Will nationalisation put an end to Britain’s rail woes? - Yorkshire Post Letters

The way that Britain's railways have been run since privatisation clearly hasn't worked for the benefit of passengers.

I hope that a future Labour administration has thought through in detail the way British Railways will run in order to make real improvements as to the way that our railways are run.

Labour's 'timetable' for phasing in a new state run, or re-nationalised rail service, should be fairly straightforward as they know when the current private companies franchises, many of which are owned by companies based in other European countries, terminate?

It does make a lot of sense to re-nationalise as station's, bridges and central signalling is currently owned by the government’s Network Rail, and when there are the inevitable delays then British Railways will solely have to answer the questions and not be able to blame a third party.

But in the meantime, the Secretary of State for Transport and his Rail Minister need to sort out the outstanding disputes with the companies who employ train drivers and the train drivers union.

If Labour does get into power this year will this drivers dispute be resolved, as the rail unions give donations to the Labour Party?

I also hope that Labour's Transport Minister sorts out the complex way tickets are purchased and make it easy to purchase one for a full journey at a reasonable price.

Why is it cheaper to buy several tickets to split the journey? For example, if you want to go to Blackpool from Hull, it is cheaper to buy a ticket from Hull to Leeds or Manchester Piccadilly stations and then buy a separate ticket from those two stations to the final destination. It is ludicrous that on some 'long distance rail routes' it is cheaper to fly there.

Who owns the rolling stock or carriages?

And this is probably one of the reasons why passenger numbers are still down compared to pre-Covid passenger numbers.

By encouraging people to travel by train it is freeing up more road space for heavy goods vehicles to move goods from ports to factories or distribution warehouses forwarding on to retail shops, and not to mention less vehicle emissions from less vehicles.