The 6.14am service that runs each Sunday from London Waterloo station to Shepperton rarely carries many passengers. But this weekend, hundreds of rail enthusiasts will board that train, which meanders through the suburbs of southwest London and Surrey.
The reason: it is the first departure from Waterloo under the newly renationalised South Western Railway. The train will also bear the logo of Great British Railways – the organisation that the government plans to create to run almost all rail services in England, Wales and Scotland. So what exactly is changing, and why?
What will passengers notice has changed?
Nothing, except that one train has been repainted with the putative Great British Railways logo and will therefore look a bit different.
The nationalised rail operation will have the same timetable, same fares, and same staff as the current private operator, which is a joint venture between FirstGroup and Hong Kong-based MTR Corporation.
South Western Railway stresses in a message to passengers: “Although the legal operator is changing, your experience won’t.” Exactly the same as when several other rail contractors – LNER, TransPennine Express, Northern and Southeastern were brought back into public ownership.
Mark Smith, the international rail guru known as The Man In Seat 61, says “Train-operating companies ceased to be franchises in the pandemic. They’re now merely contractors. So the service is already nationalised – just delivered by a private contractor whose management and staff are being taken back in-house.
“If anything, the invisible change from franchises to contracts during the pandemic was the big one, largely unnoticed by the public. This one is relatively minor.”
So if nothing changes on Sunday, why are people getting excited about it?
The government has decided this is the moment to proclaim renationalisation of the nation’s railways ahead of Great British Railways being properly established two years from now.
Unlike the current publicly owned train operators, South Western Railway hasn’t been nationalised as a result of the private operator having got into difficulties – instead, it’s a political decision.
Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, says renationalisation will “return the railways to the service of passengers and reform our broken railways, ending 30 years of fragmentation” and “put passengers firmly at the heart of the railways”.
With the private operators taken out, ministers say trains will be run “in the interests of passengers, not shareholders”. For the first time in decades, one person will be responsible for train and track (or “wheels and steel” as some rail people like to say): South Western Railway’s new managing director, Lawrence Bowman.
What does it mean for the long-suffering passenger?
The argument in favour of privatisation was summed up succinctly for me by the rail minister, Peter Hendy. Removing the private sector means that a large slab of complexity and cost falls away – with a single organisation simply focusing on how to provide the best possible service.
While the savings on payments to private contractors represent a minuscule element of the £12.5bn the taxpayer pumps in to keep the railways running, there will be an immediate halt to the constant legal battles over compensation for delays, which involve teams of lawyers being paid to bicker over who caused the problem.
Instead, train and track managers will agree on the best solution for passengers. What happens on South Western Railway from this weekend should be emulated in other parts of the country over the coming months and years, as most of the remaining private operators are brought back into public ownership.
Most but not all rail firms?
The transport secretary has made it clear that so-called open-access operators such as Hull Trains, Grand Central and Lumo will continue to run in competition with nationalised services, and others will be able to launch routes if they can demonstrate that the public will benefit and that they will not detract from the performance of nationalised trains.
How have the main rail unions reacted?
Mick Whelan, general secretary of the train drivers’ union, Aslef, said: “It’s the right decision, at the right time, to take the brakes off the UK economy and rebuild Britain. John Major’s decision to privatise British Rail in 1994 was foolish, ideologically driven, and doomed to fail.”
The biggest union, the RMT, welcomed the move, but is angry that some roles within South Western Railway, such as cleaning and security, will remain outsourced to the private sector.
Both unions have their eyes on “levelling up” – so that pay for all staff within Great British Railways will be raised to the highest rates currently being paid by the most generous operators. Which, with taxpayers currently paying £400 per second to keep the railways running, won’t go down well at the Treasury.
And each union has industrial action in progress somewhere on the network: Aslef at Hull Trains, and the RMT at CrossCountry.
How does the plan for Great British Railways compare with what’s done in Europe?
It will emulate what happens in France and Germany, where the government runs tracks and most trains, with a few long-distance private operators competing. But Italy and Spain have different, more competitive models, with ferocious competition on their high-speed networks.
