How much are UK trains Subsidised?

The average subsidy per journey will be £7.51, more than the average fare of £6.12. This compares to £43.55 and £13.43 in 2019-20 and 2020-21 respectively for journeys costing an average of £4.93 and £5.89. In 2019-20 the average subsidy was £3.73 for journeys worth an average of £6.27.



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Public spending on railways in the United Kingdom was approximately 25.9 billion British pounds in 2022/23, compared with 25.8 billion pounds in the previous year.

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While rail workers have had their pay frozen in the same period, DfT data shows that the private train operators made £310 million in taxpayer-funded profits between March 2020 and September 2022.

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Who owns and runs the UK's railways? Britain's rail network was first nationalised by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1948 and then privatised again under Sir John Major's Conservatives in 1993. Network Rail, which runs railway infrastructure in England, Scotland, and Wales, is publicly owned.

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The UK government subsidised operators across England to cap many single bus fares at £2, between January and March 2023, at a cost of £60mn.

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U.S. rail infrastructure is divided between privately owned freight and state-owned passenger rail. Freight rail is an integral part of U.S. supply chains, but the country's passenger service falls far behind that of other advanced economies. Proposals to expand high-speed rail have faltered.

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However the Conservative manifesto in 1992 promised to privatise the railway and Prime Minister John Major went for it. We were told that British Rail's natural monopoly was the problem and promised cheaper fares, better services and less cost for the taxpayer. Privatisation has failed on every front.

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General secretary of the RMT Mick Lynch told the New Statesman: “Unlike trains in the rest of Europe, which tend to be publicly owned and have cheaper fares, most UK trains are privatised, which means that a profit has to be paid out, reducing the scope for fare cuts.”

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In 2021, the estimated average gross monthly earnings of train drivers ranged from €632 in Bulgaria to €5,542 in the UK. Among EU Member States, Denmark (€4,463) was the only country where train drivers earned more than €4,000. They were paid more than €3,000 in Ireland, Luxembourg, Germany and France.

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The average gross monthly earnings of train drivers as adjusted for PPS ranged from €1,206 in Bulgaria to €4,392 in the UK in 2021. They were above €2,500 in Denmark, Germany and France.

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Following privatisation in 1993, British Rail – a publicly owned company responsible for running the railway – was divided into over 100 separate companies.

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There is, however, an American Association of Private Railroad Car Owners and a Railroad Passenger Car Alliance, which goes to show that owners are out there. And for those lucky few, Amtrak's service is one of the best ways to travel significant distances.

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Across the Amtrak system, the full cost to operate a train tends to land in the range of $0.30 to $0.70 per passenger-mile, though that number is dependent on a lot of things, perhaps the most important being the number of passengers onboard.

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