This post is about a simple, yet crucial insight: the product of the railways is the timetable. Not the tracks, not the trains, but the timetable.
First ask yourself – What is the purpose of a railway? The job of the railways is to move people around. A person gets a train because they want to travel from A to B.
A small group of enthusiasts (me included) will actively choose to get the train if at all possible, but the vast majority of people are not particularly loyal to how their user need is met. They might drive, they might fly, they might cycle, they might decide not to make the journey and just do a video call. All of these things are the competitors of the railways.
We could therefore say that the product of the railways (and roads, and airports) is travel. But we can be more specific than that. A railway is not like a road. A road is built, and then it is open for anybody to use it at any time. There is no need to plan out precisely when cars move along the road. The movements of trains, by contrast, have to be planned out months in advance. It would neither be possible nor sensible to run trains ad hoc. They are not taxis, free to roam the roads whenever they like. Railway tracks are a network; everything depends on everything else. The service from Cambridge to Norwich affects the service from Norwich to London Liverpool Street, which in turn affects the service from Liverpool Street to Southend. To optimise the use of the tracks, train movements have to be planned out well in advance with precision.
This planning is what we call the timetable, the mapping between space and time that determines which train occupies which track at which time. The railways offer travel to the public via the timetable: a traveller buys the (supposed) fact that the 12.32 from Reigate gets into London Victoria at 13.19. The product of the railways is the timetable.
To sell the product to the public, it needs to be made visual. This is a truly beautiful visualisation of a timetable (in this case, a bus timetable, but the same principle applies). Image from Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (Graphics Press 1990), 109.
For this product to be something that people want to use, it has to be better than the competition. Seen from the perspective of the passenger, railways as a technology have two inherent advantages. They are quick, sometimes very quick, and they are very reliable.
The reliability point may seem risible, but it is true: the possibility of an hour’s delay is just accepted as a fact of life on a road trip or a flight, whereas with railways, we start tutting as soon as the train is merely five minutes late. We become irritated because we hold the railways to a high standard of reliability, and we hold them to that standard because they generally fulfil it.
(There are a few subsidiary advantages that railways have – you can work on a train, anybody can use them without a licence, they tend to be pretty comfortable, you can look at pretty views. Still, basically, people get the train because it’s quick and reliable.)
You get very nice views from your window. But the main reason people travel from Edinburgh to London by train is that it’s fast and reliable. Image from Wikimedia Commons .
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