by tialaramex | 2025-04-23 12:26:15+00:00
It's actually kind of consequent to privatisation.

See, the privatisation says that there need to be lots of companies (otherwise we can't have a "free market" right?) but there's an inconvenient natural monopoly maintaining like, the actual railway track and so on - so, that natural monopoly was made into a separate company. At first the Tories kept pretending it would be profitable, but of course it's national infrastructure, how much does the USA get in direct revenue from its interstates? Nothing of course, they're a cost - you pay for them from public funds because they're a public good, duh. So in practice this is always in effect government owned and costs money even if sometimes it was notionally a "private company" that the government lends money to and never receives repayment.

Anyway, the numerous small private train operating companies (TOCs) would get an OK to use these monopoly lines along certain agreed parameters. So e.g. maybe your firm wants to run Plymouth to (London) Waterloo, once an hour from 0600 to 2300, somebody else needs the Southampton to Winchester stretch twice an hour from 0800 to 2200, they timetable all this so there's no conflict - if everybody runs to time. As a result there has to be a mechanism to handle all this arbitrary scheduling among any number of operators, even though most routes, most of the time have a single incumbent and nobody else. An enormous waste just because of ideology.

Three notionally profitable (though in fact never actually profitable) businesses can exist in this environment beyond the traditional TOCs which operate a regular scheduled train service ordinary people will use.

One is little private tours, like we'll buy one service a week from Waterloo to Winchester on a Sunday afternoon in the summer, we'll sell Famous Steam Tree beer on that train and charge £80 (no beer included) for all customers, plus £50 if you want an ordinary train home afterwards. If we can secure a genuine refurbished steam train we'll use that.

Another is private trains, closer to what you see in a Western movie sometimes. Jim and Sarah are very wealthy, they want to get married in a nice castle that's out in the sticks, for $$$ we'll sort out the authorisation so then their guests all just show up at the railway station in a city somewhere with like an airport and so on, they board the train, maybe it's a nice old steam train, maybe not, and we go direct, non-stop to the closest stop to the castle where the wedding will happen. This is crazy expensive, like, private jet expensive, but it is possible because of the "Open access" requirement where businesses can pay to use the railway lines.

The third, and one you're most likely to have glimpsed, are tiny rogue operators. Buy (well, lease) a couple of trains, get yourself routed for back and forth and offer novel routes. This would genuinely have been harder to arrange in the British Rail era, you'd need BR to decide it was worth having this weird new route. But the reason BR wouldn't have gone for this was that it was usually one person's weird dream journey and few actual customers wanted this new route, so it was unprofitable. For example a company operated from Wrexham and Marylebone, running a few trains per day, and I believe never breaking even in their 3-5 years of existence.