No radical change after nationalisation, GWR says


Great Western Railways will go back into national ownership from 13 December - Image © Press Association

The boss of Great Western Railway (GWR) has said customers should not expect "radically different" change ahead of the company returning to public ownership next month.

From 13 December 2026, a new company called Greater Western Railway Limited will operate the services, replacing First Greater Western Limited, as part of the government's plan to nationalise all rail services in England by 2027.

Speaking on BBC Radio Gloucestershire's Your Voice segment, GWR managing director Mark Hopwood said staff had been working hard behind the scenes to ensure passengers do not notice too much change.  Fundamentally, it's going to be the same staff on the same trains at the same stations," he said.


Mark Hopwood says GWR customers will not notice a "radical change"

The GWR boss added: "I think people should be reassured that this isn't a change that's going to make everything radically different, but it will be a change that I think will put the right foundations in for us to build a better railway."

The Swindon-based operator, which is owned by FirstGroup, has run services and linked London to the south-west of England and Wales since 1996.

Several rail firms around the country are already publicly owned, including Great Anglia and South Western Railway.  Welsh services were nationalised in 2021 and Scotland took trains into public ownership the following year.

While there will be little immediate change to day-to-day services and timetables, Hopwood said they were working on future plans, including freeing up more carriages for services.  "We have got a plan to lengthen some trains, but we don't have enough rolling stock to lengthen everything," he explained.

"We are currently introducing some additional rolling stock in Devon and Cornwall and that is then releasing some trains to lengthen services in this part of the world.  Perhaps not as many as everyone would like, but it is important that we take this step by step."

Hopwood also addressed commuter concerns over cancellations and delays.

One passenger who works in Birmingham said he found commuting "frustrating" due to cancellations which often make him late for work.  "Since the last month it has been horrible," Adedoio said.  "I'll have to do an extra hour at work to cover up my hour that the train has been delayed."

Responding to concerns about a lack of drivers, Hopwood said the company has "more drivers than ever before".  However, he added: "We've got a lot more trains being cancelled than I would like.  A lot of the issues that we've seen on my side of the business are more about rolling stock than drivers."

Hopwood said it had been a challenging summer due to the extreme weather and there were ongoing discussions about replacing some of the older trains in the future.  He said: "In the summer, the higher temperatures are an issue. And I think they're particularly an issue for our older diesel trains that were built in the 1980s, the early 1990s.  They either don't have air conditioning or they have a very basic version. And they're the trains that I'm really keen to get replaced."

Hopwood said it was hoped nationalisation would help to bring in more funding.  "We haven't fully recovered from what happened during Covid because we've got more people working from home, we've got more people travelling off-peak, and while that's great for those people, it has reduced our revenue.  So, the government is subsidising the railway quite a lot."

From the BBC:

From the BBC:

Should we laugh or cry?

Cancellations to services between Exeter St Davids and Okehampton via Crediton
Cancellations to services between Exeter St Davids and Paignton via Newton Abbot
Cancellations to services between Exeter St Davids and Plymouth via Newton Abbot

.  What has happened in the time I have retired is far better communications between the train operators and the infrastructure managers.

The journey to full GBR is about evolution and not revolution; many of the industry senior leaders today were working in the industry at the time of privatisation or in the years just after; they are acutely aware of Ladbrook Grove, Southall, Potters Bar, Hatfield all major incidents after a revolution in the industry had taken place, there are other parallels in the history of UK rail industry changes in management structure.

If that's the case, and all those decades worth of experience exists with vastly improved communications between operators/infrastructure management, how on Earth has said infrastructure been allowed to descend into such a state of utter decreptitude over the past few decades?

(The LTV corridor being a perfect example, which of course contains the sites of two of the major incidents to which you refer)

Surely if safety is the first priority (and I am sure no-one would dispute that it should be), the constant failures of track, signals, points, OHL etc must surely  present a very real risk to it?

It sounds very much to me as if all we have to look forward to is more of the same, with perhaps a few differently painted trains.

I recall asking the experts when all the excitement was triggered on this forum several years ago by the announcement of GWR, what tangibly could customers expect as an improvement. I never really got an answer, but perhaps this has indirectly provided it - very little, for the foreseeable future at least.

I recall asking the experts when all the excitement was triggered on this forum several years ago by the announcement of GWR, what tangibly could customers expect as an improvement. I never really got an answer, but perhaps this has indirectly provided it - very little, for the foreseeable future at least.

I recall suggesting to you several times over the last couple of years not to expect much change at all.  Mirroring exactly what 'Hopwood' said in his statement.

.....The ongoing issues of the lack of reliability of rolling stock and infrastructure, such as signalling, points and overhead line problems, for example, aren't going to be magically resolved on 13 December 2026. .....

And therein, certainly as far as the GWML - particularly the PAD<>NBY section - is concerned, lies the problem; unless and until Network Rail do their job properly and engage in a bit of root cause fault finding rather than, it seems to me, quick fix and forget about it until the next time service performance will not improve.

As to the rolling stock, specifically the IETs, Hitachi don't appear to have exactly covered themselves in glory with these machines. However I do wonder if any 'mean time/distance between failure' data comparison has been carried out across all TOCs that use IETs to possibly identify any variations in failures and their causes. 

Of course they’ll be no radical change!  The DfT have always been in control, nationalisation just cuts out the middle man and gives the DfT accountants more control so expect a gradual decline in all areas with no one publicly answerable to it.

Now ... it may be biased by a careful choice of starting date and making no reference to other factors, but I found this diagram from  The Time via "Down the line" rather interesting to consider.