UK: The Rail Partners association of train operators’ parent companies closed on March 21, having decided to wind up after being unsuccessful in persuading the government to retain a role for the private sector in the operation of Department for Transport controlled passenger services.
Rail Partners’ final event was a cybersecurity conference hosted jointly with the Rail Delivery Group and Rail Safety & Standards Board in Birmingham on March 18.
Rail Partners had been launched in July 2022 after being spun out of the Rail Delivery Group. It acted as a trade body to provide advocacy and policy development services for the private sector passenger train operator owning groups and freight operators. Ring-fencing ensured that advocacy activities were funded only by the owning groups, and not by the Train Operating Companies which receive public funding through their operating contracts.
At the launch, Rail Partners’ Chief Executive Andy Bagnall said Rail Partners aimed to ‘co-create with government a reinvigorated public-private partnership for the railway’, and to ’make the railway better by harnessing the expertise and the commercial drive of private sector operators for the benefit of those who use the railway, passengers and freight customers, and of course those who pay for it, taxpayers.’
In a farewell message, Rail Partners said ‘while train companies lost the argument over nationalisation, ultimately everyone at Rail Partners wants the railway to succeed. The overall direction of public ownership is now set, but many of the big questions of how the railway will grow and thrive under this new model are, at time of writing, still being worked through and debated.’
Its website will stay live for the next 12 months, so the work it undertook can contribute to ongoing discussions about rail reform.
Rail Partners said ’we hope that the Rail Reform Bill, coming later this year, will create a framework that delivers a better service for customers and provides certainty and clarity for the future, even if Rail Partners won’t be part of it’.
