Privatisation of British Rail: Encyclopedia II - Privatisation of British Rail - 1980s developments

Privatisation of British Rail - 1980s developments

The Thatcher administration developed a policy of selling off the nationalised industries into private ownership, or privatisation. As far as the railways were concerned, the government's policy had little effect during the whole period of the Thatcher administration except in relatively small areas, as it was considered that privatising core railway operations would be too difficult.

The chain of British Transport Hotels was sold off, mainly one hotel at a time, in 1982; Sealink (U.K.) Limited was sold in 1984 to Sea Containers Limited, who ultimately sold the routes to their current owner, Stena Line. In 1988 British Rail Engineering Limited was split between the major engineering works, which became BREL (1988) Ltd, and the (mostly smaller) works that were used for day-to-day maintenance of rolling stock, which became British Rail Maintenance Limited (BRML). BREL (1988) Ltd was soon sold to the Swiss-Swedish conglomerate ASEA Brown-Boveri, which renamed the company ABB Transportation. A merger between ABB Transportation and Daimler Benz created ADtranz on 1 January 1996; ADtranz was subsequently taken over by the Canadian-owned conglomerate, Bombardier.

For reasons of efficiency and to reduce the amount of subsidy required from government British Rail undertook a comprehensive organisational restructuring in the late 1980s. The new management structure was based on business sectors rather than geographical regions, and first manifested itself in 1985 with the creation of Railfreight, the BRB's freight operation, and the creation in 1986 of Network SouthEast, which covered local passenger services in south-east England, including the London commuter area. Sectorisation was completed in 1987 with the creation of the InterCity, Provincial (later renamed Regional Railways), Parcels (later named Rail Express Systems), Departmental (civil engineering), Freightliner and Central Services (e.g. research and IT) sectors. The regional management structure continued in parallel for a few years before it was abolished. Sectorisation was generally regarded within the industry as a great success, and it was to have a considerable effect on the way in which privatisation would be carried out.

In 1986 what may in retrospect be viewed as the harbinger of private rail operation occurred when the quarry company Foster Yeoman bought a small number of extremely powerful 3600 hp locomotives from General Motors' Electromotive Division (GM-EMD), designated British Rail Class 59, to operate mineral trains from their quarry in Wiltshire. Although owned and maintained by Foster Yeoman, the Class 59s were manned by British Rail staff. During acceptance trials, on 16 February 1986 locomotive 59001 hauled a train weighing 4639 ts – the heaviest load ever hauled by a single non-articulated traction unit. Foster Yeoman's class 59s proved extremely reliable, and it was not long before quarry company ARC and privatised power generator National Power also bought small numbers of Class 59s to haul their own trains.

Also in 1986, the possibility of breaking up British Rail was explored when discussions were held with Sea Containers Ltd, later the franchise operators of GNER, concerning the possible takeover of the railway on the Isle of Wight. However, the discussions proved abortive.

In Sweden in 1988 the State Railways, Statens Järnvägar, was split into two – Banverket to control the track network, and SJ to operate the trains. This was the first time a national railway had been split in this manner, and it allowed local county authorities to tender for local passenger services to be provided by the number of new train operators that appeared. The Swedish system appeared to be very successful initially, although some train operators have subsequently gone bankrupt, and the Swedish experiment was watched with great interest in other countries. Some observers -- including the boss of the Swiss Federal Railways, widely regarded as one of the best railways in the world -- still argue that the whole idea of separating track from train operations in this way is fundamentally misconceived, being based on the model of air transport, where the infrastructure, engineering and operational considerations are entirely different. On this view, the rail/wheel interface is an integral entity at the heart of what makes railways function, and hence the worst possible point at which to make a split, especially on an intensively-worked but multi-functional network such as Britain's.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "1980s developments", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki