Local businesses may run rural railway lines
More than 1,300 miles of rural rail lines could be handed over to local businesses or voluntary groups in an effort to reduce their current Treasury subsidy of £200 million a year.
The Government’s Strategic Rail Authority published plans yesterday for “community development” of 60 loss-making branch lines across England and Wales, but refused to exclude the possibility that some might close.
More on this on the SRA’s own site here.
I think this is an idea whose time has come. On my visits to Switzerland I’ve travelled on many of the ‘private’ railways that aren’t a part of the Swiss Federal Railways network. Many of these are short local lines in rural areas, but some are quite extensive networks including some busy commuter lines. One (the BLS) even includes a section of a major international through route. Like all Swiss railways, they’re efficiently and smartly run.
The advantage of these little local lines is that they’re under local management, and local people feel enought of a sense of ownership they wouldn’t have if their line was an remote part of a large network . They also control their own resources (staff and rolling stock) So they don’t have gaping holes in the timetable at what should have been a busy time of day because someone at the other end of the country decides the unit and crew need to be used on a commuter run on another line. (Link from Transport Blog)
I’m 50/50 on this, it could work, but I think there are more sensible solutions for some situations…
For example, in my area why not keep the Exmouth, Barnstaple and Paignton stopping services in one local “pool” based at Exeter, and from that hub develop Honiton, Okehampton, and maybe even Bideford and Tavistock services as well, sort of as a local “metro” service. (Taking over Pinhoe, Whimple and Feniton from SWT ought to improve journey times on the Wat-Exe service as well)
This would give you through running between the routes (as happens at the moment), whereas just having one branch (Barnstaple fits the quoted profile most closely) in a micro franchise would effectively cut it off from the rest of the area network.
Incidentally, it was proposed a few years back to join up the Exeter hub local routes with SWT’s diesel operated routes to make a new franchise, I think that could have been quite an interesting option, and would have been far better for the local network than “Supposedly Greater Western”
Martyn
A lot of Swiss private railway companies don’t just run a single branch but several interconnected lines; for example, the GFM (Gruyere Friebourg Morat) network include one meandering metre gauge line, two separate (and not connected) standard gauge branches, and a whole host of bus routes.
Some companies also have running powers over SBB main lines, such as the RM (which runs a quite extensive network of secondanty routes in Canton Bern) running into Luzern.
That sort of thing could work, but too often microfranchising seems to be based on a theory of running branches singly.
That only works until your unit needs to go for maintainence, or suffers a failure.
It would be horribly ineficient to have two units based on every branch to cover, but if you did “clusters” of branches then you could work up an efficient fleet which includes adequate maintainence/failure cover without wasting the resources.