Our rail system can’t have a good future when it offers less than the sum of its parts

BRITAIN’S RAILWAY faces multiple crises: reduced passenger levels, missing revenue, industrial unrest leading to disruptive strikes, and a structure that can only be described as ‘emergency arrangements’. Perhaps the least understood shortcoming is the structural flaw underpinning the timetable – namely the fallacy that aggregation of proposals from self-interested companies can make best use of capacity and offer travellers attractive options for their journeys without an integrated overall network being presented.

The current legalistic and fragmented process designed for privatisation and the quest for competition is not only sclerotic, but results in mediocre service offerings that must be deterring significant numbers of travellers. Network Rail is ignoring fundamental rubrics, and the Regulator is neglecting most of its statutory duties. Transport Secretary Mark Harper’s latest proposals for involving the private sector within the Great British Railways plans, as presented in his recent Bradshaw lecture, are not remotely in the public interest. Nor is the idea of ever-variable ‘airline style’ fares, which seems to be his latest enthusiasm (LTT 864, p.11). The sensible response to the zero-carbon, environmental and social-equity agendas by offering people an attractive alternative to the private car, is to adopt European models of system design recognising the best offer that train travel can present.

Under the present statutory and organisational context the Railways Act 1993, as amended in 2000 and 2005, is the essential context for discussion of the timetable. Under these Acts the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has an admirable set of public duties. These require it to promote shortest possible journey times; to promote use of the railway network; to contribute to development of an integrated system of transport and to contribute to sustainable development. And also to promote efficiency in providing railway services; to promote competition for the benefit of users; and to facilitate journeys which involve more than one passenger operator.

Regrettably, most of these duties have been neglected, meaning journey-times involving changing trains are demonstrably not “as short as possible”: extended waits are commonplace across the network as a consequence of fragmented planning, and at many stations minimum interchange rules are ignored, resulting in digital journey planners adding gratuitously and unnecessarily to the journey-time offered.

Use of the network is meanwhile not well promoted due to poor spacing of services, and no systematic analysis has been undertaken to test whether a different planning process could make the timetable more attractive (the results of one limited exercise have been suppressed). There has been no study by the ORR or the Department for Transport of what the required ‘integrated’ system might look like. Meanwhile, unnecessarily long journey-times do not encourage modal shift to rail in support of sustainability, and extended waiting times do not facilitate the multi-operator journeys which ORR’s instructions require.

Plainly, ORR’s preoccupation with promoting competition has led it to largely ignore its other duties – and no Secretary of State has challenged it by issuing it with guidance, as is provided for in the Acts.

The industry trumpets digitalisation but its network timetable marketing is in the dark ages. Past practice has been abandoned, with nothing new and worthwhile to replace it, despite all the creative opportunities offered by the online era, with an absence of full daily timetables/travel options displayed at stations, or network information in digital form to replace the analogue predecessors.

Two neglected truisms are relevant here, namely that public transport services should be conceived as a network and that the timetable is the crucial feature of the offer an operator makes to potential customers. Since a truism is “a statement that is so obviously true that it is almost not worth saying” it is necessary, in this context, to explain why these statements need to be reiterated.

Why a rail network is different from roads

Let’s start with some Transport Planning basics. In comparison to rail, roads form a dense network.Those with access to private vehicles have an almost infinite choice of paths between desired origins and destinations, but the downsides of that unlimited freedom are very apparent in the problems of carbon emissions, pollution, accidents, congestion and social inequities. Public transport, in contrast, can only sensibly be organised on the basis of nodes (bus stops and rail stations) and links between them. That imposes a degree of inconvenience on users that must be addressed as well as possible in the network design, scheduling and timetabling, system presentation and charging framework.

In many European countries the concept is realised in the form of integrated bus and rail systems that equitably afford citizens coherent opportunities to travel between any pair of places at attractive fares. Britain has never had this facility at a national scale. Numerous separate railway companies embedded the image of routes rather than of a network, and nationalisation did not fundamentally change perceptions. Privatisation consolidated the long inheritance: route-based franchises encouraged operators to focus on their territorial markets, while differentiation of their products in the name of competitive innovation eroded national coherence. Single-operator tickets, price discrimination against multi-operator journeys, the multiplication of brands and timetabling weaknesses all contributed to that. Some network-wide benefits such as Railcards are protected, but operators’ route diagrams often omit other operators’ routes and national marketing is rare.

At one level the approach is legitimised by the fact that most networks and routes are characterised by dominant flows, but the overall effect has been to undervalue the potential weight of innumerable smaller flows. Alongside this the institutional structure has discouraged any systematic analysis of this conceptual model. ‘Connectivity’ has become a fashionable buzzword, but it is rarely properly defined in practical terms, and there is no matrix of node to node flows or of the quality of timetabled links between them with which to evaluate performance.

Three reasons explain neglect of the overall timetable, and what it offers. First, since our railway was delivered to multiple profit-seeking companies the cult of the bargain price has become dominant. Marketing highlights the appeal of a cheaper fare if one chooses certain trains and/or buys far enough ahead. This has moved a long way from British Rail’s commercial initiative in market pricing that addressed cost-variations between routes and improved the balance between peak and off-peak loadings. Instead it has become a game between obscure company algorithms and a bemused public. Multiple so-far-unfulfilled promises of simplification never admit the roots of the problem.

The idea that travel on specific trains must be booked in advance to obtain the best fares undermines the concept that the railway exists as a readily available public service as an alternative to the private car. Moreover the available booking systems do not automatically combine the cheaper tickets, leaving customers to negotiate complex websites and work it out for themselves. If travellers are deemed to be price-sensitive, then perpetuating high prices as the most visible offer that must discourage sales is quite an indictment.

Second, this effect is exacerbated by the format of the websites, whether National Rail Enquiries or the irritatingly varied company offerings. The Journey Planner algorithm is clever and useful, but it does not present users considering rail travel with an overview of the timetable. There is no sense of the day-long pattern (the routes, interchange stations, frequency, the variation between faster and slower trains): in short, the Journey Planner may work as a ‘request answering’ facility, but it fails as a marketing tool. And the one-dimensional list of departure and arrival times misleads (for example, for cross-Thames journeys or across Glasgow a standard interchange time is applied without any indication that the frequent suburban services available from the southern termini enable flexibility).

A third reason for the downplaying of the timetable is the passive assertion that “most travellers are content to search on line for the next departure.” This convenience not surprisingly appeals particularly to digital device-wedded younger generations. Nonetheless it is pernicious when the argument of it suiting them is deployed to justify the absence of any alternative presentation and inaction regarding patent deficiencies. At worst it implies that Britain’s railway is unwilling to sell itself as a network. It is paradoxical indeed that the word ‘network’ is applied to the infrastructure administration, rather than to the assemblage of passenger train services available to travel on!

Despite the slogan ‘National Rail – Britain’s rail companies working together’ the fragmentation of planning and the presentational difficulties caused by multiple operators have resulted in the NRT on-line timetables not showing connections and therefore failing to present the connectivity that the network does offer. It sometimes seems that the timetable just exists, take it or leave it.

The only way to see a full daily timetable is to go to https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/the-timetable/electronic-national-rail-timetable/ which offers downloadable route timetables in traditional formats. This is not really a consumer-oriented resource, however, and to benefit from it users would need to be able to negotiate a complex website, know rail geography and understand industry conventions. Connections are not shown and Network Rail does not update it regularly. The option is barely publicised, though there is a slightly better private version at https://timetables.fabdigital.uk/nrt/. I suspect few people use either. Each TOC does offer on-line /printable versions of traditional timetable booklets, but the information and layout generally favour that company’s individual services. There is no British equivalent of the Swiss national network overview - see https://sma-partner.com/storage/app/media/Dokumente/Netzgrafiken/2022-11-29_NGCH2023.pdf

It might be argued by the cynical that not publishing a timetable conveniently means that holding anyone responsible for fulfilling it becomes very difficult – especially when operators are now allowed to simply issue a ‘Timetable of the Day’ the evening before

The industry trumpets digitalisation, but, however good some individual services may be, its network timetable marketing is in the dark ages - past practice has been abandoned, with nothing new and worthwhile to replace it, despite all the creative opportunities offered by the online era, with an abscence of full daily timetables/travel options displayed at stations, or network infomation in digital form to replace the analogue predecessors. The only valid question it is easy to now answer seems to be the highly specific one - ‘where do you want to go, and when, and how flexible are you to get a cheap price ?’.

These narrow mindsets are further evidenced by operators’ abandonment of printed timetables. They have seized on an easy economy and fallen for the superficial and socially questionable line that these days electronic access suffices for everyone and all purposes whilst – even for the computer-literate – access to online information is often poor. Given the proliferation of advertising literature the absence of handy guides to train services is strange. Even poster-style on station displays of the departures have gone, let alone the full timetables of the kinds still familiar on the Continent.

It might be argued by the cynical that not publishing a timetable conveniently means that holding anyone responsible for fulfilling it becomes very difficult – especially when operators are now allowed to simply issue a ‘Timetable of the Day’ the evening before, to meet their requirements to provide a service against which delays and cancellations and entitlements to refunds can be assessed. And even this is something most customers will be hard pressed to find.

What can and should be done ?

To their credit, the authors of the Williams Shapps Plan for Rail were under no illusions about the faulty structure of the industry. They focussed on the fact that multiple players

“have different motives, interests and incentives that do not always align with each other or with the interests of the passengers … whom the railways are supposed to serve, and there is no ‘guiding mind’ to … provide direction. No leader or organisation at [any level] has responsibility and accountability for making the whole system work. Co-ordination is governed by a costly, inflexible spider’s web of often adversarial relationships, penalties and disconnected incentives”.

They proposed instead “a national brand and identity to emphasise that the railways are one connected network [and] a coherent, consistent, clearly-branded operation that gives passengers confidence in using it”.

“Each contract [to run services] will require … operators to … work collaboratively with Great British Railways [the ‘guiding mind’, GBR] … to enable more convenient connections between long-distance and local services”. The long term vision was of a ‘turn up and go’ railway. The mechanism would be for GBR to “contract with private partners to operate trains to the timetable and fares it sets, in a similar way to London’s successful Overground service”.

It was recognised that “This is a major change from franchising, where each private operator designed their own timetable”. Here were also some important hazards, notably the lack of clarity about decision-making when local interests clash with the national plan and the nod to a continuing role for Open Access. Nonetheless the proposals represented a radical scheme with profound implications for the public-interest agendas.

Action was slow. However, in July 2022 the Secretary of State for Transport (Grant Shapps) invited the Chief Executive of ORR to facilitate his commission to GBR to “consider ways in which the current system can be simplified and improved. For example, areas for [process] reform include enabling integrated planning and delivery by Great British Railways in matters of network development and use, service design functions and timetabling”. This was endorsed by the Rail Delivery Group which promised to “create a simpler and better railway for everyone … by joining up the industry’s decision making [and] bringing together key stakeholders”.

But the stance has shifted – and threatens to betray the public interest. Right-wing MPs and the Rail Partners alliance of private-sector interests (including foreign-owned holding companies) lobbied the Government to limit what they see as the statist powers of GBR and to retain private operators at the heart of the railway. The Transport Secretary (now Mark Harper) outlined this in the recent Bradshaw Lecture. He repeated the commonplace analysis of what has gone wrong, but then used the naive line that all the growth since privatisation is attributable to private expertise – even though the “dynamism, innovation and efficiency of the private sector” has hardly been an unqualified success.

It is far from obvious that this new policy approach can enable the railway to earn “the public trust it needs to grow”, let alone enable it “to resurrect some national pride in our railways”. Nowhere was there any discussion of why Britain needs a comprehensive yet simple-to-use system of public transport, nor of patent public support for this.

In particular he was unaware of the irony of referring to the stasis on the East Coast Main Line, which is primarily a function of more legally enshrined access rights than can be reliably operated and has blocked the benefits of costly infrastructure enhancements, and then proposing to promote the commercial freedoms of contracted operators and to unleash many more open-access operators. So on the one hand Harper referred to “finally treating the railway as the whole system [and not as] a web of disparate interests” while proposing to lower barriers to entry, to perpetuate the separation of track and train and to make the private sector “central to the future of the railways”.

Ideology reigns. It is astonishing how “maximising competition” ignores the transfer of revenue from state funds to private companies, the downsides of operator-exclusive ticketing, the malign effects on sensible pathing and the reality that spare capacity is not readily available. There was grudging recognition in the Bradshaw talk of the need “to support those passenger services that don’t turn a profit, yet still play an important economic and social role”, but “a truly commercially led industry” allows little room for the crucial social role and contribution to sustainability and achievement of Net Zero that public transport can make if suitably designed and presented. Any mention of integration either within rail, or with bus and other public transport services was entirely missing in that speech.

It is far from obvious that this new policy approach can enable the railway to earn “the public trust it needs to grow”, let alone enable it “to resurrect some national pride in our railways”. Nowhere was there any discussion of why Britain needs a comprehensive yet simple-to-use system of public transport, nor of patent public support for this. Instead the railway is again reduced to individualistic operators pursuing profit-seeking agendas. Both theory and practice have demonstrated that corralling legally binding access rights into a workable timetable can neither optimise the utilisation of capacity nor deliver a universally attractive service capable of radically changing the modal split in rail’s favour.