The Conservatives after 1979 - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 98

The process of selling British Rail's constituent businesses as separate companies
and the specification and letting of so many passenger service franchises was extremely
time-consuming. The Labour Party had registered its opposition to the proposals
and the Conservative Government, fearful of losing office before the process could
be completed, embarked on a timetable to finalise implementation before the 1997
general election. There were widespread criticisms that the nation's railway assets were
undervalued in order to achieve a quick sale and thereby fulfil a political project.
The whole of the nation's railway infrastructure was sold for £1.8bn - a figure even
more derisory in the light of the billions of public money which had to be injected
subsequently to salvage the industry after privatisation (15.5). Shares in both
RailTrack and the rolling stock companies (ROSCOs) quickly rocketed to many times
their initial offer price.
Despite the rhetoric of competition and market forces the privatised railway was in
fact highly regulated. The principle of 'open access' which the Conservatives originally
favoured had to be shelved in the face of opposition from the companies bidding for
the passenger franchises. (In making fixed-sum bids to run services which were loss-
making overall they did not want other companies being able to enter the market and
'cream off' profitable elements along their routes.)
The division of the railway industry into so many different private companies in
order to generate competition meant that the actual business of running any part of
it became extremely complex. Nevertheless, unlike bus deregulation, the transition
to a privatised regime was comparatively smooth from the passengers' viewpoint. On
the ground there was little change - in most places the same services continued to
be run with the same trains, sometimes under the same management. There was not
the instability of 'on the road' competition or frequent changes in services. Some of
the changes which occurred during the first franchising period - for example on the
Chiltern Line from London Marylebone to Birmingham, or on the Midland Main Line
to Leicester and Nottingham - represented significant service enhancements. Railway
user groups claimed that in the initial years after privatisation service reliability and
punctuality declined, but the official figures showed very little overall change.
6.6 New rail developments
Separate from the mainstream of the national railway system the period of
Conservative Government was also marked by several other important innovations in
rail development and funding.
On a scale of its own was the Government's decision to sign a treaty with the French
Government in 1986 agreeing to the construction of a rail-based Channel Tunnel.
Scarcely less significant was Mrs Thatcher's view that a project of this magnitude,
with exceptional scale and duration of attendant risks, should be undertaken and
financed solely by the private sector. Planning debates surrounding the effects of the
tunnel were contained by the Government's decision that a new high-speed rail link
connecting the Channel Tunnel with London (CTRL) would not be needed for at least
ten years. When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994 and through 'Eurostar' services
began operating between London and Paris/Brussels the negative British attitude to
rail development contrasted unfavourably with the situation on the other side of the
Channel where new high-speed lines were opened concurrently.
In the late 1980s a subsidiary company of British Rail was created to investigate
routes for the CTRL, but on the strict condition that it too would not require public