Today's railway

A strange and contradictory time on the railways. First up, Network Rail has revealed another artist's impression of the massive redevelopment at London Bridge station -- this time showing the rather impressive-looking concourse:

At the same time, NR announced that the massive £0.5bn redevelopment currently underway at Reading station -- one of the most congested interchanges on the network -- will be completed a year early, in 2015:

Interestingly for geeks like me, NR also released a survey listing the most congested stations which are not currently being upgraded: Basingstoke, Bristol Parkway, Clapham Junction, Earlsfield, Liverpool Central, Liverpool Lime Street, London Charing Cross, London Fenchurch Street, London Victoria, Preston, Surbiton and Wimbledon (the image, below, shows Manchester Victoria, previously labelled the worst station on the network, now being hugely redeveloped):

And finally the government is trailling snippets from the McNulty Review, commissioned by the last Government to find out why Britain's dynamic private-sector railways now cost around five or six times what they did when the extremely inefficient public-sector British Rail was in charge.

McNulty has discovered Europe's railways cost 40% less (or Britain's cost 40% more -- no-one can yet say which of those different figures is correct), and politicians are already blaming this on the train drivers who earn, apparently, £41k pa, which is more than teachers, nurses and the police.

It is completely unclear to me what the relevance of those comparisons is rather than to, say, the salary levels of French or German or Dutch train drivers. We do know that train drivers under BR earned just over £20k, so in ten years their pay has doubled. In the same period the cost of the railway has increased five- or six-fold, while the number of drivers has reduced.

This simple arithmetic suggests to me that the politicians might be blaming the wrong group of people -- possibly in order to distract our attention from the greedy bastards who are really responsible.

I'd like to know how much money goes on profits/dividends each year, how much is spent on lawyers compared to European companies, and how much on administrative overhead to manage the stupidly complex network of contractual relationships that are at the messy heart of Britain's railway.