they must he capable of covering system costs amounting to £1,000/2,000 per mile, and must carry around 10,000 passengers per week if they are to do so.
Confronted with evidence that a rail service does not pay, many people ask:—
- Why not decrease fares and attract more traffic?
- Why not give people the opportunity to pay higher fares and preserve the service?
- Why not substitute rail buses for trains and decrease the cost of the service?
- Why not run fewer trains?
- Why not close some stations?
Common-sense considerations, and all experience, go to show that the problem cannot be solved either by decreasing or increasing fares.
If fares were halved, traffic would have to increase at least fourfold to cover the direct costs of stopping services as a group, and sixfold to make them pay their whole costs. Nobody can seriously suppose that this would happen. People without their own transport, at present, are not so seriously deterred by the rail fares for short journeys that they would use trains many times as often if fares were halved.
To cover the costs of many services, fares would have to be increased to about eight or ten times their present level, even if traffic remained at its present density. It would, of course, disappear completely.
The third suggestion, that rail buses should he substituted for trains, ignores the high cost of providing the route itself, and also ignores the fact that rail buses are more expensive vehicles than road buses. The extent to which the economics remain unsound can readily be seen by inserting a Movement cost of three shillings per mile in the table on page 17. It would still be necessary to have a passenger density of 14,000 per week, to cover the total cost of the service, as compared with 17,000 per week with diesel multiple units. It is not immediately apparent either, why it is thought that rail buses would give a better standard of service than a road bus in most rural areas.
Similarly, consideration of the cost figures will show that thinning out the trains, or thinning out the stations, would not make a service self-supporting even if it had no adverse effect on revenue.
These points have been mentioned, to dispose of any idea that stopping-train services could be preserved, as an economic alternative to buses or private transport, if only some ingenuity were shown by railway operators. This really is not so, and it is obvious that a high proportion of stopping passenger train services ought to be discontinued as soon as possible, and that many of the lightly loaded lines over which they operate ought to close as well unless they carry exceptional freight traffic. For this reason, all stopping services have been examined individually, and so have all lengths of lightly loaded route.
So far as the services themselves are concerned, closure proposals have been determined by the inability of the services to produce revenue sufficient to cover the direct costs of operating them. Examples illustrative of this financial test are given in Appendix 2.
There can be no doubt about the financial desirability of closing those services which do not meet this test, and it is the Railways' wish to close them as soon as the procedure permits. Questions of hardships will be considered by the Transport Users Consultative Committees.
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