Rail Privatisation – How Is It Going?

The 1993 Railways Act provided for the privatisation of British Rail in the form of franchising of passenger services and outright sale of all other parts of the business. The privatisation was unusually complex, with the existing single organisation being divided into more than 80 separate companies, the intention being to create competition not just in the form of competing train operating companies, but also for the supply of services such as rolling stock and track maintenance, wherever possible. The aim of this paper is to review events since the process of rail privatisation in Britain really started in April 1994. It is based partly on the publications of the relevant bodies and the technical press but partly on conversations with those in the industry. It is divided into five sections, looking in turn at Railtrack and the ROSCOs, the passenger franchising process, the freight sector and other businesses before seeking to draw some overall conclusions

The Case for High Speed Rail

There is currently a wave of high speed rail proposals sweeping through Europe, amounting to some 7000 route kilometres of new construction and 8000 of upgraded track and costing of the order of 58 billion ecu (in 1985 prices). There is therefore an urgent need for a careful assessment of the costs and benefits, both of the network as a whole and of the individual component parts of it. The principal benefits of high speed rail are taken to be the revenue, traffic and time savings it generates; relief of congestion , accidents and environmental effects of other modes of transport and its alleged local and regional development benefits. Clearly many of these benefits depend on how far it really does divert traffic from these modes as opposed to generating totally new trips. At the same time, high speed rail schemes have significant environmental costs. Evidence on all of these issues is examined, and it is concluded that the evidence for environmental and development benefits is limited, although in the former case in particular much depends on the exact circumstances. Given the wide variety of options in terms of speeds and mix of upgrading versus new construction, careful appraisal is very important, and a traditional transport cost-benefit analysis and environmental impact assessment appear well equipped to capture the main costs and benefits. The conclusion is that there is likely to be a good case for a core network linking the major cities of Western Europe in the middle distance range, but beyond that, upgrading of existing infrastructure and development of new technology may provide a more cost-effective solution

Railway Reform in China.

The purpose of this working paper is to consider the current situation of Chinese Railways, the progress of reforms to date, and possible future developments. The first section describes the current problems of Chinese Railways, as a vast organisation subject to strong central control, facing enormous and rapidly growing demands which it is unable to satisfy. The progress of reform in Chinese Railways to date, and in particular the Economic Contract Responsibility System instituted in the late 1980's and the development of joint venture companies to build new lines, are then described. In the following section the key reform models found in other countries - deregulation and privatisation of vertically integrated regional companies; separation of infrastructure from operations with open access andlor franchising competitors; or reorganisation on the basis of business sectors - are then described. None is fully suitable for China, but it is suggested that a combination of sectorisation, more commercial independence, further development of joint public/private partnerships and more contracting out, is the most likely way forward

Phase Dynamics of Two Entangled Qubits

We make a geometric study of the phases acquired by a general pure bipartite two level system after a cyclic unitary evolution. The geometric representation of the two particle Hilbert space makes use of Hopf fibrations. It allows for a simple description of the dynamics of the entangled state's phase during the whole evolution. The global phase after a cyclic evolution is always an entire multiple of $\pi$ for all bipartite states, a result that does not depend on the degree of entanglement. There are three different types of phases combining themselves so as to result in the $n \pi$ global phase. They can be identified as dynamical, geometrical and topological. Each one of them can be easily identified using the presented geometric description. The interplay between them depends on the initial state and on its trajectory and the results obtained are shown to be in connection to those on mixed states phases.Comment: 9 figures, slightly different version from the accepted on

The twistor geometry of three-qubit entanglement

A geometrical description of three qubit entanglement is given. A part of the transformations corresponding to stochastic local operations and classical communication on the qubits is regarded as a gauge degree of freedom. Entangled states can be represented by the points of the Klein quadric ${\cal Q}$ a space known from twistor theory. It is shown that three-qubit invariants are vanishing on special subspaces of ${\cal Q}$. An invariant vanishing for the $GHZ$ class is proposed. A geometric interpretation of the canonical decomposition and the inequality for distributed entanglement is also given.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX

Book review: Making Documentaries and News Features in the Philippines

Kenny, James & Isabel, 1996 Making Documentaries and News Features in the Philippines, Anvil Publishing, Manila. ISBN 971-27-0568-4 Review Essay by Chris Nash The Kennys take a very broad approach to the definition of documentary, including even the ten-minute segments that make up programs like 60 Minutes. This is undoubtedly wise in the context of the Philippines and most Asian, indeed international, film and video distribution systems. There is little or no arthouse cinema distribution, traditionally the mainstay of documentary film, and television infotainment very rarely gets anywhere near independent, in-the-field investigation of an issue, which is perhaps the best definition of documentary that doesn\u27t get embroiled in arguments about form and genre