High-speed rail: A £250m lesson for Britain's rail enthusiasts

The Telegraph ^ | 1/7/2012 | Andrew Gilligan

[BfloGuy]

As the Government prepares to give the go-ahead to its hugely controversial high-speed train project, its closest equivalent in Europe has had to be saved from bankruptcy with a £250 million government bailout.

The new “Fyra” high-speed service in the Netherlands — opened just two years ago — is close to financial collapse with passengers shunning its premium fares and trains running up to 85 per cent empty.

The line, between Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Breda, cost taxpayers more than £7 billion to build but is losing £320,000 a day amid disastrous levels of patronage.

A Dutch passenger pressure group, Voor Beter OV (For Better Public Transport), is now taking the national rail operator to the Netherlands’ competition tribunal after it slowed down services on the regular network in an apparent attempt to drive passengers on to the high-speed line.

“The high-speed line has been a very, very bad result for taxpayers and passengers,” said Rikus Spithorst, VBOV’s spokesman.

“The taxpayer paid for it and the idea was that the money would come back from the train company. But that isn’t going to happen.”

[wolfman23601]

I didn’t know that about the Greeks. How were they powered, oxen?

[pepperdog]

Bookmark

[bray]

Willy is working on the Obozo Reelection campaign and doesn’t have time for his Choo Choos anymore.

Pray for America

[BfloGuy]

Now we can't knock them down at all because NOBODY IS DEFENDING THEM.

It does take a lot of the fun out of it.

I still like to post about trains, though, because I really love them. I took Eurostar from London to Paris about a decade ago and it was a spectacular ride. And to be dropped off right in cental Paris was incredibly convenient for a tourist.

But my British friends would just put their cars on a ferry and drive to France. The liberals have discovered, much to their chagrin, that the Europeans -- as soon as they grew wealthy enough -- began to prefer cars just as much as we ignorant Americans.

I'd love to see some private passenger railroad development, but capital is scarce and there are much more profitable uses for it.

[fella]

prices have to be high because kickbacks to politicians are really expensive.

[muawiyah]

The capital intensive nature of rail was, of course, the first problem the Greeks encountered with the first railway.

Regarding how they moved, that'd be by oxen AND slaves AND poor guys needing a drachma or two.

The Chinese may well have beaten the Greeks to the punch with some of the ways they devised to move freight around rapids on the Grand Canal. This project was hundreds of years old when the Greeks built their first railroad but it wasn't until the 6th Century AD that someone thought to build locks that would let the water lower and raise the cargo ships. That idea swept the ancient world with the speed of a galloping Mongolian horse in the 12th century sounding out the end of the Dark Ages and the return of international commerce and life's luxuries.

[SunkenCiv]

IOW, the subsidy is in the form of taxes on fuel.

[muawiyah]

After having a BF (B=brain) I had to look up "IOW" ~ and that would be about it FOR PRIVATELY OWNED RAIL.

For state owned rail avoidance of tax on fuel or energy would simply be a pass through on the governmental budget if government also owned the fuel or the power plants or dams.

Last evening I was digging through some Baptist/Christian Church hymns and ran into some Russian church groups singing them. That always leads to Transiberian Express Music, then to the Transiberian Railroad.

Something I'd never noticed before is that the line from Moscow to Irkutsk, on the Moscow Peking line, is ELECTRIFIED! I opened up a number of different videos on that line and could not find any oil fired engines anywhere. Either the Russians have electrified the system or there are no videos of the non-electrified portions.

Socialist theories of ownership and utility of production probably get in the way of any rational understanding of what goes on with a publicly owned rail system, particularly if it's handling both profitable goods and unprofitable people.

Suffice it to say, at the end of WWII, railroads were being put back into shape quickly ~ streets and major thoroughfare roads weren't.

Folks thought transport and travel were sufficiently important to fix the rails.

[SunkenCiv]

In the case of the USSR (particularly right after WWII) rail is a convenient way to keep strict gubmint control over people’s movements in a police state. Must have made the whole works feel like Sim City to Stalin, who is known for cutting off food and fuel to regions he wanted to starve out — a quick and easy solution to a nationwide food shortage is to make sure everyone else eats, and choosing a random group to condemn as counterrevolutionary.

[muawiyah]

Roads, per se, have that characteristic.

[bert]

-——particularly right after WWII——

As recent as 1990 or so there were not roads adequate to support a tourism industry. Those wishing to visit places out of Moscow or Petrograd either went on the river or on the train.

Those who chose the river cruise were at times faced with poor food because the place they stopped had not yet received the food drop meant to have been delivered in advance by rail.

I’m guessing air planes have contributed but I have no evidence of a road network worth a damn to this day.