Of all the actions necessary to resolve the current issues in the rail industry, this plan addresses at least one of them and is therefore well thought out.
A single operator of currently DfT franchised passenger services under Great British Railways. The retention of open access passenger and freight is unfortunate, but with no interworking of loco hauled operations between passengers and freight and no capacity to reinstate the common carriers act etc, this is of little consequence. There may however be scope for GBR to cannibalise the passengers of open access operators a la bus deregulation and then simply lease and integrate their train fleets and hire their staff.
There is no reason though why on day 1, they can’t merge Network Rail with DOHL and adopt the name Great British Railways for a degree of vertical integration, merging the operations of Northern, TPE and LNER, pooling route and traction knowledge at every depot, especially in Yorkshire and the north east, regardless of former operator and beginning strategic training to eventually harmonise these, eliminating the railway’s biggest inefficiency. Any other functions that were duplicated between TOCs can also be eliminated and centralised, with GBR then preparing to integrate the next TOCs, which I believe are SWR and c2c, which may be able to find efficiency savings with the former southeastern. This is where Labour is able to find most of their £2.2 billion a year, more than scrapping profits.
There will be no TOCs in the new model. GBR’s own services won’t need track access on it’s own infrastructure. Devolved operators, both the already nationalised TfW, ScotRail and Caledonian Sleeper and Elizabeth Line and London Overground which I expect will end up directly operated by TfL, however will not be directly controlled by GBR, which will largely represent the rest of England outside London, but this is unlikely to be problematic.
The one I am most concerned about is Merseyrail. Its contract expires in 2028, but it remains to be seen whether it joins the single operator, sharing resources with other services, or achieves devolution of infrastructure and becomes an island of fragmentation. Regions other than Merseyside will also want improvements to train services without splitting off from the newly unified network.
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The Passenger Standards Authority sounds like a rebirth of the Strategic Rail Authority, taking some of the functions of the ORR and the best-price ticket guarantee is obviously true fare reform, the details of lwhich have not yet been worked out, because such a guarantee would be unworkable under the current fare structure.
New standard liveries and uniforms to go with a coherent national rolling stock strategy may also appear after a while. The new CrossCountry livery in particular I don’t expect to last long.
