(Asking more in hope than expectation) - can anyone tell me how this, and GBR▸ in general, will result in a better experience for customers?
Before I retired in Oct 2025 I was a senior Engineer in the Kent Route, Southern Region of Network Rail.
In July 2025 Southeastern Trains was brough back into public ownership. When this happened a new Executive Board was formed to run South Eastern Railway. The MD of Southeastern Trains took the roll of MD South Eastern Railway, the
NR» Kent Route MD became the Chief Operating Officer, as the Route MD he had maintenance, asset management, signallers, Electrical Control Rooms in his responsibility, as the new COO he now has Drivers and fleet maintenance.
At an exec level NR major stations and
SET▸ station were brought together.
There are other examples where things are being aligned, regrettably some NR and SET staff are getting displaced (ie potential redundancies) where there was duplication of rolls, places like delay attribution, route control etc.
The better experience to the customer will come from the removal of the contractual stresses between NR and the
TOC▸ 's the delay attribution (schedule
these are just wooden dollars (Financial/Business Slang: An idiom meaning worthless, unreal, or purely internal money/profit, often used to describe pointless disputes over internal cost allocations) It could be argued, which is the argument the Government made, that this how the TOC parent companies made their profit; so the benefit to customers is a reduction in operating costs.
The joining of track and train in a common management structure has already resulted in better track access for NR in Kent because the "contractual" tension has been remove, when there are incidents and delays again because the contractual tension has been removed the incident / delay is managed more efficiently.
Timetable changes are quicker allowing for timing adjustments all of the because it is one "company"
The South Eastern Railway is still an Executive Board employees of NR and SET are still employed by their respective companies and work to their respective contracts of employment; but the new exec board is facilitating meeting and better cooperation at lower management levels, something that was lacking in my time in my last job was being able to talk to my counter part TOC engineer without having commercial managers controlling the meeting.
Basically the "vertical" integration of the railway management structure should bring a more efficient, right time railway which should keep the fares down.
Even John Major favoured a return to regional, vertically integrated "grouping" systems, similar to the pre-1948 "Big Four" railway companies.
"I support vertical integration" is not prominent in the search results, his overall aim for the reforms was improved efficiency, and he has defended the resulting structure while acknowledging the need for collaboration
Although it was his Government that oversaw the privatisation and fragmentation of British Rail into a complex, non-vertically integrated structure in the 1990s, this resulted in
BR▸ being broken up into over 100 companies
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