Michael Holden | 18 September 2024
Arriva Group has published its recommendations to the UK Government on how using its five-step plan can help deliver an urgent reform.
Accelerating The Government’s Ambition To Fix Britain’s Railways aims to kick-start improvements that could work alongside the longer-term changes that the Government wants to deliver.
Arriva says that a new national fleet capacity strategy will help to reduce passenger overcrowding journeys by using underused trains.
An overhaul to timetabling is also needed, allowing for quicker and more effective decision-making that reflects passenger demand.
Arriva currently have the London Overground concession as well as Arriva Rail London, Chiltern Railways, Grand Central and CrossCountry and says that it is the only group to have experience with all contract types currently in use.
“The last few years have been a challenging time for the British railway – but now is the time for optimistic, forward-looking change under a new Government. There is a real opportunity to marry long-term structural reform, which Labour has set out, with further short-term improvements for passengers and the taxpayer. Our proposals set out a series of crucial steps for the Government to help deliver on that promise, accelerate their ambition to fix Britain’s railways, deliver tangible change for passengers, and realise the railway’s potential as an engine of economic growth”.
- David Brown, Managing Director of Arriva UK Trains
Comment:
Sounds interesting from one such as Arriva who’s at the deep end of pax rail. Arriva has the pedigree and has earned its spurs to be taken seriously. Owned by German publicly owned Deutsche Bahn, it operates a TfL concession of the London Overground, the DfT franchises of Chiltern Railways and CrossCountry, and is an open access operator of Grand Central.
Now, the devil’s always in the detail and how it aligns with the aspirations of other stakeholders but everyone comes at a problem from a different perspective, most likely self preservative.
“Underused trains” is an interesting reference and more effective timetabling may be easier said than done but given where we are, all bets must be off.
Altogether, it boils down to how to get more people on trains when they don’t particularly want to travel or would rather by other means, and how to put more trains on the track at peak times given line capacity limitations.
Solving the latter would likely exacerbate the former as you would have likely increased the number of trains that would be “underused” during the off peak. Either way, the economics must work. Perhaps Arriva’s got a silver bullet with its national fleet idea and technology may no doubt help.
Notwithstanding, a lot will fall on whether we go back to a vertically integrated railway industry or separated as we are or the fudge that politicians like to call “closer integration” but neither here nor there. Either way, it would depend on who is running the trains and the incentives for efficiency. What experience has taught is that the private sector is perceived as greedy, funneling the benefits to its shareholders only, whereas the public sector is perceived as less efficient and wasteful though its workers appear better aligned with consumers. So when benefits flow to railway workers, users benefit as a collateral. Where the problem arises is where the industry goes into decline due to inefficiency perhaps due to the absence of competition which the public sector is associated with. This was why we privatised the railway in the first place. So what has changed?
The corollary is that many of the operators in the UK are supposedly efficient foreign public sector owned operators DB, Trenitalia, MTR, … So are we missing something or is there a teachable moment here?