Independent UK: The new age of the train

[marmar]

The new age of the train

A historic boom on the railways – but can network take the strain?

By Jerome Taylor
Friday, 11 April 2008


Britain is witnessing the dawn of a new era of rail travel as an unprecedented demand for environmentally friendly transport encourages people to take more train journeys than at any time since the Second World War.

Figures released yesterday revealed that the number of miles travelled on the rail network reached a record-breaking peacetime high of 30.1 billion during 2007, capping a huge rise in popularity in which passenger numbers have increased every year for the past 13 years.

The rise in passenger miles, documented by the Association of Train Operating Companies (Atoc), indicates a boom in demand for rail transport at a time when the threat of climate change is encouraging more people to find greener ways of moving around.

George Muir, director general of Atoc, described the resurgence of train use as astonishing. "We knew that we were growing but it was only when we looked at the graph that we realised how sudden that growth was," he said. "If you take out the war years, for much of the past 80 years passenger miles have hovered around the 20 billion mark, but within the past 10 years it has grown dramatically."

The only time that train passenger miles – calculated as the number of journeys taken multiplied by the distance travelled – has been higher was during the Second World War when the rail network was twice the size it is now and large numbers of troops were being transported around the country. The previous peacetime record was set in 1946 – when vast numbers of soldiers were being demobilised.

Atoc's figures represent one of the most detailed attempts to gauge the popularity of Britain's railways over the past 170 years and show how demand for rail travel has reached unprecedented levels over the past decade since privatisation. Last year the network handled 1.21 billion rail journeys, the equivalent of 20 journeys for every citizen and a 7 per cent rise on 2006. Traffic on the railways, meanwhile, has increased by 67.6 per cent since 1994 when just 17.9 billion passenger miles were travelled.

Tim Leunig, a historian from the London School of Economics who helped compile the figures, said current trends meant passenger miles were likely to continue breaking records "time and time and time again" as demand increases. A White Paper last year estimated that Britain would need to double its rail capacity by 2030 to meet demand. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-new-age-of-the-train-807789.html

[slor]

1. Good to hear...

we need to revamp our national rail system. Aside from the environmental benefits, think of the jobs it would create.

[BDW1964]

2. US Rail System

Unfortunately, the dedicated passenger rail system (tracks, depots, yards, etc.) was completely dismantled starting in the 1950's and ending in the early 1970's. The one single nation-wide passenger rail service is AMTRAK and it now runs on the freight system. In the current situation, the railroads (BN_ASTF, UP, etc) have priority on the lines they own and AMTRAK trains have to defer to their schedules. This is why the schedule for AMTRAK and consequently, the service sucks. In order to move to a true passenger rail system again, it will have to become either profitable for the railroads to re-invest in rebuilding the system and operating it or become a governmental subsidized/operated system. Regardless, North America is a large area and it is sad that a once robust system was trashed in favor of highways, cars and suburbs.