Privatised railway = pointless railway

24 July 2007 - The Green Party is on balance disappointed by the new White Paper on the railways, published today. It fears that the government will not be ambitious enough in its proposals and will not commit sufficient funds in order to expand the railways and make travelling by train affordable.

Councillor Rupert Read, Transport spokesperson for Norwich Green Party and lead candidate for Eastern Region in the 2009 European elections, said, "Norwich Green Party welcomes some of what this White Paper contains, but makes this very simple point: there can never be a joined-up railway service in Britain, until the railways are re-nationalised. So long as there is a fragmented mess of profiteering private companies running our trains, they will never be up to speed.

"Given the looming challenge of dangerous climate change, it is desperately urgent for Britain's railways to come up to the standard of other western European countries, so that they offer a really strong alternative to the more climate-dangerous transport modes of road and air. Without re-nationalisation, which would enable the investment and the wholistic planning that the railways need, the British railway system will remain a second class option. None of us can afford that.

"It beggars belief that trains from London to Norwich take longer now than they did in the days of steam! This is why Norwich Green Party is launching its campaign to re-nationalise the railways today, for which we will be collecting signatures over the next several months."

Green Party national Transport Speaker, Alan Francis, said "To reduce carbon emissions from transport and reduce road congestion we need to shift more journeys from road to rail. To enable that to happen and to ease existing overcrowding the capacity and extent of the railway network must be increased significantly. Bottlenecks must be removed and some old lines and stations re-opened. This will be expensive but not doing it will be even more expensive in terms of environmental damage and congestion."

"The Green Party would scrap the £30Bn roads programme and invest the money in affordable, good quality public transport including rail. We would also introduce congestion charging and the new taxes on aviation to raise money for public transport. We would invest more in railways, increase the capacity, reduce fares, extend the network and re-integrate the railways and make them publicly accountable."

Rail fares must be affordable. The government allows train companies to increase regulated fares by 1% more than inflation each year. Many other fares are not regulated and increase far more. So rail fares are becoming more expensive in real terms. Meanwhile motoring costs have fallen in real terms over recent years. These trends need to be reversed so that train travel becomes cheaper and motoring becomes more expensive to encourage more people to use the trains.

Many rail services, particularly in London, Birmingham and Manchester and other large metropolitan areas, are overcrowded. Rail capacity needs to be increased to ease this overcrowding and provide seats for more passengers to transfer from road to rail.

Where the roads are congested the government wants to build new roads and add extra lanes and flyovers to existing ones. This policy should be applied to the railways. Where they are congested new lines, flyovers and extra tracks should be built. In many cases this would just involve re-opening some of the lines closed during the Beeching era. And some platforms should be lengthened to accommodate longer trains. These are the ways to solve overcrowding on the railways, not increasing fares to price people off the trains and force them back into their cars. Flyovers should be built at busy junctions such as Woking, Reading and Hitchin. Examples of places where extra tracks should be built include North London Line, Coventry-Birmingham, and Salisbury-Exeter.

There are many former rail lines which ought to be re-opened to provide more direct routes and bring more towns back on to the rail network. The East West Rail Link, which would link Oxford and Cambridge and thus onto Norwich, is a classic example but the government is only considering one part of it instead of the whole line. Other lines to re-open include Uckfield-Lewes and Matlock-Buxton.

The railways don't only carry passengers. To reduce the number of lorries on our roads we need to carry more freight on the railways. This too needs more capacity on the railways, particularly to and from ports, and more rail freight terminals. It also needs some bridges and tunnels to be raised to allow the standard international containers (9ft 6in high) to be carried on ordinary rail wagons.

Click here to sign the petition for a re-nationalised railway system.