42 Britain The EconomistAugust 17th 2019
2 surprisingly, many countries on the conti-
nent see the British model as one to copy.
eu rules that came into force in June re-
quire state-owned rail firms to open their
tracks to rivals and legally separate the
management of track and train, as in Brit-
ain. And although British rail-users are fed
up, those elsewhere are crosser still. Only
five eucountries have happier passengers
(and most of them are in countries without
many railway lines).
Britons may scoff at the idea that they
have anything to teach the world about rail-
ways. But they do (see chart). Passenger
numbers have risen by almost 120% since
privatisation, twice the increase in the
next-best big country, Spain. This may be
because other forms of transport have be-
come more wretched: driving has got prici-
er, for instance. Yet anti-car policies have
gone further in other countries, without an
equivalent rail boom. Meanwhile, Britain
has gone from having one of the most acci-
dent-prone railways in Europe to running
its safest.
Average British fares are by some way
the highest in Europe. But European pas-
sengers pay less for their tickets mainly be-
cause they pay more through taxation. In
France and Germany, taxpayers cover al-
most half the cost of train tickets, whereas
the fares Britons pay fully cover the trains’
operating costs. Any argument for increas-
ing subsidies must reckon with the fact
that rail-users are, on average, a richer
bunch than those who use other forms of
transport, such as buses.
Where Britain does badly is in the cru-
cial area of reliability. Although its long-
distance trains are pretty punctual by Euro-
pean standards, its short-haul ones run
late. Britain comes 19th out of 26 European
countries for punctuality on local routes—
and these are the ones that cause most an-
guish, as commuters rely on them to get to
work on time.
The franchising business has also
sometimes proved chaotic. The East Coastmainline franchise has gone bust three
times—in 2007, 2009 and 2018—as opera-
tors overpromised how much they could
pay in track-access charges. Even Eamonn
Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, a liber-
tarian think-tank which pioneered the idea
of separating the management of track and
trains, admits that franchises “didn’t work
out as we intended”.
Faced with these problems, the govern-
ment is thinking about new approaches.
On some long-distance routes it is running
an “open-access” system, under which dif-
ferent companies are allowed to run ser-
vices along the same route in competition
with each other. The idea is to offer passen-
gers a choice, driving down prices and en-
couraging innovation—something that is
discouraged by franchising, in which rail
companies are tied to contracts so detailed
that some even specify how often train car-
pets should be shampooed.
The results are encouraging. On the East
Coast mainline, open-access operators
such as Hull trains and Grand Central now
compete for passengers. Average fares are
lower than on the West Coast mainline,
where the West Midlands trains franchise
for stopping services and the Virgin trains
franchise for express ones hold near-mo-
nopolies. Three of the four train companies
with the highest passenger-satisfaction
ratings last year were open-access opera-
tors, not franchisees.
On shorter lines, the open-access ap-
proach is harder to pull off. Busy commuter
routes have such tightly packed services
that arranging a timetable around several
companies would be a recipe for chaos. So
an alternative approach is to grant conces-
sions in which a single operator signs a
contract to run all services on a line, and
sometimes to maintain the track as well.
London’s Docklands Light Railway, which
has the happiest rail passengers in the cap-
ital, is run like this by Keolis, a French firm.
Three of Britain’s four most punctual rail
firms are concessions.
Granting concessions doesn’t give pas-
sengers a choice about how they travel. Yet
an element of competition can be intro-
duced by re-opening alternative lines that
were closed half a century ago. In 2016 Chil-
tern Railways opened a London-Oxford
line that had been closed by British Rail in
the 1960s, when rail use was in decline.
Within a few months the incumbent on a
rival line, gwr, cut ticket prices and intro-
duced free Wi-Fi. Some have proposed re-
opening a 40-mile stretch of the Great Cen-
tral Railway between Aylesbury and Rugby
to provide competition for the West Coast
mainline between London and the north.
There may be little case for turning back
the clock to the 1980s, before privatisation.
But going back even further, to the days
when passengers had a real choice of which
line to take, is a promising alternative. 7FirstclassSources:Eurostat;WorldBank;OECDPassenger-km per death, 2017, millionEuropean countries, rail travel0 250 500 750 1,000 1,250 1,500 1,750BritainBritainChange in passenger-km travelled, 1996-2017, %-120 -80 -40 0 40 80 120Average fare per passenger-km, €, 20160 0.05 0.10 0.15 0.20 0.25BritainT
aking a cabfrom Euston station in
central London used to be a grim
experience. In the 1960s the taxi rank
was put in a poorly ventilated un-
derground garage known as “the gas
chamber”. In January cabbies were
cheered when the rank was moved
above ground to make way for hs2, a
planned high-speed railway between
London and the north of England. Yet
fears are growing that Boris Johnson’s
government could derail the project.
hs2 is not a done deal. Some £4bn
($5bn) of work has been completed,
including exhuming 45,000 bodies
from a graveyard at Euston to make way
for new platforms. The rest of the cash
was to be released this autumn if the
project was on track to stay within its
£56bn budget. But that looks unlikely.
In December hs2’s chairman resigned
over rising costs. Last month his re-
placement warned that the bill could
overrun by £30bn.
Boris Johnson is sceptical. The new
prime minister has previously de-
scribed hs2’s costs as “spiralling out of
control”. He has ordered a review by
Douglas Oakervee, another former hs 2
chairman, who will report within six
weeks on whether the project should be
slimmed down or even scrapped. At the
same time he has promised to build
new railways between northern cities,
dubbed hs3, at a cost of £39bn.
Opponents of hs 2 —from the ner-
dish Campaign for Better Transport to
the right-wing TaxPayers’ Alliance—
worry that its huge budget will mean
less money for improving local links.
They say the cash should be spent on
re-opening smaller lines closed in the
1960s, which would have greater eco-
nomic benefit per pound spent, accord-
ing to the government’s own analysis.
Yet for all the doubts, hs2 is likely to
survive in some form. Mr Johnson
recently told the Birmingham Mail:“I’m
going to hesitate for a long time before
scrapping any major infrastructure
project.” One option is to slow the
trains down, to avoid the cost of rein-
forcing weak ground in the Midlands
that cannot support a 225mph (362kph)
train. A further £8bn could be saved by
ending the line in Old Oak Common, in
west London, rather than Euston. That
might inconvenience passengers but
would boost the area, one of Mr John-
son’s pet projects when he was mayor.A speed bump
High Speed 2Euston, we have a problem