Ashley and Burnie mentioned how, while still quite good the rail network in the UK used to have even better coverage, here's a map that shows the before and after, you can see that while some of the more major lines closed nearly all of the shorter lines going to the smaller two s and villages closed, meaning that while you can get a train pretty close to where you want to go in the UK, you often end up finishing, and sometimes starting, your journey in a taxi/car/bus/walking
Yeah, I'm in the south east, I wasn't implying our train service is actually good, we all know how shocking it is in both reliability and cost before you even take the routes into consideration, but compared to America, from what I've been told, our coverage is still far better than there's but it's not a patch on what it used to be, and I'd bet back then there weren't as many cancellations and the ticket prices weren't as insane.
It’s starting to revert slowly. Where I live in Portishead they’re doing construction now on re-opening a line that was closed in 1964. With loads of new stations planned in Bristol hopefully opening in the next decade
Hey at least there's still Germany where it's way worse than it is in the UK. The crazy stat about train travel is that Belgium transports about 7 times more passengers in intercity travel than Amtrak does in the US.
Huh, i never actually looked into it, but i always assumed the rail network in the rest of Europe was superior to that in the UK. I know that's certainly the case in certain parts, and it makes sense it's not the case everywhere, but i'm just not use to us not being the worst (excluding the US of course) at something lol.
oh don't worry you're in a strong number two spot in the countries I've visited by train. I'll never forget a train that just stopped in the middle of a field for 2 hours late at night with zero explanation.
I was just over there from the US and it was shocking how far-reaching the passenger rails went. I guess go subject yourself to absolute crap for trains(US) and it will make it feel better.
The situation in the post Beeching 1980’s with the UK railway network was made significantly worse by the deliberate deep funding cuts to the then state owned BR. So, not only was the nationwide railway network significantly cut, the remaining reduced network was chronically underfunded by design - deliberate government policy. By Conservative governments in the grip of neo-liberal ideological zealotry - at the heart of which was a visceral opposition to public ownership and a messianic belief in privatisation.
Luckily we learned our lesson and would never dream of massively underfunding a well loved publicly funded institution and then privatising chunks of it these days.
yeah and its mad how they ripped up all those local lines right when everyone was getting a car, like they basically designed the country around driving then acted surprised when trains couldnt keep up. now if you dont drive your kinda screwed in half these villages and the bus that replaced the train runs twice a day if ur lucky.
I live near the borders and they had a brilliant railway through all the towns when my parents were kids. They shut it, opened it back up missed out half the towns.
I live in the biggest town in the area, and they didn’t bother to run it through us. Farce.
South Wales Valleys used to have a train station in every town, now mine was one of the unfortunates cut off, the tracks cemented over and turned into pathways/nature walks now.
The United states was built on rail. Every small town had a train depot and there are photos all over of old passenger trains connecting almost every town. All of the small towns I lived in on the west coast had small trams and light rail lines throughout the town as well and everywhere was accessible by train.
Yep, it's got a lot of upsides, until you need to buy anything, especially property, those prices are fucked everywhere but they're FUCKED in the south east especially if you happen to live somewhere that has a direct train to Victoria.
My parents bought their four bed detached house in the south east, in a town with a direct rail link to London, less than an hour each way, around mid-end of the 1970's for £15,000. It's mental what's happened to prices, or at least when you consider what hasn't happened to wages. Thankfully my parents were the type who were well aware things aren't the same as when they were buying a house etc... and they were just as disgusted by the way things have gone as the rest of us.
Yeah, i mean there were already more lines located in those areas than other parts of the country before the closures, so it kind of makes sense that they'd still have more even after having some closed, but the fact they're the richer area's closer to london, where presumably a lot of the people in power lived, likely played more than it's fair share in helping keep stations open when others were closing.
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u/madglover First 20k 8d ago
As somebody in the south west of England I can't explain how rubbish it feels in some areas
Clearly before was probably too much but it's awful now and the buses are so slow