Place North West | Rail reforms need full Northern devolution placenorthwest.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from placenorthwest.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The last ever Inter City 125 on the East Coast Mainline stopped off in Durham station in 2019. Picture by Tom Banks CONTROL of trains and track will be brought under a new public sector body named Great British Railways (GBR) as part of sweeping reforms, the Department for Transport has announced in a move praised by North-East leaders. The organisation will own and manage rail infrastructure, issue contracts to private firms to run trains, set most fares and timetables, and sell tickets. It will absorb Network Rail in a bid to end the current “blame-game system” between train and track operations when disruption occurs.
Network Rail set to slash thousands of jobs telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Ministers hope the changes, the biggest shake-up since privatisation in the early 1990s, will resolve the fragmentation of the industry which has been blamed for adding cost as well as leading to the chaos seen in the 2018 rail timetable crisis and franchise failures that prompted the review.
Despite three years having elapsed, the white paper will still leave much of the detail to be decided. The head of Network Rail, Andrew Haines, and its chairman, Sir Peter Hendy, will be tasked with drawing up the processes and structures of the new GBR, which will eventually subsume Network Rail.
New types of fares aimed at making train travel more attractive to part-time commuters will also be unveiled by ministers – largely in the form of carnet-style tickets for multiple journeys with limited savings, which may disappoint passenger groups.