What are your plans on July 17th?

Hope they don't include driving anywhere as the roads will be packed with
those who can't catch trains as we will all be on strike.

The strike won't happen......

>>
>>Macquarie Bank and Veolia want Railcorp and already have been talking
>>publicly about it
>
> They want Sector 1, the one part of CityRail that makes money.
>
> fish
>>
>>
>

Veolia first enquired about sector 1 about 10 years ago, Macquarie wants the
lot.

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:29:49 +1000, Uncle Joe wrote:


>>>Macquarie Bank and Veolia want Railcorp and already have been talking
>>>publicly about it
>>
>> They want Sector 1, the one part of CityRail that makes money.

> Veolia first enquired about sector 1 about 10 years ago, Macquarie wants
> the lot.

Sectorisation always had the feel of a 'split the system up into smaller
bits and flog them' sort of thing.

You have the farce that was British Rail privatization and then Victoria
failed attempt to copy. One operator ended up with both halves in the end
anyway.

I'm sure Veolia would take the lot of Cityrail if the terms were right.
They run urban and regional railways in other places.

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:12:00 +0000, Fish Womper wrote:


> A lot of work yet to be done before it would be even remotely viable.

Cityrail as an independent business would never be viable in the normal
sense. They MIGHT be able to operationally break even, but there is no
way it could cover capital costs.

> You'd think they would be wanting guarantees from the Govt in order to
> run unprofitable services and to carry pensioners, etc, at current
> fares. You would end up with the Govt paying hundreds of millions every
> year just to get them to run trains at night and on weekends.

And the government doesn't cost the government that now ?.

Selling something like that off, doesn't stop the money flow. It then
takes a competent government to ensure the money is flowing into
providing a public service and not lining share holder pockets at
taxpayer expense. Given our current level of government ineptness, I
don't think they would be able to do that - they seem to be blindingly
funding rorts in Cityrail and railcorp management and they also seem to
be propping up all the toll road PPPs as well. Of course we don't know
what really goes on in the private road operators, unless they screw up
enough to come to the attention of the companies regulator.