The renationalisation of British railways seems to be the new public fetish; we have a short collective memory it would seem.



First and foremost, the system we have today isn't a proper market in railways. It's a system known as "franchising", where operating companies bid for use of the railways. This, essentially, creates concentrated monopolies which, when coupled with the bidding mechanism, raises prices and then the government makes everybody bear part of the cost with fare subsidies.

But what does the graph tell us? Even a bad system of privatisation is better than nationalisation. During the initial development of the railways from around 1830 to 1913, the system was properly privatised and construction was done mainly with private capital. The government took effectual control during the First World War, and then in 1923 David Lloyd George was dissatisfied with the high competition and low profits of the private railways, and so consolidated them into regional monopolies known as the Big Four.

They performed very poorly, and then following world war two the entire system was nationalised under British Rail. In 1995, the Major government introduced the current system and by 2010 it had made up the lost ground of the previous 80 years.

So what exactly do the numbers in increments of 250 mean...?

Oh fuck, lol.

It's the number of train journeys in millions.

Has there been any statistical research into the effect of the booming automobile industry during that nationalized period? I imagine nearly every adult having access to a car would reduce the number of train rides. I think it's also important to take into account the fact that it probably wasn't just the act of privatization but also a general effort to expand railways and make them a more economical option. Add that to the fluctuations in oil prices in the last two decades and I see a lot of extraneous reasons why people be preferring to use trains more than they had in the past.

You know I'm not just playing devil's advocate because of anti-privatization, but from my statistical background I'd prefer to see actual evidence of correlation between nationalization and poor performance in this market.

Well, let's look at some alternate hypotheses:

It doesn't look like a rise in the cost of driving:


Nor changes in GDP:


Comparative growth? No.


Extra governmental funding? No.


And it certainly hasn't come at the expense of safety.

Well, let's look at some alternate hypotheses:

It doesn't look like a rise in the cost of driving:

Has any sort of interaction hypothesis testing been done? Graphs don't mean anything without statistical analysis.