LNER is back !!

General UK Railway Discussion and questions.
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Nexusdj
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LNER is back !!

Post by Nexusdj »

Another East coast franchise has failed and is to be re-nationalised again on the 24th June 2018 .
Out go Virgin and Stagecoach and in comes the London and North East Railway or LNER for short .

BBC :http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44142258

DFT :https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... ail-update

LNER website : http://www.lnerailway.co.uk/

IEP's in apple green and teak ..... ;)
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by Briggsy »

Give it a year, then they'll let it go to the highest bidder (one of the usual suspects and / or chums of the Tories) - then it'll be ran into the ground again at taxpayer expense, bailed out again at taxpayer expense, then once its making the country some money, it'll be flogged off again in the usual never ending circle.
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by cyberdonblue »

Briggsy wrote:Give it a year, then they'll let it go to the highest bidder (one of the usual suspects and / or chums of the Tories)...
:lol: They've already stated that Virgin and Stage Coach WILL NOT be banned from bidding for any future franchises. You couldn't make it up, could you? If those two signed a contract then the government should say, "Cough up the money you promised the taxpayer or get out of town!"

The talk now is of bringing the East Coast back into public ownership (where it was happily making a profit for the taxpayer before the crooks intervened) until 2020 and then farming it out under another fiddle that they propose to call a "Public/Private Partnership." You know the one. It's where the public pay for it and the private company walks off with all the money. :o

And they call the people in prison crooks :roll:

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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by PFX »

I'd love to see the route staying in public ownership. It operated successfully during its last period under DoT control. Isn't this the 3rd time it's been given up by the private sector? That surely says they are all making hugely unrealistic bids, over promising and under delivering, at least in terms of their own profit margins.
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by cyberdonblue »

And they're obviously not being held to the contracts that they bid for and signed otherwise they'd be broke. Seems to me it's, "Think of a number, whisper it to the government, rake in as much taxpayers cash as you possibly can and then say you got your numbers wrong so you're going home to Mommy so can Joe Public pick up the tab for the rest of it?"

They make me sick. They don't even hide their contempt for the taxpayer anymore.

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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by blackwatch13 »

L et's
N ationalise
E very
R oute
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by TheGamingBloke »

blackwatch13 wrote:L et's
N ationalise
E very
R oute
Probably what it stands for in the first place :lol:
Woah, this text is really big!

Hey, this text is really small! :lol:
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by davies_mike57 »

Jolly good show with the LNER decision.
Lets hope that they look after and bring their customers and staff first, retaining jobs is important for economical growth.
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by rjhowie »

So I take it that Briggsy thinks as he mentions pals of the Noires re private his pals the Labour will solve the problem?!

I remember practically that nationalisation was most certainly not the paragon of virtue and people were fed up with it. One has to accept there are issues but far more people use the railways now than in Briggsy's wonderful out of date dream! :lol:
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by Shippy2013 »

I think what Biggsy is trying to say is. This whole privatisation thing is a mess....

You get private companies/huge corporations putting in vastly over exaggerated bids to run the franchises. Promising: New Trains, Extra Services.... Bla Bla Bla bla. The DFT take it all in like some of these older vulnerable people you see conned into buying expensive health chairs or double glazing on watchdog. The difference being, when these companies realise there bud was vastly over ambitious it’s not the that end up bailing out the failed system, it’s the tax payers. The big companies/corporations just walk away and are then free to come back and do it all over again. A complete joke and as biggsy said a never ending circle.



Just re nationalise and take out the middle man......


But yes it’s not that simple and yes BR was a huge lumbering giant that to had its major failings, I don’t think there is a happy medium. But maybe a nationalised railway regulated by both government and private investors. The government run the railway as a whole but private companies provide investment and take a percentage of revenue. I don’t know....
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by cyberdonblue »

The real con is that there are NO privatised railways in this country. The taxpayer pays for it all! If these so-called private companies were made to stand on their own two feet like proper private companies do - without the huge government subsidies that they get (bigger than B.R. EVER got) - they would all disappear within a week.

The British car industry went to the wall with a whimper because the government refused to give them any financial backing to keep them alive. Why? Because they couldn't be bothered to address the mass corruption within the management of the industry at that time and also probably because there was no "kick-back" in it for them. It was far too big to carve up amongst their richest mates by then too. Instead, they surrendered it to the gansters in Brussels and probably got a nice fat wad for doing so. Even after BMW had stolen everything worth having from the Longbridge site (the Mini, the Rover V8 engine which they'd been trying to buy for decades, and a whole load of valuable R & D to say the least,) the government refused to help save the place and the thousands of jobs that went down the toilet as a result of its collapse. How it collapsed should have brought about a criminal inquiry, but the rich men that walked off with everybody's pensions never even broke into a sweat when a few questions were eventually asked. Once again, it was allowed to quietly slip away into oblivion. Nobody does corruption quite like the British (and then these people have the audacity to point the finger at some of the African or Arab nations ha ha ha!)

British industry as a whole was given away to Brussels in the name of progress and a common market for all. Coal, steel, cars, ship building, clothing manufacturing. All massive industries employing thousands of British people for a hundred years and more. It all went down the toilet. People said to the Witch called Thatcher at the time, "When you've finished selling all of the family silver where do we go next?" She had no answers and didn't care anyway. She wasn't going to be penniless and homeless.

If B.R. had been given anything like the kind of money that is being handed out today we would have the finest railway system in the World BAR NONE! Why? Because when you take away the rich, boozey, old and over paid board members of the old B.R. regime (and the politicians with their dirty hands enjoying the high life at taxpayers expense) the real railwaymen were legendary. No man or woman walked away from the job when it was in turmoil. Everybody pulled their weight when things went wrong - not like today! Railway workshops at Doncaster, Derby, Swindon, Crewe and many others besides, were the finest and most skilled of their kind. Of course they were! We invented bloody railways and the skills learned by those pioneers through bitter experience were passed on to the generations that followed. This country led the World in engineering skills because of it. It mattered not a jot, however, to the rich and powerful. All they could see were the £ signs.

Today, you have a bunch of ex-Air Force, ex-police, ex-army, ex any job where you do exactly as you're told, doing the job of train drivers. For what they do they are vastly OVERPAID. Having spoken to some of my ex-colleagues who are driver instructors now, I wouldn't trust the majority of these newcomers to drive a nail into a piece of wood - but then these modern Units are virtually idiot proof anyway, thank the gods. These people are contracted to work 4 days a week (35 hours.) The majority of them will not work a minute longer (because £50,000 a year says they don't need to.) They have no loyalty unto anyone but themselves.

I'm so glad that I'm drifting into the twighlight years of my existence now because there is little or no loyalty of any kind in this life anymore - not just on the railway. It's everyman for himself these days it seems - despite the false outpouring of "grief" when something of an islamic nature occurs. A lot of these younger people today have had it all handed to them on a plate. That sounds insulting, I know, but it's not meant to be. It's just how it is and us parents and grandparents are proud to be able to have made it so. It means that we behaved correctly and fought for the right things. However, the young don't know poverty first hand like we did. They believe the government propoganda that Unions are bad and that pensioners are milking the system to the detriment of the young. Well, sit back and wait folks; because when they've finished giving back to the rich bosses everything that the hard working men and women of this country before them fought for, these youngsters and the children of these youngsters are going to have to fight the same battles we fought all over again. The trouble is, it will be even harder for you young people then because the rich and powerful no longer need you. Your fathers and your grandfathers, and all those before, invented automation - and more recently computers. You don't think for one minute, do you, that those in power are going to pay you to sit at home and enjoy yourself?

Cheers

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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by rjhowie »

Shippy2013 you have just drifted into the kind of crowd response when a problem on railways comes up and shout for the State being in sole charge. Most people who think carefully will remember that BR was not that brilliant and it did not matter which of the two main parties were in office. When the many closures came in under Beeching (some were right as it happens and others a bit sad) the opposition in parliament condemned that state of affairs and said when in power they would bring much back. Did they? No they did sod all no matter how many times in power. The hard fact is that there are massive more people using the railways than under BR and a challenge. Whether we have rail run by the government or the alternaive we have had challenges but that the great numbers still tell us something that wasn't told in BR days. Cute how quickly memories fade.......
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by Shippy2013 »

Rjhowie. If you read the last part of my post you would see that I admit BR had massive problems too.

There is no easy solution. All I was saying is that the current franchise system stinks of corruption and back handers. It needs to change but how I or nobody knows.

As for all the closures under the beeching act yes most were probably justified. Hundreds of miles of single track branch lines to villages with small populations that the then growing road network was better suited to handle and were never going to be good business sense, The biggest mistakes I reckon were the GC (this signed the death warrant for the Woodhead later really), the Derbyshire and Staffordshire Extension from Nottingham to Burton via Derby Friargate (with the population in the Midlands know that line would have been a huge boost to the local commuter transport system) the Northern route through Devon, the Border line (ok this is now coming back) and the east west link Again being re opened. Just imagine if the 2nd beeching report hadn’t been threw out. That was even more drastic.
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by rjhowie »

Fair view reply - part from the out of place corruption and backhander view which detracts a bit from your stance. Up here in Scotland we too had many lines which had unfortunately passed their days. Many moons ago i had been on a couple of them and realised that there were routes that had passed their time and I have to include city suburban like here in Glasgow. A railway company here which had recently built s suburban line near the Clyde kicked up when the city electrified it's very extensive tramway around 1900. It sadly could not compete but dragged on for decades friom private the State run and dead.

Although there are faults than can be loaded today just like Nationalising days the outstanding feature is the hard truth fact that more people still use rail than BR days. Did not matter who was in power rail was tolerated! Rail moans in BR time went away beyond the stale sandwiches jokes and passengers no increased as now. Since de-nationalising we have had 4 lines re-opened here one electric and now another presently getting the same put in.
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Re: LNER is back !!

Post by klambert »

rjhowie wrote:
Although there are faults than can be loaded today just like Nationalising days the outstanding feature is the hard truth fact that more people still use rail than BR days.
Ah a common myth which is due to rising car ownership causing roads to be intolerably congested, this too us a hard truth, this is a global trend which is occurring regardless of whether the railways are state owned or not. Rail ridership would've increased just as much if not more, if under the 'bad old days' of British Rail'.

Incidentally rjhowie, how would you propose a solution to rail private/public ownership?
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