Austrian economist calls for privatised rail in EU - gets brutal UK reality check

An Austrian economist is being urged to reconsider calling for trains to be privatised in the European Union, with social media users from the UK inviting him to visit the country to experience one of the train operators.

Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn Tweeted on Thursday (October 3) he was in favour of privatising “all railways in [the] EU” and that legislators should “make it illegal to operate state railways” because “private railways work much better”.

Yet it was only last week that a survey on UK rail passengers’ satisfaction with each train operator was published by watchdog TransportFocus and found that only five out of 22 operators listed reached an overall satisfaction score (based on factors such as punctuality/reliability, cleanliness and crowding) of more than 90 out of 100.

These were c2c, Great Northern, Merseyrail, ScotRail and TfL Rail (also known as the Elizabeth Line).

Elsewhere, CrossCountry has ‘red’ scores across all six categories and when looking at punctuality specifically, none of the 22 operators hit a satisfaction score of 90 or higher.

CrossCountry is the worst with a score of 67, followed by Thameslink and Avanti West Coast on 69 and 70 respectively.

Merseyrail tops the chart, though only with a score of 88.

Before this, a YouGov survey in June found just 43 per cent of Brits are satisfied with train travel in the UK.

And this isn’t helped by issues with the tracks, wires and signals owned by public company Network Rail, which revealed in data provided under the Freedom of Information Act back in August that passengers have lost almost a million minutes to signal failures since the 2018-19 financial year.

So, all in all, UK rail is far, far from perfect, and Brits were more than happy to point that out to Fehlinger-Jahn in response to his Tweet.

On Thursday, Labour’s transport secretary Louise Haigh picked Laura Shoaf – chief executive of the West Midlands Combined Authority – to oversee the renationalisation of UK railways and run Shadow Great British Railways (SGBR).

SGBR will eventually become just Great British Railways when the government’s Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership Bill) becomes law – it passed all stages in the House of Commons at the start of September.

In a speech delivered during the third reading of the bill, which will see services become publicly owned as the private companies’ rail contracts expire, Haigh said the proposed legislation will “[call] time on the 30-year ideological privatisation experiment on our railways” which “failed” passengers, the economy and to “modernise our railways”.

“Our railways will serve the British public – be they passengers or the taxpayer – and as we bring services into public ownership, we will drive up performance,” she said.

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