@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:Centrox, you could tell us about the great British railway companies before they were nationalized.
In the 19th century, railways were promoted by private companies who raised share capital and usually linked two end points, providing the railway name, e.g. Liverpool and Manchester, London, Brighton and South Coast. As the century wore on, the bigger, more successful companies swallowed up the smaller ones, until by around 1900 there were a number of big companies, each covering a geographic area, and some smaller ones. Each railway had its own locomotive works - unlike in the US, where independent loco manufacturers (e.g. Baldwin, seem to have been the norm. Each British railway had a Chief Mechanical Engineer who designed the rolling stock, either personally or as head of a team. These tended to be strong personalities. Motive power policies varied between companies. The Midland Railway, for example, had a "small engine" policy, that is, they did not build very large and powerful locos, so that heavy trains might be hauled by two medium sized machines. When you build a railway you can either build expensive, and run cheap, or the other way around. That is, you can spend a lot of money making the railway as level and straight as you can, using tunnels, viaducts, cuttings, embankments, etc, in which case you will save money on running costs (coal, mainly) or you can build, more cheaply, a line which meanders around hills or goes up one side and down the other, in which case you need more powerful locos which use more coal, and wear out more quickly. A busy line between two big cities is likely to attract a lot of traffic, so would be built to be fast and direct, while a rural branch line would be rambling and follow the contours of the landscape. Often two companies would be rivals for traffic between the same places. During the First World War, the government took over control of the railways, and after the war, didn't really want to give it back again. In 1922 the government forced all of the railways to merge into 4 companies (the "Big Four") - the London, Midland and Scottish, the Southern, the Great Western, and the London and North Eastern. This was called the "Grouping". This situation lasted until 1948, when the state nationalised the Big Four into one state-owned organisation called British Railways. In 1994, a Tory government abolished that setup, and, placing the tracks and infrastructure in the hands of one company, sold concessions to private companies to run services in different areas of the country, these areas often coinciding with the areas of the pre-Grouping companies. It is no secret that this has not been a huge success.
