On the wrong track

If you’re Canadian, the odds are pretty good that when you go to another country, you’re going to find better train service than you do at home.

We’re just back from England where the trains and the Underground became so much a part of our day that we were close to taking them for granted. It’s a good feeling and although I can understand running to catch a train if you have an appointment or are on your way to work, for us, well . . . we hoped to catch the train but if we didn’t, another one would soon be along.

(Taken from the station near our hotel.)

We travelled to France – under the Channel – by Eurostar and when we arrived, we also took advantage of France’s rail service.

(Four years ago, we also used trains in Italy, Germany, Belgium and France and had no complaints.)

Now I freely admit that we were there for a pretty short time and I’m sure that people who use the trains day in and day out, year after year, don’t look at the service as positively as I do. I’m also speaking comparatively.

Rail service in Britain has been privatised (I’m spelling it that way out of respect) and this process has been so complex that I won’t try to explain it. You can imagine though, trying to sell off the railways in bits and pieces – how to do it? By geography? By the age of the rails and the rolling stock? By how busy the service is?

To this day, the privatisation causes problems as in some places, just as an example, the rails and the rolling stock are owned by different companies. In a for-profit system, this can compromise safety as each company plays repairs off the other. There have been serious accidents, including a number of fatalities.

At one point after the privatisation, three of the lines went bankrupt and were re-nationalized. It’s nice to shatter the always-trotted-out myth that the private sector always runs things better than the public sector. It’s not true, of course, and in this case, after the public sector took over, the lines were safer and more efficient than their private counterparts.

I have to emphasize that the positive impression of the train service that I have is in comparison to home and that the people who use it regularly would probably guffaw reading this.

I did enjoy my train experiences though. What can I say?

(The platform that we used daily.)

In 1993, The Independent did some background on the issues around privatisation.

In 2013, The Guardian asks some pointed questions about how it’s all working.

And in 2015, Metro.UK slams the system for high fares, poor service.

So what do I know? It’s still better than home but I’d be happier if the railway system were a publicly-owned service.