At 6:14 am on Sunday, May 25, the first train of Great British Railways (GBR), the new public body overseeing rail transport in the United Kingdom, departed London’s Waterloo Station for Shepperton, a town in Surrey, in the southeast of England. Its locomotives, unveiled the previous week by Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander, are the first to display GBR’s red, white and blue logo.
This inaugural journey marked the nationalization of South Western Railway, which operates 1,600 trains daily across southwest England, according to its website. Co-owned by First Group, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, and MTR, the operator of Hong Kong’s metro, this railway group is the first to return to state control as part of a process initiated by the Labour government. The Department for Transport announced that C2C, in Essex, would follow at the end of July and Greater Anglia, in the east of England, in the autumn.
Fulfilling a campaign promise, Labour plans to nationalize the 10 companies running England’s rail system by October 2027. A law adopted at the end of 2024 allows the government to retake over these entities as their contracts expire. Eventually, they will be consolidated into Great British Rail, though the exact structure of the organization remains to be defined.
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