How capitalism works

I mentioned the sad demise of the Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone Railway company a couple of days ago.

Coincidentally, the Rail Passenger Satisfaction survey arrived yesterday. At the top, with 96% of passengers satisfied with the service: the unsubsidised Wrexham, Shropshire and Marylebone.

Capitalist monopolies lead to worse services. They cut choice, they cut corners, they charge more. The W+S is owned by the same company as Chiltern Railways: Deutsche Bahn, the German state operator. So although the Germans made the trains run on time, they couldn't defeat the vested interests of our crony capitalists.

Murder on the Wrexham and Shropshire Express

I liked the W+S. It ran cheap services in beautifully-appointed old trains, which made everybody stop and stare as they ran through stations because they reminded us all of the days in which railway travel was elegant, enjoyable, affordable and logical. No more: the Wrexham Shropshire Railway closes down on Friday.

Needless to say, they're victims of monopoly capitalism. The insane idea of railway privatisation was that multiple companies would maintain the tracks, others would run the stations and many others would run trains. A recipe for disaster. The hope was that loads of companies would compete to provide services. The reality was that anyone trying to do something different - like the W+S, which provided a London service for an area deprived of easy access to the capital - gets squeezed out by the big monopolists who make 'profits' by extracting more subsidies from the taxpayer than state-owned British Rail (!) while increasing ticket prices by obscene amounts.. So the W+S was restricted to bad times and stopping only at tiny stations away from large towns and cities, and forced to take the slow routes. Did the big firms try to provide a service to compete with the W+S? No, of course not: they just closed it down by underhand methods.

Yet more proof that capitalism fosters poor, expensive services at the expense of those who try to do a decent job.

God, I feel sorry for the Germans and their terrible public transport.

Train travel throughout Germany was also thrown into chaos as operators ordered high-speed trains to slow down to 200 km/hour in order to avoid accidents due to ice clumps on the rails, leading to many delays and cancellations. 

Awful. Their inefficient state-run trains have to slow down to 200kph in extreme conditions.

In other news, 201 kph (125mph) is the top speed of all British InterCity trains - unchanged since the railways were privatised (cost to the state then: £2.5bn; cost to the state now: £4.9bn - and ticket prices have rocketed). The rest don't get anywhere near.

Grumpy.

Morning. I'll be quiet today - I'm skiving work shortly to go to Sunny Birmingham to get my Mac's screen fixed. Given my recent luck, I'll drop it in front of the train before I get there.

Perhaps it's just touch-screens I break - I've cracked the one on my nasty phone, a piece of (free) junk designed to look just enough like an iPhone to fool the short-sighted, and just different enough to avoid getting sued. Thankfully, my iPod Touch remains intact. For now.

So - off to the Metropolis, then back for teaching at 6 - delightful.

I went fencing in Shrewsbury last night. I was meant to go for dinner with one of my coaches and his family, but ended up sitting on a train between Telford and Oakengates while the local cops chased kids along the track. Quite frankly, I think the steam train shouldn't have stopped for Jenny Agutter and her brothers, and it certainly shouldn't have stopped for these brats. If, as a society, we're going to say that ten-year old children are capable of committing murder and standing trial as adults (like the Bulger murderers), they can bloody well take the consequences of playing on railway lines. Let them play - Darwinism in action.



Alternatively, perhaps children shouldn't be considered capable of moral responsibility for serious crimes?

So anyway, instead of tucking into a fine dinner washed down with the vintage Rioja I'd brought along as my contribution, I stood in a packed and smelly commuter train while assorted little delinquents mooned us. Ah, the romance of the rails.



(My mother was an extra in this film!)

Gordon the Big Engine and Henry the Green Engine

Prompted by a mention on the radio yesterday, I dig out my old Rev. W. Awdry railway books, and discover that Gordon the Big Engine is competitive, surly, a dependable workhorse who hates to be beaten, and often the butt of jokes by flashier engines. He always gets through in the end, and is always at the heart of rescue operations.

Gordon's important position as the engine who usually pulls the Express has made him proud, pompous and arrogant, with good reason, too; he is the strongest engine on Sodor after all.Because of his rank in the social order of the North Western Railway, Gordon expects to get the important jobs and either sulks when he doesn't, or gets jealous of those who do. Sometimes, Gordon acts as a bully… Sometimes Gordon shows a kinder side and gives the younger engines advice, usually after he has had some mishap as a result of his foolhardiness. Some of his advice isn't exactly honest, though, as James and Sir Handel have discovered.

Amongst his rivals is Henry the Green Engine. Henry is vain, spiteful, patronising and snobbish, and winds Gordon up something rotten. He was owned by Sir Topham Hatt. He's painted green but burns coal, very inefficiently. Completely coincidentally, he looks like David Cameron.

Here's a moral tale about poor Gordon:

Training Day?

The political parties are spending the day arguing about a pipe-dream: the development of a 250mph railway from London to Birmingham (in 30-50 minutes) and one day beyond.

I love trains, and wish this project would happen (once, as Ben points out, the rest of the railway network is fixed), but it just won't. It would make internal flights obsolete immediately.

1. This country is bust.
2. It will only begin once Crossrail (the east-west London line) is built: that hasn't started, and probably won't.
3. Neither party will commit to the nationalisation of the railway network that is the only way to manage a project like this.
4. The line goes through a lot of rich, pretty countryside areas: Tory constituencies - an incoming Tory government will never allow this to happen.

It's a cynical piece of electioneering, a prestige project to whet our whistles which will never happen: the UK hasn't even electrified all the existing lines yet, something war-ravaged France, Germany and Italy managed in the 1950s! They may as well promise us this and this.

Cheating, greedy bastards

I mailed Virgin Trains and Cross Country to ask what counts as 'peak time' - none of the rail companies makes this information easily available. Virgin didn't bother to reply, but I got this galling reply for Cross Country:

Peak Hours are generally between 04:30 and 09:30 and again between 15:30 and 18:15 from Monday to Friday. All other times are Off-Peak. I hope this helps.

Thank you once again for taking the time to get in touch. 

Unbelievable. 04.30 a.m. 'peak'? Nonsense. Nationalisation NOW!

5.30 a.m. Everybody's preferred time to travel

I'm going to a conference in April. All staff have £500 per year to spend on such things. The conference, including accommodation, comes to £290.

I intend to take the train there. Not wanting to waste an overnight stay, I found an 05.24 train that gets me in at 09.30. Early, but doable. Should be cheap.

Oh no. 05.24 is apparently 'peak time'. £192. Whereas a journey at 9.45 is 'only' £50, despite that train being inevitably busier than one running basically in the middle of the night. This is the insanity of rail privatisation - and why I'll have to miss a morning of this fascinating conference.

Morons. Vote for whoever says they'll renationalise the railways.

You're about to elect these people

Sir Nicholas Winterton is a man with a history of racist jokes and outrageous expenses claims. He's also a Conservative MP. The Great British Public seems to have decided that his party (which disastrously privatised the railways, by the way) deserves power in the upcoming election. He has just announced that:

MPs should be allowed to claim expenses for first-class tickets because standard coaches are for "a totally different type of people".

After declaring himself "infuriated" with proposals from the new expenses watchdog to ban payments for first-class tickets during a magazine interview, the MP for Macclesfield told a radio interviewer that people travelling on standard tickets were "in a different walk of life" and their children might disturb an MP's work. "They want to stop members of parliament travelling first class. That puts us below local councillors and officers of local government. They all travel first class … So we are supposed to stand when there are no seats … I'm sorry, it infuriates me."

So what was the Pringles tube for?

I asked, and you provided many and varied responses. None of them were correct.

Neal utilised the tube to make me………………………… The Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack© (quotes below are from the hilarious interview linked to by her name). In case you don't know her, she's the shrillest, least informed, most opinionated, most often wrong, most reactionary and most unpleasant journalist in the country - more so even than Jan Moir, because Philips is more intelligent. She has turned her talent towards evil. For instance, she believes that climate change just isn't happening and is a big communist plot (qualifications - zero), putting her in the company of this charming fellow and this one, and she calls London Londonistan which apparently isn't racist, whereas having even the slightest scintilla of doubt about anything Israel does is anti-semitic and you may as well wear an SS uniform and burn Jews every weekend because you are a Holocaust denier. Obama, to her, is 'in the Islamists' camp' and became a Christian as an electoral tactic… And she thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism, which is a sure sign of an uninformed fruitcake.

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

The key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews".

"The capture of all society's institutions, such as schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police and voluntary groups. This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism."

She writes, of course, for the Daily Mail.

The newspaper rack is perfectly designed, as you can see, to shut her up by cramming her mouth with The Guardian, which is her nemesis. The speech bubble is wipe-clean, enabling me to replace her old lunacies with fresh ones.

Melanie Philips: proof that you can be intelligent and stupid, or cynical ranter for money? Whatever the case, she makes me angrier than anyone else on the planet. This includes Michael Portillo. He was the son of Spanish Republican refugees who betrayed them by becoming one of the most rightwing Conservative government ministers in recent history. He made me shout extremely rude words at the television this morning. It was a repeat of one of his post-politics travel shows, in which he extolled the beauty and efficiency of the Spanish hyper-fast railway network.

Why did this make me angry, you may ask. After all, you love trains and foreigners, Vole. (Yes, Melanie, I do.) Well children, it made me angry because Portillo was one of the Conservative minister who privatised Britain's railway network. They broke it up into stupid little parcels and sold the scraps at a knockdown price to their flaky, dodgy, asset-stripping financier friends, who turned a tired but functional service into a shiny, awful, unreliable service which is Europe's most expensive. So for him to spend licence-payers' money grinning smugly from the seat of a fast, luxurious train we'll never have because he stole the network from us is UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. The total, total bastard. How DARE he?

And yet, Melanie Philips is worse. Portillo's a well-fed smug turncoat. Philips is actually, deliberately evil because she refuses to think past her prejudices, despite having the intelligence to do so.

Delenda est Carthago

I hate the use of mobile phones, stereos and other noise-making gadgets in public. The judicious use of earphones seems perfectly acceptable to me, as a way of blocking out the world or adding a soundtrack to your observation of it - but using speakers to impose your tastes on other passengers is nothing short of bullying. I've always wanted to respond with a blast of the dullest material available - perhaps Radio 4's You and Yours or Money Box.

So imagine my utter horror on receiving promotional junk from a rail company this morning: offering a prize of portable speakers! Is there no protection? If violence ensues, they're responsible. Sod the mimsy mention of the 'quiet coach'. If you are so thoughtless and selfish as to broadcast your music to other passengers, you deserve to have the speaker recycled as a gobstopper.

Ten lucky Raileasy customers will be picked out of our Christmas draw and will receive an Orbitsound T3 portable speaker. This small personal speaker produces a great sound and is perfect for sharing music from your MP3 player, music phone or laptop which was recently rated best travel speaker for iPod and iPhone by iPod User - the ideal travel companion (unless you’re travelling in the quiet coach!)

Attention, female football fans

Victoria and I bumped into Gary Speed in Chester yesterday. I didn't notice but Victoria (who is Welsh) went weak at the knees (her actual phrase doesn't bear repetition on a family blog), but here's a picture of what you missed.

Meanwhile, the goverment's announced a plan to build such fabulously fast railways that domestic flights will wither away. They shouldn't exist on such a small island anyway. This is the first thing this government's done in ages that's purely, unambiguously brilliant - so obviously the lobbyists are out in force and it'll never happen. O'Leary of Ryanair called it 'insane', so it must be a good thing.

Smile you bastards, or you're sacked

Sometimes the most oppressive aspects of life are the most stupid - Keihin Electric Express Railway Company are assessing their employees to make sure they're smiling properly and frequently, using some software

Railway workers of Japan: rise up, scowl, and overthrow the tyranny of enforced false joy! Our masters pay us to facilitate their profits. They have enough power without demanding that we pretend to enjoy it - it's an attempt to take over your souls.

Here in the UK, grumpy shop assistants are a cultural strength, from Open All Hours to Fawlty Towers to Black Books, never mind the distinct brand of misery dispensed by transport officials. Why should people on the minimum wage be forced to smile through the inanity and stupidity of the great British public? I respect the strength of mind of any employee who refuses to engage in this fraudulent attempt to persuade us that suffering terrible conditions on low pay is somehow the fulfilment of all their fantasies. Furthermore, the grumpy employee reminds us that there's a human in that uniform, not a robot on whom we can unload all our frustrations. They can treat us as badly with full legal immunity - they can't build enjoying it into our contracts.

So next time you're treated dismissively, rudely or surlily by a man or woman in a neon nylon suit, remind yourself that this is an act of class warfare and applaud their brave stand against the tyranny of simulated joy. Unhappiness is your right and mine.