Bombardier awarded Electrostar order

The good news for Derby is that Bombardier has been awarded an order for 130 new Electrostar carriages for Southern. But what a pity that the opportunity was not taken to give these trains the design changes that would have made them so much better.

It is not that they are bad trains but there is plenty of room for improvement. It is unfortunate that design deficiencies are perpetuated over and over again instead of being dealt with through a programme of progressive development. This seems to be a British failing. We let ourselves down by not being sufficiently critical. Indeed, criticism is seen as disloyal and those who do it are regarded as whingers. It does not help the country's industrial performance.

The religion of peace strikes again

At least 35 people were killed in an explosion in a Catholic church in the suburbs of Abuja in Nigeria, while a second explosion rocked a church in Jos.

Guardian article.

Mind the gap

At long last the hazard of station platform gaps has been brought to attention. There is an article on the subject here.

Some of the comments are amazingly complacent.

King Jong III succeeds King Jong II

That's monarchy for you.

Advance train tickets cost more than you think

The hand of tickets I bought on Monday turned out to be money down the drain. Late on Monday evening I got a phone call from the people I was visiting to say their car had been run into and they could not see me because they would be spending the day trying to get it fixed and back on the road.

That is the trouble with advance tickets. Things can crop up to stop one making the journey. Which is why they are more expensive than they seem. People must realise this. So why do we have to put up with them?

Advance tickets are all about "Yield Management". Ideally, every train would have a full load of passengers for the whole length of its journey. Ideally, also, trains would run at regular intervals for 16 hours a day and every train would have the same number of carriages. But people prefer to travel when it suits them, and this gives rise to periods of peak demand. If the system is designed to carry peak traffic, then the trains will be more than half-empty for much of the time. Conversely, a system designed for off-peak traffic will be overcrowded at peak times.

Yield management is used to even out the traffic to match demand to supply. There is nothing new about the concept. From the earliest times, cheap excursion fares were offered, and at the weekends passengers travelled from the city to the seaside on commuter trains. On long-distance routes there were cheap mid-week tickets to tempt people to travel then rather than at the busy week-ends. At the busiest times of the year, seat reservations were compulsory for some trains. At the busiest times of the year, also, extra trains were run. If a particular train looked as if it was likely to be over-full, extra coaches could easily be added. Elderly trains were held in reserve for just this eventuality. At times, one was liable to travel in a train that belonged in a museum, but one could expect to get a seat, and sometimes a surprisingly comfortable though ancient one.

All this came to an end with the advent of fixed formation and multiple unit trains in the 1970s. These are so expensive that spare trains can not be held in reserve, and so complex, with so many cable connections between the vehicles, that extra carriages cannot easily be added. It can take several hours to remove a vehicle from some types of diesel multiple unit and and another half a day to put it back again and make sure everything is working properly.

Slower is faster
With the HS2 trains costing about twice as much as a conventional speed train, and the special trains for running on both HS2 and existing lines costing three times as much, the pressure on the operators to fill every seat at the maximum price will be even more acute. It is good economics but rotten service, and it adds to journey time because passengers have to turn up long before their train departs to be sure of not losing the journey they have paid for. From the passengers' point of view, a slower, regular interval walk-on service is faster!

In the long run, better technical solutions should be sought. The price of carriages needs to come down, and it should be made easier to add and remove vehicles, even if it means leaving off some of the frills we have become accustomed to such as computer points. Nevertheless, things could be improved. It is very expensive to keep all these booking systems up and running. It is not necessary to book every passenger into a particular seat on a particular train. The main need is to encourage people to travel off peak. It is not difficult to predict which trains are likely to be busy. Surely all that is needed is to have a relatively low standard fare and have all seats reservable on the busiest trains, with reservation fees set according to how popular the train was likely to be. And get rid of those bargain basement tickets which can turn out to be money down the drain.

Hand of tickets

Hand of tickets, originally uploaded by Henry░Law.

It took me the best part of half an hour to buy a ticket from Brighton to Nuneaton on the internet. Even then it was not what I wanted, as I would have preferred to go on the slower train and avoid changing at Rugby but that was more expensive, goodness knows why.

I was not able to print out my own ticket but had to go to the station and fetch it from a machine. This involved typing in a code on the touch screen keyboard, which is always awkward.

In the end, the machine spewed out ticket after ticket, and I finished up with these nine pieces of card. I will leave it to the ticket inspector to sort that lot out.

Why HS2 is such extraordinarily bad value for money

Supporters of HS2 have never addressed the point that the line costs about four or five times that of a conventional speed railway to build, the trains will cost twice that of conventional speed trains and the special trains for running on both HS2 and existing routes will cost half as much again.

Energy and other operating costs will be about double.

Put plainly: for the price of HS2 we could have about four times as much new railway. There are projects all over the country that are crying out to be done and which should take precedence. How about this for a little list for starters.

• Reinstatement Oxford to Cambridge, Brighton to Guildford.
• Electrification Basingstoke to Salisbury and Reading, London to Birmingham via Banbury, Bristol to Birmingham, Cardiff to Swansea, Oxford to Birmingham, Crewe to Holyhead, Hastings to Ashford, Hurst Green to Uckfield, Newcastle to Carlisle as diversionary route.
• Complete doubling Oxford to Worcester, Swindon to Stroud, Salisbury to Exeter, Plymouth to Penzance, Tonbridge Wells to Hastings.
• Brighton main line - completion of 4-tracking of Three Bridges to Wivelsfield.
• Weaver Junction to Crewe - 4-tracking
  

The extra capacity that is the argument for HS2 could be provided, again at a fraction of the cost, by reinstating the Great Central line and the missing piece of the Midland line to Manchester via Buxton.

There would still be something left over and the benefits would start to appear long before 2026.

What needs to be done, and why

Robin Smith explains all in a 30 minute interview from Occupy London. Brilliant.

Virgins of the Islamic Paradise

Porcelain Nuns, a photo by A.Currell on Flickr.

I like to think of the Virgins of the Islamic Paradise turning out to be be nuns, preferably of the Sacred Heart Order, pre-Vatican 2.

Health and Safety

In a discussion in the Guardian's Comment is Free yesterday, I was asked, "Where in the Physiocrats' Laissez-Faire life of purity do you think health and safety legislation figures?"

It is an excellent question. Laissez-Faire concerns, primarily, the realm of economics. The answer to the question, however, lies in the common law concept of "duty of care". The fear and possibility of being sued is an excellent deterrent against laxity in matters of health and safety. Legislation should do no more than codify good practice for the guidance of the parties concerned.

In the economic sphere, the most important contribution of the Physiocrats is their proposal for the replacement of the multiplicity of contemporary taxes by the Single Tax, or Impôt Unique, which is explained in the Wikipedia if anyone is interested.

However, beware of the Wikipedia. Entries tend to be pulled this way and that by people pushing their own agendas (possibly including me, of course). Thus, "individualism" has been appropriated by Anarcho-Capitalists, who, when tackled, turn out to be bitterly opposed to the single tax proposal which they revile as communistic! The Physiocrat model is the antithesis of Anarcho-Capitalism.

The French Wikipedia entry on L'Impôt Unique is a good example of how unreliable it can be, since it describes it as the "Flat Tax", which it most definitely is not.

In present economic circumstances, the bargaining power of labour is weak, since most people have no option but to sell their labour power to an employer and are little more than wage slaves. The single tax policy would correct this imbalance so that employers and labour were bargaining from an equal position of strength. Employers who were careless about health and safety would quickly find that nobody would work for them.