Nationalisation good or bad ? (ex cheerful 2015 thread)

Nationalisation, a disastrous mistake? Well given that the Railway Companies were near broke and the infrastructure was all shot, what other choice was there?

 

Pay them the compensation they were due? Just about everything else in the country was on its uppers so the railways were no different in that respect. Irrespective of the state of the railways, Labour were going to nationalise them anyway.

 

How did Nationalisation help? If you spend x million subsidising a state company or x million subsidising a private company you've still spent x million. Of course what was politically acceptable at the time is quite another matter. Its only recently that state subsidising private companies has become acceptable.

[Later - although having said that there were the loan acts in the 30s, but that was probably felt to be different to subsidising daily operations]

 

Long-term loans from the government. Nationalisation was a dreadful mistake.

 

How was the grouping much better ? - all that achieved was to remove competition from the market, 1948 was just the next cheap option down the same path that started in the 1922 railways act.

Had the railways had been nationalised in 1922, by 1948 we'd be in a similar state to German railways with mass produced standard designs, instead of the stock mess that was inherited in 1948 and the path to electrification could have been much more clear... Saving many millions.

 

I don't know exactly what would have happened had the railways been nationalised in 1922. I do believe that there was some scope for grouping companies together after the First World War to enable the railways to achieve greater efficiency. Whether doing it by geography was the right choice is a question that we will never know but it seems a logical one.

Perhaps German politicians had a better industrial strategy and less influenced by ideological concerns compared to our generation of politicians from the 1950s onwards.

 

I don't think it removed all competition, that's what nationalisation did. would there really have been A4s and Coronations racing each other to Scotland under a nationalised railways? Of course not! Maybe reducing it to 4 was too much, but you can't say that 120 different companies was a good way of going about a railway network.

 

In what way was competition removed from the market? London KX to York was by the GN with running powers over the NE prior to 1923, after 1923 it was the LNER so no change there. London to Leicester prior to 1923 was by the MR out of St. Pancras or the GCR out of Marylebone. After 1923 it was LMS or LNER from the same starting points. And that's just two examples.

 

If you wanted to go from anywhere to anywhere within the 4 regions... what competitive options did you have ?
for most people grouping removed competition from the market. Unless you were going from London to Scotland or Plymouth or Midlands there was very little competitive options available... The LMS / LNER only competed on a couple of core routes / markets.. if you were in Blackpool, Scarborough, Taunton, Dover for instance.. what choices did you have after 1922...

Sure the A4's evoked competitive glamour.. but for most people its only marketing not reality. Duchesses were not competing with A4s for business from Norwich were they ?

I'd go further and say people have more competitive choice today than in 1923... at many key stations you have trains from several franchises, unfortunately they are all governed by the same communist style regulations.

 

Why does competition matter? Railways are intensely unique in transport form that it's almost impossible to have 'perfect' competition (in the style of airlines or bus routes) due to the infrastructure and parliamentary problems that railway promoters came across.

 

Sorry but it didn't. Prior to the grouping London to Brighton was by LBSCR, after the grouping it was by SR and after 1948 by BR(S). London to Norwich was GER, LNER and BR(E). London to Bristol was GWR then BR(W). In many cases nothing was changed by any of the reorganisations. There were some routes where there was competition for traffic of course but in many cases there wasn't.

 

No and that's not what they were built for.

 

So let me turn the question around..

if the railways weren't built for competition... hows it every man and his dog wanted a railway to London or Manchester.. why did the GCR bother with London at all ?
Manchester could have survived with 1 company, not the L&Y, LNW, GC, MR and even the GWR wanting a bite at the cherry...
Why was the S&C built, it wasn't necessary in a non-competing model, it certainly wasn't built out of a compassionate desire to service some remote fell hamlets ?

Railways were built for competition, they were the airlines of their day.
They competed, they had share holders demanding a return.

1922 ended all that... it became 4 differing companies servicing 4 differing areas, with points of overlap, with an aim to make a profit and an air of competition on a few key routes. Even within the 4 companies there was excess of duplication on some routes, due to their competitive history.

Beeching was the product of shaving out the excesses of a competitive industry which the 4 regionals started but failed to achieve.

Again I'll point to Germany, indeed most of Europes railways as a case in point.. there isn't different competing routes between Berlin and Hamburg etc etc.. they were nationalised way before and a moderation of common sense saw standardisation on classes and development of non duplicating, non-competing routes.

Our coronershop style bespoke culture saw aggressive development of railways in a competing sense, that overtime saw winners/losers and inevitable consolidation.. it's the same in internet today.. the cornershops (remember the hundreds of dial up service providers of the 1990s) have consolidated into the big few internet providers today, largely due to the government investment into select IT Telcos to provide the core IT backbone and resultant killing off / aquisitions the smaller service providers.

 

Not really. London to Manchester was essentially LNWR v MR v GCR and after the grouping it was LMS v LNER so most of the competition was still there.

 

created a new thread from the 2015 reasons to be cheerful thread.. for nationalisation good or bad..

http://www.national-preservation.com/threads/reasons-to-be-cheerful-2015.403315/#post-1029570

 

so in 1948.. given the competitive choices you had from Manchester to London.. what would you have taken... an LMS pacific to London, or some trundle via Sheffield or Derby, or maybe even on the CLC to Chester and take the GW on a backwater route ?
in 1921 would you have made the same decision.. considering the GC had faster locos but a longer route.

 

I suppose I see what you mean, which is why I suggested that perhaps 4 was too few. I don't believe that 120 different railway companies was a good thing though. Maybe they did need a similar system to that of today...

 

You seem to be contradicting yourself now but the choices would have been possibly an A3/V2 to Marylebone, a 5XP to St. Pancras or a Scot to Euston. Without studying the timetables of the time, I can;t say which would have been the more attractive time wise but to people living at many intermediate stations, there was only ever one choice no matter what period of history we are discussing.

 

Mindless competition brought the SER and LCDR to the point of bankruptcy but that doesn't mean that all competition was a bad thing. The competition for the Anglo-Scottish traffic drove improvements on the competing routes and I suspect similar could be said for some other long distance traffic flows.

 

Though you have to remember that in areas where there was nominally competition, pooling arrangements sometimes negated that. For example, after 1912 the GWR and LSWR came to an agreement - in modern terms we'd probably call it a cartel - not to compete west of Exeter: instead they simply split all traffic receipts in agreed proportion. Not much opportunity for competition to improve the breed there! Such traffic sharing arrangements were far from unique, and indeed they go back right to the formative days of the railways in the 1830s.

Tom