Transport Insights

There’s an interesting revelation in the Guardian’s story abut hundreds of civil servants being transferred from the Department for Transport (DfT) to the state-owned rail operator, as part of the creation of Great British Railways (GBR):

sources indicated that GBR would now probably not be up and running until 2028

I noted a couple of weeks back that, although the DfT’s webpage implies a start date of 2027, the absence of a date from a recent press release was saying that GBR was “coming soon”, was conspicuous.

In April, the DfT described the return to public hands of as South Western Railway as a “new dawn for rail”, but the state-owned firm has just quietly announced cuts to services.

As has been observed, there was no fanfare about this deterioration. Heidi Alexander certainly didn’t stand in front of an SWR train to publicise it.