With Labour in power for a year, pledging to nationalise Britain’s railways, it’s worth a look at progress.
After a rapid start, progress has slowed, perhaps even stalled.
That quick start saw Parliament pass legislation that allowed the public sector to assume control of train operating companies as their private deals expired. Without it, ministers could only have their ‘operator of last resort’ take over on a temporary basis.
Of course, temporary was not defined and could last some time. LNER, for example, had been temporarily in the state sector since 2017 when Virgin Trains East Coast handed back the keys of its franchise.
But the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act 2024 reversed the legal bar on state enterprises running passenger operations, paving the way for Great British Railways (GBR) to gradually assume control.
In the meantime, private sector operators holding government operating contracts shift to sit under DfT Operator (DFTO) as their deals expire. South Western Railway was the first on May 25 , c2c was next on July 20, to be followed by Greater Anglia on October 12 and then the rest over the next few years and the last in 2027.
They join LNER, Southeastern, Northern and TransPennine Express which were already part of DFTO.
Where progress has been slower is in creating GBR. It will own track and train in England but devolve operations of both in Scotland and Wales.
Rail Minister Lord Hendy’s overall idea is to have one person responsible for both sides of the wheel-rail interface. Beyond this, the UK government has not been clear why it’s embarked on rail nationalisation beyond Labour’s general preference for state ownership and control.
By way of balance, back in 1991, British Rail Chairman Bob Reid noted that the Conservative government then in power had likewise not been clear about its objectives for pursuing privatisation although there was a driving factor of separating track and train.
It comes down to a question of what problem ministers are trying to fix with nationalisation. Ministers’ public pronouncements have gone little further than having that one person in charge, able to make decisions across the divide. But there remains to question of in whose interests those decisions come.
Passengers will hope the decisions favour them as farepayers – the railway’s customers. But the railway is certain to need a continuing overall subsidy which means that not every decision can openly favour passengers.
There’s an element of risk when ministers argue that today’s railway is broken and that nationalisation is the only answer. So far, nationalisation is proving a popular policy but it demands a real and obvious improvement to fulfil that promise.
If – when? – newly integrated track-and-train railway companies start cutting services, perhaps to cut costs, the arguments that nationalisation delivers a better railway start to tarnish.
The other half of this equation is revenue, which continues its recovery from the pandemic collapse in 2020 but remains behind the levels seen beforehand. Part of this gap could be structural. There are fewer business travellers and more of them are likely travelling on cheaper advance tickets rather than flexible full fares. And there are fewer commuters as those that can work across a mix of home and office.
This shows in figures from ORR. Govia Thameslink Railway’s pre-COVID peak was 349 million passengers in 2019-20. In 2024-25, it was 298m. At Avanti West Coast, the peak was 39.4m passengers in 2018-19, it’s now 34.9m for 2024-25. The exception comes from LNER. Like Avanti, it peaked in 2018-19 with 22.3m passengers but has since exceeded that with 26.6m in 2024-25.
LNER’s services are busy with leisure passengers whereas AWC has traditionally had a busier business market from cities such as Birmingham and Manchester to London.
Which brings us back to prospective service cuts. If South Western Railway’s commuters are no longer present in their former numbers (spoiler alert… they’ve not, they peaked at 238m in 2015-16 but were just 166m in 2024-25) then services should be cut.
But one challenge for Lawrence Bowman at the head of his newly integrated railway is that he’s taking delivery of 60 new fixed-formation 10-car Class 701 trains for inner suburban services to replace four-car Class 455s. This removes his flexibility to run shorter trains to cut costs although this might be balanced by less need to shunt and form trains in depots and lower operating costs that should come with modern trains.
However, SWR provides the model for GBR’s future layout. It’s one based on vertically integrated regional companies. As an aside, this is widely thought to be the model that Prime Minister John Major favoured as he privatised BR in the 1990s.
It’s also the traditional model for railway companies as the network grew from its 1825 beginnings. It was regional companies that government forced into larger regional companies, the ‘Big 4’ in 1923: London and North Eastern Railway (LNER), London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), Great Western Railway (GWR) and Southern Railway (SR).
Such a regional model works better in some parts than others. SWR fits nicely with Network Rail’s Wessex Route, as does Steve White’s Southeastern with NR’s Kent Route. The Southern part of GTR fits well with Sussex Route but GTR also contains Thameslink which crosses the River Thames and fans out into three NR routes.
Then there’s the question of branding. Great Western Railway has built a strong brand with its dark green colouring and initials that play strongly on a roundel introduced by its private predecessor in the 1930s.
Current operator First Group introduced the new GWR to replace its First Great Western brand as one designed to be timeless and impervious to the company actually operating the trains. It’s also the brand that serves Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander’s constituency which might give it more life.
It remains to be seen if such services will be ‘GWR by GBR’ or the other way around. Some might advocate for the recreation of British Rail’s InterCity as an overarching brand for long-distance services. It disappeared at privatisation which means that anyone under 40 is unlikely to have clear memories of it. Nor does it fit well with regionalised infrastructure.
LNER and Greater Anglia are also strong brands which could be worth preserving if the future is not to be GBR for everything. There’s no obvious answer that trumps all others.
If these strong regional brands are worth keeping the it’s inescapable that they fit the overall GBR model of integrated companies. Which means they need to fit around their infrastructure.
British Rail latterly had six regions: Scotland, Eastern, Anglia, Southern, Western and London Midland. NR has five regions: Scotland (containing one route), Eastern (four routes), Wales and Western (two routes), North West and Central (three routes), and Southern (three routes).
Splitting Wales and Scotland from NR’s other routes leaves 11 routes. Of these, 10 are regional with the other, East Coast, being more functional than regional as it covers the East Coast Main Line from London to the Scottish border. As such, it closely matches LNER’s operating patch.
One of the persistent criticisms of privatisation is that it fragmented the railway, creating too many interfaces. Combatting this demands fewer interfaces and thus as few track-and-train groupings as possible.
Scotland and Wales are devolved and surely must remain so which leaves the question of numbers in England. So what might be done?
How about six?
- Southern (with operators SWR, GTR and Southeastern and NR’s Wessex, Sussex and Kent Routes)
- Western (GWR with NR’s Western Route)
- Midland (operators Avanti West Coast, West Midlands Trains and Chiltern with NR’s Central and West Coast South Routes)
- Eastern (operators East Midlands Trains, Greater Anglia and c2c with NR’s East Midlands and Anglia Routes)
- Northern (train operators Northern and TransPennine Express with NR’s North West and North East Routes)
- East Coast (with LNER and NR’s East Coast Route).
I’ve already noted how Thameslink’s part of GTR doesn’t fit well anywhere. Nor does CrossCountry which perhaps tucks best under Midland given the importance of Birmingham New Street to all its operations.
Another question for DfT surrounds the legal niceties of future companies. DFTO will inherit legally separate companies as their contracts expire. NR’s regions and routes are all of one company.
Is the future GBR a single company just as British Rail was with internal boundaries and divisions? Or should DfT retain (perhaps merging) today’s train operators as separate companies? Should it split NR to match and thus have six English track-and-train railway companies sitting under GBR as a holding company?
That seems radical but perhaps not as difficult as it might have been back in the 1990s as a privatisation measure. To do it then would have needed a clear idea of risks and liabilities lying behind boundaries across ageing infrastructure. For nationalisation, GBR would remain the overall owner and could treat risks on whichever side of the boundary they lie.
There’s a political aspect to creating GBR as a holding company that contains legally separate railway companies. Such a structure would be easy for a future government to privatise.
A version of this article first appeared in RAIL magazine, issue 1041, 6-20 August 2025.