UK trains are an utter joke

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Mobster
Soldato
Joined
9 Apr 2012
Posts
13,166
The trains are just an absolute disgrace. No accountability, nearly always late, strikes (which in principal I support) and the Government doesn’t seem to give a crap.

For the country that invented the train, this is a national embarrassment. The Tories privatisation has just made the mess worse.
 
This is what happens when you live ln a country where people are packed in like sardines. I intend to bail on England tbh. Screw living here in 20-30 years time, can't even imagine how crap it will be.
 
I don't think there's anything wrong with privatisation - it helps with accountability.

Imagine how much harder it'd be to take the whole UK train company to court over lateness. Or if industrial action happened across the board.
 
sneakysnail said:
This is what happens when you live ln a country where people are packed in like sardines. I intend to bail on England tbh. Screw living here in 20-30 years time, can't even imagine how crap it will be.
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While I think there's some general truth to this. Japan is much more tightly packed and I believe its train system is much better.

I think ultimately that yes population increase is the problem, the solution is to increase investment and to open more lines. But this hasn't happened, or at least not enough.
 
I travelled down to Leeds recently from Edinburgh for a hospital appointment and was stunned by the poor quality of the trains. I have not been any distance on a train for about 15 years when I used to travel regularly down to Cheltenham.
What struck me was the lack of space. I am not particularly big but my knees were touching the seat in front. And what happened to the tables with a pair of seats either side facing it?
6 hour round trip was very unpleasant, next time I will fly or hire a decent car.
 
Rant much, every train I take is on time to a few minutes, relatively clean, occasionally crowded but I am rarely standing long.

I remember British rail very well and they were no better. When you remember that far more people travel by rail today, I think that it is not a bad service, not the best, but OK.

By the way it is principle not principal in this instance.
 
They're average at best and expensive crap service at the worst, bit like most of our public transport.

The only public transport I enjoy using regularly are the trams- reasonably priced, clean and very frequent so you're never waiting long for the next one so no need to have timetables and any of that rubbish, just hop on/off plus no tickets or conductors. Hard to believe we ripped out all the trams and trolley buses in favour of the car, now look at the mess we're in.
 
The fact uk invented the rail network is it's blessing and curse.

The infrastructure was developed iteratively, and by many small competing networks.

With no ongoing effort to improve interconnectivity since then, we are now in the position of having an archaic network that is extremely difficult to maintain let alone upgrade.

I worked in signaling design 5 years ago, and as a future thinking techy I was appalled at the state of it.

Drawings are still 80% on old brown plastic sheets and need electric erasers to run out old connections to draw new.

The big location cabinets are choc full of actual relays for the logic - the things that preceded transistors.

I could go on, but the fact is it's insanely expensive to do anything, and the ingrained infrastructure is not conducive to being torn up and rebuilt. Look at the hs2 debacle, how hard would it be to get the whole country to agree to similar, even if we had the money.

It's a terrible state, but rather than blame the UK for being so bad, I'm slightly dumbfounded how other countries are so good
 
uk trains very poor imo compared to other train services i've used in other countries (france, thailand, taiwan) not much can be done about it unfortunately.
 
Surfer said:
uk trains very poor imo compared to other train services i've used in other countries (france, thailand, taiwan) not much can be done about it unfortunately.
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Funny you should mention Thailand. A train ticket from Bangkok out into the countryside costs 2p. A comparable distance to London to reading. A train I get a lot costing £15+. Transport in general is so cheap out there.
 
Never had a problem when i used to travel down to London, great service almost always on time, good food and nice clean trains at a reasonable price (given the lack of stress etc), our rail network in the second safest in the EU so we must be doing something right........
 
Mason- said:
While I think there's some general truth to this. Japan is much more tightly packed and I believe its train system is much better.

I think ultimately that yes population increase is the problem, the solution is to increase investment and to open more lines. But this hasn't happened, or at least not enough.
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Their rail system is pretty much a symbol of national pride though.

I wonder if it's influenced a bit by them being a bit late to the modern world/ trains. They had a strange period where they exiled them selves from the world and would execute any one trying to enter or leave the country.

The Americans threatening to invade them unless they would trade basically made them open their borders and after that they tried to modernise and brought in experts to design their rail networks and everything else.

Us English might have been the first to have trains but we were learning as we went and making a mess of it a bit. They had 70 years of lessons learnt and a very under developed country at the time. I would suspect the foundations of their transport network is very solid and well thought out with expansion in mind compared to ours.
 
Given the operators only receive a 3% profit on the rail fares, I wouldn't bother with nationalising the railways again - the benefits of privatisation surely outweigh this cost? The cost, however, is a joke for the service provided. I would be more than happy to see increasing amounts of taxpayers' money used to subsidise rail fares because the cost is unreasonably high. I'm also surprised that 48% of rail fares are spent on investing in the network and maintaining tracks and trains, surely there are some efficiency gains to be had here?
 
I catch a train to Manchester every day. It's 1 stop from Manchester, it's always late and it costs £6.20 return a day...

Plus in 4 years I've never got a seat and it's 50/50 whether I'll be able to get onto the train or not as it's that packed...

It should be 4 carriages, it's often 3 and sometimes just 2.

In London each Overground train is like 10 carriages, turn up every 5-10 minutes etc it's luxury in comparison.
 
I’ve never had any problem with the trains but then my experience is mainly between reading and London outside of rush hour. So very limited.

Could the trains be cleaner? Yes but the general public need to take a long hard look at themselves and take some responsibility for the cleanliness of the trains (much like fly tipping and littering it seems to have become more ‘acceptable’ in recent years)
 
I just wish they'd make an m25 style line around London, having to go in and then out of London to get across it is very expensive, which really hampers possible living locations. I work in Surrey, but am looking to move to Hertfordshire or Kent, but the only train option is traveling in to London and out again.
 
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