May 19th - The future of train travel is in a state

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2023

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

I'm at London Waterloo – the busiest railway station in the UK, and also the home for Network Rail and the Great British Railways Transition Team. The latter is the body that is supposed to be acting as a "guiding mind" for the nation's rail services. Reports this morning say that the legislation necessary to establish GBR won't happen before the next election. Add to that the latest strike called by the RMT, and there are few reasons to be cheerful about the near future of rail – and train travellers.

This podcast is free, much like my weekly newsletter - subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, the last one of the week. It's Friday the 19th of May.
0:09.7	And I'm afraid that, well, ahead of the weekend, I am feeling pretty glum. As you can tell,
0:17.2	perhaps, I'm back at Britain's busiest railway station, London Waterloo,
0:22.2	which is also the home of the Great British Railways Transition Team. Yes, it is. These are the
0:32.2	people who are going to be, we think, responsible for running great British railways. This was a Boris Johnson
0:40.2	plan that actually reflects something that the rail industry has been calling for for ages.
0:46.6	At the moment, everything's a bit of a muddle. You've got network rail, which is also
0:51.7	headquartered here at London Waterloo who run the
0:55.2	infrastructure and organised stations and so on and then you've got the train operators all of
1:03.4	whom are directed by the department for transport there's also some open access operators
1:10.0	who are private companies but most of them are going to be companies like Southwestern Railway here at London Waterloo, like LNERR, Avanti West Coast, GWR, all of those.
1:21.8	The Department of Transport says, we want you to run these services. We want you to charge these fares.
1:27.0	The fairs are complete
1:28.6	nonsense as has been discussed many, many times before. You're going from London to Bridgeport,
1:35.0	Bristol. If you don't use the Didcott Dodge, you are paying too much money. It's a nonsense.
1:40.7	So everybody agrees that there has to be a guiding mind. A fat controller
1:48.7	it's been described as who keeps everything running sensibly. They would set timetables,
1:54.5	they would collect fares, ticketing would be simplified. The whole idea is very-standing, even though, of course, Boris Johnson's gone,
2:06.0	as well as Grant Shaps, the Transport Secretary at the time. We've been through Liz Truss as Prime Minister
2:11.9	and Anne-Marie Trevelyan. Remember her as Transport Secretary. We're now on to Rishi Sunak and Mark Harper.
2:18.7	Now Mark Harper has been convinced about the wisdom of Great British Railways.
2:24.6	Unfortunately, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has very little but scorn for the rail industry.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Independent, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Independent and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.