Why railways in the UK suck

How the infrastructure works

Most of the UK's rail infrastructure (switches, rail, signals, stations, OLE) is owned and managed by Network Rail, although they do not run any passenger services themselves. Most of our European neighbours have a state-owned rail company (e.g, SNCF, Nederlandse Spoorwegen, Deutsche Bahn), but railways in the UK are privatised.

To demonstrate this, let's discuss the two main problems commuters have with the railways - fares and delays.

Privatisation and fares

Colchester and Cambridge are roughly the same distance away from London and similar in population. As of when I'm writing (January 2025), an off-peak open return ticket from Colchester to London is £42.80, whereas the same ticket from Cambridge to London is £26.20.

I think the reason for the price difference is competition. Colchester station is only served by Greater Anglia. Cambridge is served by Greater Anglia, but it's also served by other operators like Great Northern and Thameslink. In Colchester, Greater Anglia has no competition so they can charge more because people rely on the railway.

It's not uncommon for certain areas of the country to be primarily operated by one company, and sometimes operators you think would be competitors are part of the same franchise (e.g., West Midlands Trains & London Northwestern Railway).

Some countries have train services for certain regions, but it doesn't mean they're privately owned. Poland has local train operators for its voivodeships (e.g., Koleje Malopolskie which covers the Lesser Poland Voivodeship), but they are funded by the local government. Trains between major cities (e.g., Krakow to Warsaw) are operated by the state-owned rail company PKP.

Delays

The railway requires frequent maintenance for safety reasons and to keep it operating smoothly. The jobs are expensive, time-consuming and often require planning in advance. For instance, do we need a possession? How many people do we need for the job? What competencies do they need to have? What Safe System of Work should be in place?

Unlike on the road, a train can't just go past an obstacle. Even if there's another track the train can move onto, it would require a lot of coordination from the signaller to avoid a head-on collision with another train. It may involve waiting for other trains to pass before switching tracks to ensure the train can move back to the original track and to avoid two trains being in the same section.

This is a problem with rail privatisation. Even if companies compete on price, they cannot compete on service because they share the infrastructure.

Why bother with trains?

When things work, trains are great. They can carry a lot of cargo/passengers, it's cheaper to run a train than a plane relative to the amount of cargo, and trains are allowed to travel much faster (UK motorway speed limit is 70mph or 112kph).

In places like Japan and China, high-speed rail has been a huge success. Driving from Shanghai to Beijing takes around 12 hours, in comparison, the bullet train takes around 4.5-6 hours. It's arguably faster than flying when you factor in the time spent going through security and the time between the gate closing and the plane taking off.