Comments by "Jim Taylor" (@jimtaylor294) on "The UK DIDN'T "Privatize" the Railways" video.

The "natural monopolies" argument is a bit of a myth, as Railways have always had competition for transit of goods & people. In the UK the railways lost a lot of freight to the roads due to swinging price controls and over regulation, compared to the postwar - and mostly private sector - Van and Lorry drivers using low cost postwar surplus vehicles on state subsidiary built roads. A boom in private car & bike ownership also ate into railway customer traffic, while price controls ate away at money for investment while artificially making overcrowding worse. This is to say: Railways have always had competition, and must endeavour to remain competitive if they want to remain relevant, or open at all. (being state owned didn't help the thousands of miles of track axed by Beeching & Wilson)
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Separately: It's a myth that "hurr durr Raikways are a natural monopoly". They aren't. Through history Railway companies have competed not just with each other for customers, but with other modes of transport (Tube trains, Buses, Cars, 'planes & more). They have no natural monopoly over public transit, and must always strive to be competitive if they wish to remain relevant. This is something state owned railways typically struggle with, as did various non-nationalized but over-regulated railways like the pre-'48 Big Four, which lost out hard on freight & passengers due to government meddling on prices.
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Aye, and Sweden was the country the UK Government was stating as their inspiration for ""privatisation"" back in the '90's; an inspiration that aged like milk 😅 .
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^ #Delusion100 😂 Clearly this guy isn't old enough to actually remember how bad BR was, nor has any actual in-depth knowledge of nationalised railways abroad 🙄 😮‍💨 . Private business and the free market created the Railways from nothing... it was government that made them an unprofitable money sink; more government will only make them even worse.
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^ Straight up dishonesty / delusion. Colour me unsurprised 😂 . No country has built a railway system from nothing via the public sector. Even the Soviet Union inherited its railway system from the Tsar and the various companies that'd built it. Great Britain's rail system - the first in history - was wholly a private sector product; private companies built it, with capital from private investors and companies with vested interests. The government only took an active interest in interfering in the years preceding WWI... and ultimately succeeded only in turning a peach into a lemon.
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Still an example of turning a lemon (JNR) into a Peach (JR). Anyone familiar with Japanese railways before the '80's will know JNR was as bad as BR, if not worse. JR by contrast; vast improvement in efficiency, frequency and even cost. Not perfect, but it would be a vast improvement over the farce we Brit's have been subjected to since 1948.
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^ Missed the point entirely, just like most Soviet made missiles 😆😂 .
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^ Shows what you know, as there's documentary evidence that the Soviets adopted the policy of large warheads on their ICBM's and other nuclear missiles, because they knew missing the target was a high probability and hoped the yield would account for this deficiency 😂 . Polaris & Trident had [physically] small [relatively speaking] warheads because they were confident of accuracy.
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"You're not a Postal Worker are you?" - Gunshop owner in Jumanji 😂
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^ Citation needed (understatement)
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The irony also is that Thatcher refused calls to denationalize BR, after the latter showed some effectiveness with the Intercity 125 , open plan carriages and Sectorization.
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...and a pile of scrap scavenged rubble 😂
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Amen on the weird infrastructure vs rolling stock split. The Swedes were the supposed "inspiration for that disaster (their railways have also gone to hell), whilst the actually sound example Japan was demonstrating, was conveniently ignored by Major's lot.
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@Lusa_Iceheart I recommend brevity & paragrsphs in comment writing, as that was a headache to read 😅 . I also disagree on various points, but will keep it simple: • The UK was never skittish about taking on escaped slaves from the US. Heck when they left the 13 Colonies in 1783 a lot of blacks opted to with them, knowing they'd have better odds of a better life, and invariably they did. Similar story when the UK withdrew from territories captured in the War of 1812. • The Canadian territories were sparsely populated for most of their early history, so if anything they benefitted from runaway slaves. • India (or more precisely the myriad of disunited kingdoms that the British ended up ruling) actually had anything but a ""parasitic"" experience, rather it was the UK that put more in overall than they took out. This is proven by looking at the in depth economic side of things, as well as the fact that the British expended a great amount of money, time and resources there. For example: 1. There was barely any civil plumbing - nor sewage treatment- before the British (and since the 1940s it's slipped backwards in many ways). 2. All but one of India's railway lines were built by the British. 3. There was no domestic Tea industry in India - nor anywhere in the region besides China - before the British not only managed to get the precious plants from out of the Qing's clutches, but also set up successful plantations across India, Ceylon, East-Africa & other locations. ...among various other aspects one could name. In other words; don't take school history books too seriously; they're mostly fiction and outright lies.
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@christopherconard2831 "we will not tolerate your silly metric system" - most Brit's when confronted with a Frenchie or a German 😂
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Another excellent video TIK. Would be interested in your outlook on Japan's approach to Railways since the 1980's, verses how [badly] we Brit's - and the Swedes our government imitated back in about 1994 - have handled the Railway issue.
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@googleandsusansucks Not yet at least. There is hope at least in that there have been governments elsewhere that have bitten the bullet of potential short term unpopularity to make radical changes away from centralization. Denmark and Japan spring to mind in certain sectors, but there are more. Probably will be a while yet for us, but it would be worth it.
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^ Clichéd defence of state ownership tis clichéd 🙄 . The real solution is returning the entire rail sector to the private sector, as it was before the government first stuck its nose in during WWI.
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False actually. Railtrack was ostensibly "private", but in reality was a loosely reigned corporation with few direct employees and an army of subcontractors. Its failures were the result of organizational incompetence and chaos, rather than any strategy. As with all things created by government rather than public industry, it failed hard. It also didn't poof out of existence, rather it just changed its name and became NetworkFail.
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@diegoyanesholtz212 Our passenger rail is aye, but in Freight terms it's the other way round. This's ironic as the first railways in Britain were for freight only, but the government ruined that aspect with price controls and swinging red tape, while also worsening passenger rail as a consequence. In the US's case I think it was government interference that - ironically- helped make Passenger rail economically unprofitable in the first place, while subsidiaries to airlines and road building widened the profitability gap, putting off private investors even more. The US also has far larger distances between population centers than the UK, which also gives airlines a vast journey speed advantage that only railways of greater comfort and convenience could realistically compete with 🤔
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^ Cute attempt at a rebuke, but a very weak one 😆
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^ #Projection100 😆🤣 Also: great job self-invalidating all claim you had to creditability 😂
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^ Non reply is non. Ding
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^×2 Not quite actually. Various companies were hoping to have a station in the center of London, but the cost and likely disruption made that impossible, so they went for the next best option of each having a terminus station reasonably far into London. It worked well, as evidenced by the simple fact that all but one of those Terminai are still in use as stations today 🙂 . They also weren't "near bankrupt" after WWI, rather the government & civil service was smelling a power grab (again).
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Very well put. Makes one wonder what might have been, had the Big Four in the late-'40's been simply given government loans at low interest to rebuild, alongwith a deregulation drive to ease such efforts... certainly would be better than the farce we have now, with politicians and civil servants still claiming they know how to run a railway 😅
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@warrenrandall6936 Precisely. The late and great Ronnie Barker's in particular 🙂👌
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^ Cute pro-big government distortionist narrative, but nope; "neglected lines" wasn't a feature of the generations of pre-BR railway companies in the UK, unlike the entire BR era, where the national network lost money year after year, while the quality of service continually declined. Fact is that the Railways were profitable and generally effective (especially in examples such as the GWR & LSWR), before the government became arrogant enough to think they knew how to run a business they had no role in the rise thereof (besides rubber stamping peices of paper, which's what government is usually supposed to be limited to), and proceeded to kill yet another goose that'd laid them golden eggs in the period they'd let it mostly be. (same with aerospace, cars, housebuilding, shipbuilding, steel, and pretty much everything else 😮‍💨) Japan has proved that a privately owned, sectorized railway network is far better, than the god awful worst-of-both-worlds system (devised by some moron in 1970's/'80's Sweden) we've been lumped with since 1994, which is basically state ownership with a few subcontractors 🤦‍♂️.
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@airplane1831 Debatable, as technically she did increase BR's funding, as she also gave several funding boosts to what was left of British Leyland for as long as there was some hope of it recovering (which the sales flop of the Austin Maestro put an end to). BR's budget was vast at the time, and yet it always lost money... Thatcher accredited them for aspects that worked (which I mentioned prior) but at the same time knew better than to sign blank checks. Worth noting also that the funding increase prior to "privatisation" (that wasn't privatisation at all) was specifically to be used as a Float, a bit like that which Austin-Rover got on several occasions.
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@airplane1831 You're welcome, though I do not agree. The reason why is that the pre-grouping rail companies managed quite well to sustain themselves. The reason why was minimal government interference, which insured they could be competitive on both passenger and - most importantly of all - Freight traffic. Most railways - excluding those built specifically to deliver coal to ports or power stations- had mixed traffic of both types, with Freight being the main factor in why the Railways had enough cash for R&D and service expansion in passenger terms. I think TIK's point was chiefly that it was the government's meddling that destroyed that balance, and turned the railways from prosperity to loss making embarrassment. I also wouldn't be surprised if he lives in part of the railway desert areas of the country, which are due to the mad chopping of Macmillain, Beeching and Wilson. No amount of cuts would've solved BR's underlying woes, just like more government interference is just beating the long dead corpse of a goose, that once laid golden eggs. It's worth noting that subsidy technically doesn't make anything less expensive, it just hides the true cost by making the passenger pay twice through their taxes; which was the main reason why BR was always a fundamentally unethical idea. (perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I don't believe in paying twice for a one time service rendered, let alone being double charged by stealth) The railways could be saved, but it would require the government to accept that politicians and civil servants can't - and shouldn't - run a railway, nor have any role short of: • Final approval for planning permission. • Oversight of [now extremely rare] major accidents. • Ensuring safety regulations are adhered to (in which the Germans wholesale failed in the '90's).
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^ Missed the point entirely (by intent or ignorance, I knoweth nor careth not), you have 🙄😮‍💨 . Also false. The railways didn't "monopolise", rather were forced into groupings, and later nationalised despite public opposition. Similar story in other countries like Germany, with similarly dreadful results (the Big Four crushed the Deutsch Reichsbahn in comparable performance terms for good reason, just as JR today makes a mockery of NationalFail and its faux "private" modus operandi). Also false on the London example, as ULEZ wouldn't be facing open revolt nor Buses & Trams active in the capital if rail was the only option relied on 😂 .
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@Lusa_Iceheart Mostly agree... however: The Empire didn't "burden" the 13 colonies with slavery; it was a societal norm' across the world at the time, like indentured servitude. Ironically it was the British - and some of their colonial offspring- that were not only the first to conclude that slavery wasn't a good thing, but also the first to instigate and leverage abolition of it. The UK being the progenitor of the industrial revolution also was a great help in removing the economic need for slaves as well. Modernity superseding barbarism. Some of the 13 colonies that'd form the USA had leaned toward slavery being immoral before the 1770's, but it took another century and a civil war for it to lead to abolition across them all.
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^ #EverythingYouJustSaidWasWrong 😂
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Well put. Those whom want BR back either like soggy sandwiches, or are too young - or stupid - to remember how bad it was.
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^ Ah, a leftoid being casually racist and name-calling people for not on-board with bringing back soggy sandwiches; how... predictable 😂 . Newsflash: the worst train crash in living memory was German (not British), and the result of systemic ignoring of safety rules by the nationalised rail corporation, Deutsche Bahn. (so bad was the scandal it canned an export deal for the I.C.E. train to AMTRAK) Add in the mess that is nationalised rail in Sweden, Poland, Romania & more... and yeah~ BR's haplessness was anything but the exception 😂
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^ Three comments worth of leftoid denialist cope 😂 Nationalisation of railways has never "made them better", as evidenced by the mess in this country, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Romania and many more 😮‍💨 .
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^ A Politician actually listening to the constituents?. Good joke 😂 . Railway Companies are always better than plastic faced politicians and unelected civil servants, because the latter typically lose nothing from people complaining &/or going elsewhere for a service, while a company board and their investors do. Also: throwing good money after bad seldom accomplishes anything, other than wasting money.
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@captainsmith3972 It's true that there will always be some government oversight, though there's two details to consider there: • Most of our railways and subways were built during the Victorian era by private industry, with the only government role being to approve where they could and couldn't do it. (it wasn't until after the turn of the century that the government overtly switched from a hands off to interventionist posture, that went into overdrive during & after WWI) • Apart from giving final approval for planning permission, coordinating efforts in the advent of a [now very rare] major accident, and ensuring safety regulations are followed (which the German gov' certainly failed in doing with their version of BR in the 1990's), there isn't much else that government should have a role in with the railways. After all: private venture developed, built and ran them for generations, whereas the government had neglected the public road network in all but times of war.
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^ Not true actually. It was the government making [yet another] power grab. The politicians had played no significant role in the creation of the Railways, but after seeing them succeed, they were determined to interfere... and would ultimately achieve nothing but turn a peach into a lemon. The roads and airlines have been a similar story.
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