This is incorrect. The biggest accidents - Potters Bar, Hatfield, Southall - happened in the years immediately after privatisation, before passenger numbers had grown much.
The problem was more that - in typical privatised fashion - the industry was treated as a cash grab, and property speculation and other side quests got more management attention than running a safe railway.
That first incarnation was so bad it was quickly nuked, and replaced with the hybrid arrangement we have today, which has a much better safety record, but is still comically expensive and inefficient.
And franchises very clearly have improved, so that's incorrect too. Delays and cancellations are down across the network, and that's before the system is reintegrated.
The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge. The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.
This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.
> The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.
That's always the loss. In privitisation, in out-sourcing, and in downscaling engineering teams by firing senior engineers. And it's great for the those in charge of the budget cuts, because it is a loss that is very difficult to quantify financially, and will only show over a longer period of time. Typically, well after they cashed-out and left.
> And it's great for the those in charge of the budget cuts, because it is a loss that is very difficult to quantify financially, and will only show over a longer period of time. Typically, well after they cashed-out and left.
IMHO most executive pay should be locked up for decades by law, and they only get a middle-class wage stipend in the interim. And I mean really locked up, such that a significant fraction should only be payed out as long as 20 years later. And that pay gets forfeited if the organization has too many problems.
It'd help disincentive smash-and-grab management like you describe (because weakening the org would jeopardize the locked up pay, and would help a big with succession (because their pay would depend on the successor's performance, too).
Don't we have already solution for this? It is called pension. Extra executive compensation should be set up as pension, which starts paying at usual pension age. And it must be locked to only be shares of the company. And it should work by automatically selling to open market the shares locked up until the expected life expectancy expires.
And thus the cycle continues- the EU stifles meritocracy, bemoans the resulting lack of innovation and entrepreneurship, and resorts to inventing new and novel ways to penalize US companies as a coping mechanism
> The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety, as measured by accidents, has become worse since privatisation.
This article was written in 2007, just a few years after Network Rail was re-nationalised in 2002.
Since 2002, there has only been a single passenger fatality attributable to poor maintenance: the Grayrigg derailment in 2007.
This followed a cluster of high profile crashes during the Railtrack (privatisation) era in 1997-2002 that killed dozens, and were directly or partly attributable to poor maintenance.
I’d argue that the longer Network Rail’s good safety record continues, the more we can disregard that article.
Read the bottom of page 17 and page 18 of the article I linked to.
Given where it was published (a magazine backed by statisticians associations in three countries) it would have been very damaging to the author's (a professor at Imperial College) reputation to have been sloppy about conclusions.
This be enough if there is metric that shows worse safety:
The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety has become worse since privatisation.
The study at hand seems to have considered only fatal accidents. Probably for good statistical reasons. But the most obvious next “what” to my mind would be accidents that did not result in fatalities.
Followed closely by safety-involved “incidents” that were reportable somewhere (internally or to a regulator), but that luckily didn’t result in an accident that time.
One imagines these must get really hard to measure reliably the further they get from concrete death records.
I don’t mean it as a criticism! I think that their choice to study a dataset of accidents resulting in fatalities—was reasonable, and that it was admirable to reiterate that qualifier in the conclusion.
I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow. But it makes sense to me why academics might choose a narrow but highly reliable dataset, and try to be very transparent about that: safety is certainly much broader than just fatality-accidents, but fatality-accidents are awfully hard to fudge long-term records for.
> I’m also sensitive to the parent commenter’s point that the choice of indicator was kind of narrow.
But you're not. We can separate the parent comment into two claims:
(1) The indicator was accidents;
(2) The indicator is too narrow.
You've supported (2) by pointing out that the parent commenter's idea of what the choice of indicator was was completely incorrect. But everything they said was wrong! They were wrong about the indicator, and they were wrong that the indicator they called excessively narrow was excessively narrow. They weren't saying that the paper judged by a criterion that was too narrow, independently of what that criterion was. (1) and (2) are both claims you can mine out of the parent comment, but they're not claims that were made separately in the parent comment.
"Accidents" covers everything you might want to know about. It's crazy to say that looking at accident rates is "suspiciously specific". It's crazy because it's as nonspecific as you can get.
> The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.
It wasn't given away. Fiat Ferroviaria purchased the patents for it.
Mind, the UK wasn't the first tilted train (that would probably be PERC in the US) or even the first actively tilted train (either SNCF in France or Deutsche Bahn in Germany).
Yeah that sounds about right. I can't think of many situations where privatizing safety critical operations hasn't ended in disaster. Safety at that point ceases to be a priority and just another number on the sheet to crunch. If the lawsuit is cheaper than the savings from cutting corners, that's the move to make.
>The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.
Yeah, this is often the biggest loss of mass layoffs in the name of short term profits. Esepcially since the situations also tend to cut training programs. You're slashing a pipe for some quick water at the cost of draining the rest of your plumbing system. while firing the plumbers in the process.
I wish we could switch back to incentivizing long term portfolios and planning. It's reckless at this point.
From the start, in 1994, there was this arbitrarily imposed structure with Railtrack owning all the track, and all the private companies leasing. The original plan was that this Railtrack thing would be publicly funded, and that's where that structure came from. Slowly over three years, then, the railway went private. Railtrack wasn't private until 1996. Then the railway was "properly private," but not really, because of this track-monopoly structure imposed on it by legislation, Railtrack being in effect government-run and a "private" company somehow too. Five years later (2001) there was bankruptcy, administration and re-nationalization of Railtrack (into "Network Rail") anyway.
Lurking in the background the whole time was the RMT, the National Union of Rail [etc.] Workers, led by "communist/socialist" Bob Crow, a moderate in the union.
So if this is viewed as an experiment in private ownership, experimental conditions were extremely messy and any conclusions are invalidated by cultural complexities and compromises.
My commentary is this: It looks like around 1982, the trend reversed, well before the privatization. My takeaway is that whatever the government had done under nationalization was successful at addressing the concerns that existed and contributed to a downward trend that began before nationalization.
There are lots of wiggles in any graph and you can always take a wiggle and say "ah the trend was reversed". Privatization showed a steady growth in passenger numbers for decades. Nationalization didn't.
The trend is not a "wiggle." It is the slope of a local region, around which the "wiggles" bounce.
Sure, I agree: privatization continued the trend that nationalization established.
My point is simply this: the graph on its own doesn't indicate anything causal, but your original comment implied that the graph is enough to prove that privatization caused the growth.
Sure. The graph on its own doesn't prove causality. The graph, plus a little basic common sense, does give strong evidence of causality. Specifically, there's no other plausible alternative for the sudden dramatic turnaround in the mid-80s and sustained growth thereafter.
The turnaround in the mid 1980s predates privatization, so unless everyone had time machines back then, this is evidence against causality.
Also: common sense is not evidence. It never has been, nor will it ever be. Justification? Sure. Could even be that common sense is correct. But, evidence? No.
The British rail privatization was so successful in increasing passenger numbers it also increased the number of passengers taking the train in France (despite French rail still being state-controlled).
Or maybe, just maybe, there's another underlying casual relationship that explains why train use increased a ton in the 90s and 00s in both countries (and other European countries too, by the way, AFAIK passengers count also increased in Germany in that period). Who knows.
Much of the French high speed rail network (LGV Atlantique,
LGV Rhône-Alpes, LGV Nord,
LGV Méditerranée,
LGV Est, etc) was inaugurated in the 1990s and 2000s.
This alone would have been responsible for a big increase in French rail traffic.
UK rail infrastructure certainly received improvements during this era too, but besides HS1 it was mostly just renewing and upgrading existing tracks. Nothing like the thousands of km of new high speed rail that was built in France!
If you just look at France it may be tempted to conclude it must be TGV, but that's the same methodological problem: it grew in most of Europe by comparable amount in the period.
Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period.
It's not TGV, it's not privatization and it is not Wiedervereinigung, it's a broader trend.
> "Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period."
I don't entirely disagree with you, but rail lines don't function in isolation. If you introduce a new high speed main line, there is a network effect: connecting services will also see a boost in traffic from people travelling on other lines to reach the new one.
Cool story. Got evidence? I googled for a minute and found this official document:
"Thus, as shown in Figure 3, the modal share of rail has oscillated between 7 and 10% for almost 30 years, with a low point reached in 1995 following several years of crisis, and a maximum reached in 2011."
> This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.
No kidding.
But of course, never underestimate the motivated reasoning of an HN user. After all, somebody made money off of the privatization. That could've been you, and you like making money, right?
The problem was more that - in typical privatised fashion - the industry was treated as a cash grab, and property speculation and other side quests got more management attention than running a safe railway.
That first incarnation was so bad it was quickly nuked, and replaced with the hybrid arrangement we have today, which has a much better safety record, but is still comically expensive and inefficient.
And franchises very clearly have improved, so that's incorrect too. Delays and cancellations are down across the network, and that's before the system is reintegrated.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2025/oct...
The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge. The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.
This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.