Home » Research Projects » The Effect of Ownership and Regulation on British Railway Performance, 1850-2006
Timing is Everything
How has the performance of railways in Britain changed in the last 150 years?
“The only way to be sure of catching a train,” said G.K. Chesterton, “is to miss the one before it.” Certainly, the efficiency, reliability and affordability of railway travel has been the subject of much discussion in homes and offices, and on railway platforms, ever since the railways became a significant form of travel over 150 years ago. This study looks at the output of British railways, measured in terms of passenger miles, and speed of travel (including waiting times) from 1850 to 2006.
Over the last century and a half, railways have experienced very different forms of ownership and regulation. At first, railways were privately built using private finance. Gradually, government became more and more involved in fare-setting, integrating and standardising track, and regulating competition. Over the Twentieth Century, railways were under government control in the two World Wars, heavily regulated between those wars, wholly nationalised for fifty years from the 1940s, privatized under a regulator (with separate track and train operating companies) from the mid-1990s, with the track operation being effectively renationalised in the early 2000s.
How important have these various patterns of regulation and ownership (all private, all public, part-private, part-public) been in delivering faster trains as set against levels of investment and general changes in technology?
What the research means for policy-makers and the wider community
- Policymakers and researchers will be able to use the study to assess systematically (for the first time) the various determinants, including regulation and public ownership, of changes in train speeds in Great Britain over a long period of time
- The study will provide important new data for economists and social and economic historians interested in evaluating railway regimes in particular and public services in general, and will lend itself to application in other countries.
Research Methods
The study will use railway timetables to construct indices of train speeds from the start of the railway era to the present day. These will take into account not only nominal route speeds, but directness of journey, waiting times, and the pattern of journeys over the day, selecting the 50 most important rail journeys in Great Britain by numbers of users together with a basket of ‘minor’ journeys. The study will also place a value on the time saved by increasing speeds over the years. Although time saved is not part of national income, it is an important component of the standard of living and lies at the heart of modern transport economics. The researchers will use techniques borrowed from the ‘international trade gravity model’ to place a value to society of improved train speeds. That model offers a well-established methodology for estimating geographical effects such as the way that train speeds effect the distances that commuters travel and consequently how far they can live from their place of work.
