetually hobbled by contract disputes. As for franchisees, the rule — I wrote a long time ago — seemed to be that ‘the more your passengers like you, the less likely you are to survive’. The best, GNER on the East Coast main line, was one of the first to fail. The Wrexham & Shropshire service from Marylebone, loved by those who discovered it, was barged out by bigger players in less than three years.

And vice versa: in an example of how capitalism really isn’t supposed to work, if you were managing to extract profits from this flawed system, the more likely it was that travellers — especially southern commuters — hated you with a passion. Some struggling franchisees simply handed back their contracts while others were belatedly sacked for incompetence. Large parts of the system ended up owned not by private investors but by foreign taxpayers through German, French and even Chinese state rail companies.

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