The TransPennine Express ‘service’ has been taken into government hands, another privatisation failure, it seems.
I can speak from personal experience that the TransPennine Express service was truly awful.
‘A bus on wheels,’ as my dad used to say and, some of them literally were, a few years ago.
TransPennine Express
TPE will be nationalised after customer complaints of poor service and cancelled trains.
The government will now run the service which covers Manchester and Liverpool and other key northern cities and runs to Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland.
In January and February about a quarter of its services were cancelled, proof of its shocking service.
Privatisation
Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside Kim Johnson tweeted: “The failed experiment of rail privatisation is falling apart for all to see. It’s time we brought the whole rail network under public ownership and control.”
Can govt save it?
Maybe not!
Transport Secretary Mark Harper said taking TransPennine under state control was “not a silver bullet and will not instantaneously fix a number of challenges being faced”.
Criticism
Louise Haigh, Labour’s shadow transport sec, said: “This endless cycle of shambolic private operators failing passengers shows the Conservatives’ rail system is fundamentally broken.”
Also, Andy Burnham, Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, said privatisation has “seen fares shoot up, and the standard of services go down, and the companies in the end are not accountable to the paying public”.
East coast
it echoes the failure of the east coast line after a total failure of privatisation.
At the time the RMT general secretary, Mick Cash, said: “Three private operators (GNER, NXEC, VTEC) have failed on East Coast with bids promising £1.3bn, £1.4bn and £3.3bn respectively. Privatisation has been a total failure.”
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