How Britain's railways are run.
How has Britain's railway network been run since "privatisation" in 1994?
What is “Great Britain”?
Great Britain is the name of a group of nations on the island of Britannia, namely England, Scotland and Wales. If you want to include Northern Ireland then the correct way to call this country would be “The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. As such, Ireland’s railway system and the Isle Of Man’s railway network will not be talked about here as they are run differently to Britannia’s railway network.
Network Rail
Network Rail is Britain’s national railway infrastructure company, state owned since 2004 when the previous privately-owned company Railtrak plc collapsed due to lawsuits following a series of deadly railway accidents.
The job of Network Rail is to maintain the majority of Britain’s railway network from busy mainlines such as the East Coast Main Line to small, minor branch lines such as the Romford-Upminster line, however they do not own or maintain railways which are not connected to the mainline network or have trains running over them which are not controlled directly by the Department for Transport such as the London Underground, Tyne & Wear Metro, Glasgow Subway, Tramways (e.g. Manchester Metrolink) or Heritage Railways (e.g. Bluebell Railway).
Some mainline railway stations are also owned by Network Rail, however these are mostly inner-London railway termini (e.g. London Waterloo) or stations that lots of passenger railway operators use (e.g. Manchester Piccadilly)
Passenger Trains
On the National Rail network, passenger trains are split into 2 categories, the first is a contract to the Department for Transport known as a “Franchise agreement”. These Franchise agreements are set by the Department for Transport and consist of leasing out the operation, branding and ticketing of a mainline railway and it’s branch lines to a private company whom has to bid in a competitive tendering process. For example, the South Western Railway is a franchise agreement between a company called First MTR South Western Trains Limited and the Department of Transport; the private company is a joint venture owned by the First Group and Mass Transit Railway Corporation Limited (MTRCL) of the United Kingdom and Hong Kong respectively, and they are the company who operates the South Western Franchise which includes the South Western Mainline, Portsmouth Direct Line, West of England Main Line, Waterloo-Reading Line, Branch lines and since 2007 the Island line (which is on the Isle of Wright and previously had it’s own franchise); this current company has been running trains since 2017 while the previous operator was a subsidiary of the Stagecoach Group between privatisation in 1994 and 2017, in 2016, 2 companies lodged a bid to run the franchise which was the Stagecoach Group and the First Group which later became a joint venture with the MTRCL.
There are also some “Open Access Operators”; these are companies whom run passenger trains over the national network but are bound by fewer Department for Transport regulations and are not franchise holders, for instance, “Grand Central” is an open-access operator which operates trains between London Kings Cross and Sunderland or Bradford Interchange via the East Coast Mainline directly competing with the current franchise holder on the ECML called The London and North Eastern Railway Company (LNER) which has been government-owned since 2018 after the previous franchise holder, Virgin Trains East Coast ceased operations due to financial woes.
Freight Trains
Freight trains are operated by private companies whom are not bound by as many legal restrictions as passenger train operators. Most freight trains are operated between places such as Quarries, Nuclear power plants, Cargo Ports to places such as Aggregate supply companies, cargo ports, Steel mills and Construction equipment manufacturing sites (e.g. a facility where bricks are manufactured in bulk.
The largest freight rail operator is DB Cargo UK, a subsidiary of the German-state-owned Deutsche Bahn which operates freight trains nationwide from branch lines, which are mostly in industrial areas onto the mainline network where freight and passenger traffic becomes mixed. As such, the only connected parts of the British railway network that does not usually see freight traffic is the London Underground since it’s effective nationalisation in 1933 when freight traffic on the Metropolitan District Railways ceased as the London Passenger Transport Board worked on their core business, carrying passengers.
Rolling Stock companies
A “Rolling Stock company” is a business which owns a fleet of trains and then leases them out to a private company for use. These companies have only existed since ~1994 when the privatisation of British Rail occurred and without the legislation which was created during this time period, these companies would not exist.
When the mainline network was privatised in 1994, the ownership of British Rail’s fleet of trains, locomotives and carriages were put into a small group of legal entities such as Angel Trains or Porterbrook Leasing and Eversholt Rail Group instead of the companies who actually operated the trains (e.g. First Great Western Railway*) and as such, this may have made the network a little less efficient as it now takes a lot longer to replace a fleet of trains that the public does not like with a new set of trains such as what happened with the Pacer class of trains which were a fleet of Railbuses produced by British Rail during the 1980s as a “temporary” measure to replace 40-50 year old trains from the 1950s and 1960s but had instead lasted in service up to 2021/2022 which was far longer than their 10-20 year long lifespan.
*A few companies own some of their fleet such as the First Great Western Railway which was one of the first post-privatisation railway operators in the UK to own some parts of their fleet, however, they still lease much of their trains from some “Rolling Stock Operating Companies (ROSOC)” like most of the other UK train operators.
Office of Rail and Road
The ORR provides statistics for the UK Railway and roadway network; most notably, they provide statistics for railway station passenger counts and in the FY2019/2020 was Berney Arms in Norfolk which is a station with no road access and must be accessed via some marshlands and a now-closed pub.
The ORR also regulates the UK railway network after replacing a separate organisation called the Strategic Rail Authority which also includes things such as operating licenses for railway companies, as well as monitoring some of Britain’s roads. And as with “railway regulation”, this does not just include the mainline network but also includes the London Underground and any Light Railway Network such as the Manchester Metrolink.
This should be all information pertaining to the management-operation of the mainline railway network in Great Britain but if there are any errors or omissions, please leave a comment below.
Other key railway information:
The GB Network is the world’s oldest network and until the 1960s was one of the densest networks in the world
All mainline networks use the Standard Gauge track at 1450mm in width
Some railway operators have been nationalised in the UK since 2020 such as Scotrail and Transport for Wales. In the case of TfW, the operator was nationalised from the company KeolisAmey which had operated the service since 2017-2018 but KA was not paid out over the outright theft of their business which is unusual in the UK.
Unlike in many other countries, Postal mail is still shipped via the railway network; these trains are operated by Royal Mail.
In the South East of England and a few other places, the electrical system is 750V DC 3rd rail while the rest of the electrical network is 1500V DC Overhead wire
Most UK railway lines were closed between the 1950s-1970s largely under a scheme called The Beeching Cuts whereby the government closed down underutilised, unprofitable and competing railway lines largely in rural areas but also in cities with London and the South East of England being the least-affected; this plan coincided with a massive construction boom of wide roads and motorways as the transport minister whom comissioned the Beaching Cuts (a report by Dr. Richard Beeching of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI)) [name was Ernest Marples] owned shares in road building companies.
Most railway line alignments are over a century old. The oldest railway alignment still in use is the Wimbledon-Croydon railway line which is now a part of the Croydon Tramlink