Publicly owned rail is popular. But is it making the trains run on time?

Publicly owned rail is popular. But is it making the trains run on time?

The early afternoon of Wednesday 6 August was an unremarkable one on the rail network. Then suddenly, shortly before 14:00, a power failure brought trains across the north-west of England to a halt.

Chaos ensued: passengers told the BBC they were stranded on platforms for hours, with some having to book hotels for the night.

This incident, stemming from a short power cut that affected Network Rail's operating centre in Manchester, was, in itself, unusual. But it added to a difficult summer for train passengers.

Repeated heatwaves required risk control measures like speed reductions to avoid tracks being damaged in the heat, leading to delays and cancellations. There was a serious derailment near Lewes, East Sussex, and another smaller-scale incident near Wickford in Essex soon after.

Against a backdrop of relatively high cancellation rates and steep fares compared with previous decades, rail users could be forgiven for forming the impression that things are not working.

Something is changing, though: Labour is steadily bringing nearly all passenger rail services into public hands. Nationalisation is a popular idea - a YouGov tracker poll suggests almost two thirds of the public support public ownership.

August's 90-second power outage sparked chaos for rail commuters

But in reality, plans are still in their early stages. Big structural changes have yet to be introduced. And experts caution that it's too early to say how successful these will be.

So can rail nationalisation meet the public's expectations? Or are the ongoing delays and cancellations that we're currently seeing under a part-nationalised network a sign that it might struggle to deliver real improvement?

South Western Railway (SWR) was nationalised in May 2025, the first of six services to be brought into public ownership under Labour so far.

At Woking station, which is served by SWR, regular commuter Leo tells me he had been optimistic about public ownership, but hasn't noticed it making any difference so far: "I think the phrase 'emperor's new clothes' comes to mind… it's still unreliable."

SWR saw a clear increase in cancellations during its first year in public hands.

But how much of this was due to nationalisation?

The Conservatives have cited SWR as an example of how public control does not necessarily mean improvements or fix key problems.

But the government argues SWR's early period in public hands was affected by high summer temperatures, signal failures and trespass incidents.

Lord Hendy, the rail minister, says work to turn the operator around has included introducing long-delayed new trains on suburban routes and recruiting more drivers, resulting in a drop in those cancellations that are due to staff shortages.

TransPennine Express was nationalised in May 2023, under the Conservative government. Many passengers had been at their wits' end as the operator struggled to fulfil its timetable and suffered from poor industrial relations.

A plan to improve reliability was put in place, which included cutting some services and even removing one type of train as a way of sorting out staffing problems. A new deal with the drivers' union also helped - something an insider at the former private sector operator claimed to me their company had not been permitted to do.

So has it worked? Cancellations have fallen noticeably. But they were still above the Great Britain average in the year to August.

It's really important to say the data can only tell us so much. There are so many different factors that might affect the performance of each service: for example, the state of the infrastructure it relies on, weather events or simply how well it was working before the government took over.

Plus, of the operators nationalised since Labour came to power, only SWR and c2c have completed a whole year in public hands. Even for those nationalised years earlier, the picture is clouded by the impact of the pandemic, when passenger numbers fell off a cliff.

But according to Alex Hynes, chief executive of DfT Operator Limited (DfTO), the government company that currently owns publicly-run operators, it has been possible to make some short-term changes. Notably, these include making one team jointly responsible for managing infrastructure and passenger train services in some areas including the south-west of England.

"The railway is a system: track, train, people," he says. "So by putting one person in charge, they can fix all elements of the system to deliver a better service to customers."

Hynes also gives examples of changes on the recently nationalised Thameslink; investment in better cleaning, improving toilets and replacing unpopular upright "ironing-board" seats.

But when it comes to the pure performance data of operators nationalised in the past few years - delays, cancellations - can we really draw any conclusions yet to tell us whether the policy is working?

"I think it's completely hopeless to try and do that assessment over such a short period," Stephen Glaister, a former chair of regulator the Office of Rail and Road who is now emeritus professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London. He thinks a decade is needed to assess the impact of nationalisation.

The government argues that official data suggests publicly owned train operators are performing better on punctuality and cancellations overall than those still under DfT contracts to private operators.

Experts point out that whoever is running the passenger trains, some limitations remain. Many delays happen because infrastructure, like signals, fails. There's only so much capacity on the existing network. And getting better trains or more staff can take years.

The view that privatisation ultimately failed, leaving unreliable services and high fares, may be widespread. However, Prof Glaister argues that for a few years in the 1990s, the old privatised system actually worked well. Operating costs and subsidies were falling while the number of train services and passengers went up, he says.

And in the current context, it's important to be clear about what nationalisation really means.

The railways Labour inherited weren't, in truth, completely privatised, and nationalisation doesn't mean a return to British Rail.

For example, the infrastructure manager Network Rail has been fully under public control for over two decades. A number of train companies including LNER and Northern had already been nationalised under the Conservatives. Scotrail, Transport for Wales and Caledonian Sleeper are controlled by devolved national governments.

And even those operators still on contracts issued by the DfT at Westminster have been heavily controlled by the government for years. During Covid, private operators started being paid a fixed fee to run services, while the taxpayer took on the financial risk. The terms of the contracts meant train companies had to "ask government for permission to blow their nose", according to one senior industry executive, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely.

Highly profitable rolling stock companies ("ROSCOS") still own the actual trains. Freight companies operate privately too, and there are a handful of fully commercial "open access operators" on the rails like Lumo, Hull Trains and Grand Central - although there are concerns within the industry that these could end up squeezed.

So what is often referred to as the nationalisation of the railways, in fact amounts to gradually returning passenger train operators run by private companies to public hands as their contracts expire - and making this the default.

This is not all that's happening, though. The government hopes that re-organising the railways under a new publicly run body, Great British Railways (GBR), will make a big difference. This will bring together the running of trains and tracks, ending the current fragmented system.

A botched rail timetable introduction in 2018 was the spark for the then-Conservative government to eventually propose GBR as a new overarching body - although the Tories believe private competition should not be excluded from the system.

Some trains are already covered in distinctive GBR branding, but the organisation still doesn't exist. A new law to create it is making its way through parliament. Unknowns remain, like exactly how GBR will interact with devolved governments, and who its senior leaders will be.

Transport expert and author Prof Jon Shaw, of the University of Plymouth, says the idea of a "single guiding mind" should create "a better planned railway that's more aligned to the customer".