Die Verstaatlichung der Schienen ist hier. Wird es unsere Züge tatsächlich verbessern?

As far as I’m aware, Northern is still widely regarded as a total pile of shit, crap trains, slow, late, cancellations, and expensive. And they were nationalised over five years ago.

As a socialist, I’m all for nationalisation of key national industries, but you can’t just half-arse it and hope everything works out well.

At the moment nationalised train companies seem worse than British Rail in its last years, when it was being deliberately underfunded and run into the ground to pave the way for privatisation. So that’s saying something.

Price will not change as long as the strike goes on and on

Prices are never going down. I don’t know who needs to hear this but if you believe rail, energy, food, water, rent prices etc are ever coming down, they won’t. It doesn’t matter what happens. You could privatise all water companies, take back all housing stock from housing associations and make them council owned again, it won’t bring prices down.

The biggest issue with British railways is the high cost and nationalisation will not do anything about that.

Just wait until they stop giving drivers annual pay rises, then you’ll see a shit service

It might if it was all one single national entity. Right now it’s all fragmented so there’s no benefit. If it could be unified then the opportunity opens up for fair fare reform and make rail pricing make sense. Making it non-profit would mean the incentive to keep gouging communiters goes alway.

I wonder how much things would be improved if we just deleted roscos, and instead either the trains themselves were nationalised or just owned by the rail operators. It seems to me they extract a lot of money while adding no value whatsoever.

I doubt it will make much difference – it won’t be owned by private companies, but they will pick up the contracts for running it albeit on a budget

I’m hopeful, however the bar is so low that the tunnelling project required to reach it would take 20 years and cost the taxpayer £100 billion. 

This country is forever going to be behind on rail until we upgrade our network to double decker trains like the rest of Europe and it won’t ever happen because the government is fully focused on short term obtainable goals for quick political points.

Yes it’s outdated and Victorian but every PC gamer knows, you can’t just show horn a solution to make your games run better with a blatantly obvious bottleneck. Eventually an upgrade will be required.

The UK’s rail system struggles with several points:

– Lines at or near the limit of their capacity with few or no major upgrades or new lines being built. The reactivation of old lines is slow and sparse.
– The operators, owners of the trains and people responsible for the tracks are all different organisations with their own unique co-coordination struggles.
– A lot of tech is ancient and/or prone to failure, sometimes due to maintenance issues because gotta save money. It’s so funny to me how the Cambrian Main Line has more modern signalling than almost anywhere else and it’s still just level 1 ETCS and feels old again.
– There’s shareholders taking money out of everything on top of already needing to make revenue for profit margins and the marketing budgets.
– Struggles with staff trying to retain jobs, improve conditions and keep pay up with inflation (particularly the staff that are NOT drivers).
– Plus MANY more I haven’t mentioned, e.g. the way operators obtain contracts and the passenger numbers they project vs. what they actually achieve.

Nationalising can tackle some of these issues with varying degrees of effectivity, however as long as it’s not a full commitment to complete takeover and staggering investment (like building the entire original HS2 plan), it will not yield the promised results.

But Reddit told me nationalisation was a silver bullet…