What a foolish comment
I have just read reports about the join bid of MTR Hong Kong and GNER for serving all Kent and Southeast London. It’s a 71%(GNER)/29%(MTR) investment, both companies could benefit from the expertise of their partner. MTR brings punctuality of 99% while GNER has been here for a while, and no doubt this is certainly good news for people at Kent. However, Roger Ford, who is a technical editor of Modern Railways magazine, when asked the implication of such foreign participation by Guardian, he said:
Roger Ford, technical editor of Modern Railways magazine, said it was foolish to expect overseas operators to work magic: "MTR is a very good operation in Hong Kong. But they have a brand new system which was built by the Brits. They have brand new trains and a brand new track which has been steadily upgraded and improved. Compare that with Kent and what do they know?"
I think he has missed something. First of all, nobody expects magic here, according to Guardian, MTR has 80km of railway track and carries 2.24 million passengers a day which is 10% of Kent’s track length but 5 times the passengers number. There are simply too many problems causing the delays, such as track conditions and carriage age. Refurbishment of the whole network is costly and must be done in years, I think 10 years would be a reasonable figure.
Second, MTR started running its service since 1979, about 25 years of age. Do you think they stopped since then? Improvement was done from time to time, day in day out. If you consider the world 25 years ago, when people were not depending on transport the way like now, they improved a “hell” lot. The brand new system didn’t help them, the maintenance and improvement did.
Finally, vandalism has always been a problem within Britain, they cost millions to get rid of them. Phil Gaffney, a former British Rail engineer and MTR’s director of operations, could only recall 3-4 incidents of vandalism in 25 years. Some stupid people here in Britain pointed out MTR couldn’t cope with the culture difference, have you forgotten it’s a join bid? Where is GNER? They will deal with it, and please blame the English for vandalism, not a rail operator.
Guardian Report
Times Report
Roger Ford, technical editor of Modern Railways magazine, said it was foolish to expect overseas operators to work magic: "MTR is a very good operation in Hong Kong. But they have a brand new system which was built by the Brits. They have brand new trains and a brand new track which has been steadily upgraded and improved. Compare that with Kent and what do they know?"
I think he has missed something. First of all, nobody expects magic here, according to Guardian, MTR has 80km of railway track and carries 2.24 million passengers a day which is 10% of Kent’s track length but 5 times the passengers number. There are simply too many problems causing the delays, such as track conditions and carriage age. Refurbishment of the whole network is costly and must be done in years, I think 10 years would be a reasonable figure.
Second, MTR started running its service since 1979, about 25 years of age. Do you think they stopped since then? Improvement was done from time to time, day in day out. If you consider the world 25 years ago, when people were not depending on transport the way like now, they improved a “hell” lot. The brand new system didn’t help them, the maintenance and improvement did.
Finally, vandalism has always been a problem within Britain, they cost millions to get rid of them. Phil Gaffney, a former British Rail engineer and MTR’s director of operations, could only recall 3-4 incidents of vandalism in 25 years. Some stupid people here in Britain pointed out MTR couldn’t cope with the culture difference, have you forgotten it’s a join bid? Where is GNER? They will deal with it, and please blame the English for vandalism, not a rail operator.
Guardian Report
Times Report
posted by mini cod at 1:27 PM
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