Ransom, P.J.G. (July 1989). The Victorian Railway and How It Evolved. London: William Heinemann. ISBN 978-0-434-98083-3. Caroline Lucas MP brings Railway Bill to Parliament". The Green Party. 22 January 2016 . Retrieved 9 June 2019. The uniformity of BR branding continued until the process of sectorisation was introduced in the 1980s. Certain BR operations such as Inter-City, Network SouthEast, Regional Railways or Rail Express Systems began to adopt their own identities, introducing logos and colour schemes which were essentially variants of the British Rail brand. Eventually, as sectorisation developed into a prelude to privatisation, the unified British Rail brand disappeared, with the notable exception of the Double Arrow symbol, which has survived to this day and serves as a generic trademark to denote railway services across Great Britain. [32] The BR Corporate Identity Manual is noted as a piece of British design history and there are plans for it to be re-published. [36] Network [ edit ] Regions [ edit ] These failures led to the trains being withdrawn from service while the problems were ironed out. However, by this time, managerial and political support had evaporated. Consequently, phase 3, the introduction of the Squadron fleet (APT-S), did not occur, and the project ended in 1982.

Read Railway Records: A Guide to Sources by C J Edwards (PRO 2001) for further guidance on how to use our records. The report, latterly known as the "Modernisation Plan", [6] was published in January 1955. It was intended to bring the railway system into the 20th century. A government White Paper produced in 1956 stated that modernisation would help eliminate BR's financial deficit by 1962, but the figures in both this and the original plan were produced for political reasons and not based on detailed analysis. [7] The aim was to increase speed, reliability, safety, and line capacity through a series of measures that would make services more attractive to passengers and freight operators, thus recovering traffic lost to the roads. Important areas included: What Wolmar does communicate very effectively is the supreme difficulty of running a railway, with its huge fixed assets, astronomical overheads and susceptibility to changes in government, technology, the energy market and the natural environment. Great British Railways is still searching for a CEO. Could this be Wolmar’s job application? For People Who Devour Books in total, electrification of more than 180 miles of route, meaning that 75% of the country’s main lines will be electric, to meet the ambition of removing all diesel-only trains from the network by 2040, as part of our commitment to reach Net Zero by 2050. Main article: History of rail transport in Great Britain 1830–1922 Frith's The Railway Station, 1862 depiction of Paddington railway station in LondonAmbler, D.W. (1989). The History and Practice of Britain's Railways: A New Research Agenda. Ashgate.

The Network Railcard, introduced in 1986 by British Rail upon the creation of their Network SouthEast sector in parts of Southern England

British Rail Workshops". railwaybritain.co.uk. Archived from the original on 12 April 2010 . Retrieved 2 August 2010. McLean, Iain, and Christopher Foster. "The political economy of regulation: interests, ideology, voters, and the UK Regulation of Railways Act 1844." Public Administration 70.3 (1992): 313-331.

Welsby, John. "Railway Services for Rural Areas". Japan Railway & Transport Review (9): 12–17. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 . Retrieved 27 November 2015. The railway companies ceased to be profitable after the mid-1870s. [15] Nationalisation of the railways was first proposed by William Ewart Gladstone as early as the 1840s, and calls for nationalisation continued throughout that century, with F. Keddell writing in 1890 that "The only valid ground for maintaining the monopoly would be the proof that the Railway Companies have made a fair and proper use of their great powers, and have conduced to the prosperity of the people. But the exact contrary is the case." [16] The entire network was brought under government control during the First World War, and a number of advantages of amalgamation and planning were revealed. However, the Conservative members of the wartime coalition government resisted calls for the formal nationalisation of the railways in 1921. Shannon, Paul. "Blue Diesel Days". Ian Allan Publishing. Archived from the original on 1 December 2008 . Retrieved 16 November 2008.

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a b c Terence Richard Gourvish; N. Blake (1986). British Railways, 1948–73: a business history. Cambridge University Press. pp.286–290. Wolmar is no fan of privatisation. His book, however, is hardly an advertisement for nationalisation, even if one accepts the need for state subsidy to keep the trains running. He itemises the poor decisions taken by BR that left the railways in Britain lagging behind their continental equivalents. For two decades after the war, BR persisted with expensive, polluting and labour-intensive steam locomotives, not wishing to go to war with the trade unions in either the rail or coal sectors. Steam engines were finally withdrawn in Britain in 1968, four years after Japan’s bullet train had made its debut. Their main replacements were diesel locomotives, with electrification proceeding painfully slowly (still today, when rail is heralded as a green alternative, only some 40 per cent of lines are electrified). Ellis, Cuthbert Hamilton. British Railway History. An outline from the accession of William IV to the Nationalisation of Railways, 1830–1876 (vol 1. G. Allen and Unwin, 1954) The first passenger-carrying public railway was opened by the Swansea and Mumbles Railway at Oystermouth in 1807, using horse-drawn carriages on an existing tramline. Although the company was considered the sole public-transport option in many rural areas, the Beeching cuts made buses the only public transport available in some rural areas. [46] Despite increases in traffic congestion and road fuel prices beginning to rise in the 1990s, British Rail remained unprofitable. Following sectorisation, InterCity became profitable. InterCity became one of Britain's top 150 companies, providing city centre to city centre travel across the nation from Aberdeen and Inverness in the north to Poole and Penzance in the south. [47] Investment [ edit ]

As Wolmar shows, however, uncertainty is nothing new where trains are concerned. The railways have been in almost permanent crisis since 1948, when the Big Four, the handful of companies that had dominated the interwar railways, were brought into public ownership by Clement Attlee’s Labour government. Indeed, crisis as much as ideology lay behind railway nationalisation. Overuse and underinvestment during the war years, not to mention the depredations of the Luftwaffe, had left the railways in a threadbare state and the Big Four effectively bankrupt.

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Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original on 5 January 2016 . Retrieved 13 August 2017. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) delivering NPR through a new high-speed line between Warrington, Manchester and Marsden in Yorkshire as in the first of the options originally put forward by TfN in 2019. Upon sectorisation in 1982, three passenger sectors were created: InterCity, operating principal express services; London & South East (renamed Network SouthEast in 1986) operating commuter services in the London area; Provincial (renamed Regional Railways in 1989) responsible for all other passenger services. [27] In the metropolitan counties local services were managed by the Passenger Transport Executives. Provincial was the most subsidised (per passenger km) of the three sectors; upon formation, its costs were four times its revenue. [27] During the 1980s British Rail ran the Rail Riders membership club aimed at 5- to 15-year-olds. Haywood, Russell. Railways, urban development and town planning in Britain: 1948–2008 (Routledge, 2016). Budget 2014: fears of more austerity in spite of growth". The Daily Telegraph. 19 March 2014. Archived from the original on 21 June 2014 . Retrieved 20 May 2014.