davehammer

£60k is way too high for London to Edinburgh. I remember hearing from someone that would know this sort of thing that it cost Silverjet £66k to do a round trip to NYC at $100 per barrel oil. The 10k figure mentioned earlier sounds far more realistic.

HIDDY

The mail goes by train surely?

Dirty_Idea

Benefits as feeder routes do indeed need to be factored in. It's challenging to model this correctly, as it's difficult to work out the intent of passengers, and also to sensibly assign a value to both the two 'essential' legs of the journey.

I wasn't around at the time, but my understanding is that this was the flaw of the proposals enacted from the Beeching report. A simple model of the profitability of the route in terms of direct revenue vs cost was used, as opposed to the less tangible benefit set (ie. passengers using the feeders to travel on mainlines).

We live and learn, one would hope.

Edit: Actually, we don't. Even taken as a whole the railways benefits cannot be measured purely by revenue. Yet all colours of politicians seem to think it's that simple.

AGSF

I thought it cost something like 250k to fly a 747 8-9 hours? 60k for a short domestic flight seems way too much. I would guess closer to 10?

Kgmm77

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

The numbers in such a complex organisation can be massaged to suit whatever particular point of view senior management want to push. Areas such as fixed cost allocation and transfer pricing are ripe for fudging.