Halfapenguin.com

Capitalism cannot fix the trains

13:47, 24 Jul 2007

Capitalism, and its child philosophy consumerism is not a system without merit, and in many situations it does a passable and sometimes good job at delivering reasonable service to people. However like a few government sanctioned monopolies, the train companies are not one of them.

There is no competition on the railways, unless you want to take a car, you have no practical alternatives. Therefore rather than dropping, we have had continual increases while services get significantly worse.

My personal favourite experience of this was the 7pm from London to Bristol on a Friday evening. This was every time the busiest train i have seen, because it was the first train you could catch which wasn't peak rate, and also people going back for the weekend. When this was the old style long trains it was still jam packed, but on every second weekend they would use the new much smaller carriages, which meant many people couldn't get on the train. They knew this would happen, and could fix it with some thought on planning but continually made the same mistake.

This was a symbol of the problem of capitalism running on the train networks. Virgin brought out its Voyager series of trains with several notable enhancements


  • A more complete shop

  • Powerpoints at the seat, vital for anyone with a laptop or in need of a phone charge

  • More comfortable seating

  • Ability to join trains together to get more seating

As a result, rather than taking care to produce a worthy equivalent, First rushed out the flawed Adelante to replace its aging network of trains, however these have several issues.


  • Approximetly half the sized of the replaced trains, with no extra services to take up the slack

  • No powerpoints at the seats

  • Seats have no improvements, possibly actually a little more uncomfortable than the originals

  • Cannot be expanded by any means so the limited capacity cannot be overcome without increasing services

  • Flaws in the design of the engines mean that simple problems like replacing the front windscreen takes 3 days rather than 1 day in the previous model

So the result is, that customers are paying both in time and through their wallets for a bad management decision, and has anyone lost their jobs? No, and its unlikely they will do, since First are still making huge profits at our expense.

Virgin themselves are no shining example of service, while they have the ability to fix overcrowding with additional services and carriages, they rarely do, consistently their trains are behind schedule (although this is in part due to the fact that First get priority on the rails, even if they are behind schedule), and they still charge through the nose for food onboard train due to operating an exclusive franchise.

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