Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Balance of Payments Crisis? | |
Posted by: | Richard Greenhough | |
Date/Time: | 01/10/15 10:49:00 |
"1. The devastating impact of the Second World War on the railway companies, for which nationalisation was the Labour government's attempt to recover the situation" I agree that WW2 caused the railways massive problems, but I don't agree that nationalisation was the best way to recover the situation. Had the railways remained in private hands I do not believe that the loss of route mileage as a result of the Beeching Report would have been nearly as severe, and we would not now be having to spend large amounts of money reconstructing the lines that were closed then - such as the old Waverley route, lost in 1969 and partially reopened last month as the Borders railway. "The Great Western electrification currently in progress will cost £1.7 million per track km." I suspect that if the GWR had remained in private hands this would have been undertaken years ago. "BR in the 1980s and 1990s did a lot of things right." I note that you don't defend the way it was run in the 1950s and 1960s. We will never know what would have happened if nationalisation had not taken place, but IMHO the private enterprise that built the railways in the first place would have worked much harder to keep them going successfully than the combination of civil servants and inadequate management that ran BR. One example is Heathrow - an obvious source of traffic, yet it took until 1993 for work to start on linking it to the GWR main line, and we still don't have a link to the SWT network. It is hard to believe that the GWR and SR would have not pushed for links into the airport in the 1950s if they had still been private companies. It might also have been that the LMS would have done a better job on Birmingham New Street in the 1960s, so that we would not have had to spend so much on the revamp that is currently nearing completion, and the GWR would not have let Birmingham Snow Hill be closed and lie derelict for years before more money was needed to re-open it. And would private enterprise have let the Kingsland viaduct in East London be closed and lie derelict from 1986 to 2010 ? |