Make Trains Great Again: Can Labour bring our railways back from the brink?

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

News, Government, Politics, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

The problems with our rail network are clear to anybody who’s been on a train lately. It’s a colossal challenge for Labour – so how will they handle the issues? And could our rail systems ever rival those of Japan, Switzerland and Germany? To find out, Ros Taylor talks to rail engineer and writer Gareth Dennis, whose upcoming book How the Railways Will Fix the Future: Rediscovering the Essential Brilliance of the Iron Road offers a deep dive into the British rail system. We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to Indeed.com/bunker for £100 sponsored credit. • Get tickets for Levitation, the annual festival of electronic music and ideas presented by friends of the pod Castles In Space, at Bedford Esquires on Sat 5 Oct. And here’s a taster playlist of who’s on: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4EBQbDcgPFEf9Bx5AJvvrX?si=a572a2d92dd24231 www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Eliza Davis Beard. Audio production by Simon Williams and Tom Taylor. Managing Editor Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor Andrew Harrison. Art by James Parrett. Music by Kenny Dickinson. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, this is a short message from AO. Everyone knows a home isn't a home without
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0:20.0	When there's no place like home, there's no place like AO, and over 500,000 happy customers trust us with that.
0:27.0	Shop now at AO.com. Hello and welcome to the bunker. You're need to know on news and politics five days a week.
0:43.8	I'm Ros Taylor.
0:45.9	The years long rail strikes have been pretty much settled and Labour is re-nationalising the
0:50.4	railways gradually. But could our railways be not just okay? the railways will fix the future and he joins me in the studio today. Welcome to the bunker
1:04.2	Gareth. Hi Ross hi. When it comes to the railways it's fair to say you dream
1:08.8	big and we'll get onto that shortly. Let's talk about the state we're in right now. How
1:15.1	a British railway is doing post COVID? Yeah, it's an interesting mixed bag.
1:20.1	So one of the ways to think about how a massive complicated system like the railways works is understanding the incentives that get people
1:27.8	Fundamentally a thing like the railway is a system of people making it work so at the front line we actually have a lot of staff who
1:34.1	their incentives are quite straightforward which is get people comfortably safely
1:37.8	where they need to be, get freight moving. And so actually we've seen a
1:41.4	pretty rapid return to you know we're now above 100% of pre-Covid level ridership on the railway.
1:46.5	We don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
1:47.7	Patterns have changed a bit sure, but in terms of the overall numbers, we're back at where we were before the pandemic in terms of passenger ridership. So from that perspective, pretty well.
1:57.0	What's incredible is that if you look at what's happening at a more strategic and management level, the railways are, I would just say, in a bit of a shambles.
2:04.8	We had kind of a thin gruel of some form of strategy whipped away from us back at the end of
	...

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