I’ve been taking trains across Britain for the best part of two decades, and I can tell you with some confidence that a rebrand has never once made a train run on time. So when the government announced that Great British Railways 2026 would finally consolidate the fragmented mess of franchises, operators and track managers into one unified body, my first instinct was cautious. Not cynical, exactly. Just cautious. Because the problems with British rail are structural, financial and decades deep, and no logo on a carriage changes any of that.
The transition is genuinely underway. Great British Railways is being assembled from the pieces of a franchised system that, by most honest assessments, served passengers poorly while delivering reasonable returns to private shareholders. The Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act, passed in late 2024, handed the government the mechanism to bring operators back into public hands as their contracts expired. By mid-2026, around two-thirds of passenger services run under public ownership again. That is real. But ownership is not the same thing as performance, and performance is where the story gets uncomfortable.
The punctuality problem nobody wants to own
According to the Office of Rail and Road, around 62% of trains in the UK arrived on time in the most recent full reporting period, using the industry’s own generous ‘on time’ definition, which allows a three-minute margin on shorter services and five minutes on longer ones. By European standards, that figure is somewhere between embarrassing and alarming. Deutsche Bahn in Germany is frequently mocked for poor performance, yet even Germany’s troubled network has at points outperformed ours on intercity punctuality. Swiss Federal Railways sits consistently above 90%. We are not in that conversation.
The causes are layered. Network Rail, now operating under Great British Railways’ umbrella, is responsible for the infrastructure: the tracks, signals, bridges, and level crossings. A significant chunk of that infrastructure dates back to the Victorian era. Upgrade projects routinely overrun, and weekend engineering works have become such a fixture of British life that cancelling your plans because of ‘rail replacement buses’ barely registers as news any more. I’ve sat in a draughty bus shelter in Crewe at 23:00 waiting for one of those buses. Once is enough to make the point viscerally.
Fares that still make European visitors wince
The fare structure is the other great injustice. Britain has some of the most expensive walk-up rail fares in Europe, a fact the government’s own data does not dispute. A peak-time single from Manchester to London can still comfortably exceed £200. Advance fares exist and can be good value if you book weeks out and your plans never change, but that is not how most people’s lives work. The complexity of the pricing system is itself a problem: there are thousands of different fare types for what is essentially a journey from A to B.
The government has promised a simplified fares structure as part of the Great British Railways plan, and a nationwide fares review has been promised for years. Progress has been glacial. Oli and I have discussed this at length, and the conclusion we keep arriving at is this: simplifying fares costs money in the short term because it means cutting the premium prices that currently subsidise the network. No government, of any stripe, has been willing to absorb that cost upfront. So passengers continue to pay for a system that does not justify its price tag.
This connects directly to the broader question of whether nationalisation is actually fixing anything that we’ve written about before. The short answer remains: not yet. Possibly not soon. Public ownership removes the profit motive but does not conjure the capital investment the network requires. Those are two entirely different problems.
The infrastructure gap that cannot be wished away
Here is the number that should dominate every conversation about British rail: the infrastructure investment gap is estimated at somewhere between £40 billion and £50 billion over the next decade, depending on whose analysis you use. HS2’s partial cancellation north of Birmingham removed a significant chunk of planned capacity from the northern network. The promised Northern Powerhouse Rail upgrades remain in a state of perpetual ‘review’. Transpennine services, which connect Manchester, Leeds, York and Hull, were so unreliable that the previous operator was effectively stripped of its contract and brought under public control early. That decision fixed the political optics. It did not fix the track.
Signalling is a particular headache. Much of the network still relies on analogue signalling that caps how many trains can run per hour on a given line. The rollout of the European Train Control System, which would allow far more trains to use the same track safely, is decades behind schedule and billions over budget. Great British Railways inherits this. It does not solve it.
What passengers actually want
I’d argue the public’s expectations here are not unreasonable. People want trains that run to time, fares that don’t require a mortgage, and a ticketing system simple enough to understand without a flow chart. They are not asking for Swiss precision or Japanese frequency. They want the basics done reliably.
The social dimension matters too. Rail connectivity is not just a convenience issue. Rural communities with poor services face genuine economic and social exclusion. The postcode lottery that defines access to NHS services in rural Britain is mirrored, almost exactly, in rail access. If your nearest station has two trains a day and the last one leaves at 18:30, the network is not serving you in any meaningful sense. Nationalisation, at least in principle, should be more attentive to social need than private franchises chasing profitable corridors. Whether it will be in practice remains to be seen.
There is also a workforce dimension. The train drivers’ dispute that paralysed services in 2022 and 2023 exposed just how much leverage individual unions hold over a system with no redundancy. ASLEF and the RMT secured significant pay settlements. Those costs sit on the public balance sheet now. That is not a criticism of the workers, whose pay had genuinely fallen behind; it is a structural observation about how labour costs compound the funding challenge.
Is there a realistic path to better rail?
Probably, yes. But it is a long one. The Office of Rail and Road continues to publish performance data that holds the new structure to account. The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail, which laid the intellectual groundwork for Great British Railways, had genuinely sensible ideas about integrating track and train operations. And there are parts of the network, the Elizabeth line being the clearest example, that show what investment and integration can deliver when the politics align.
The economic inactivity problem gripping parts of Britain is also, in a roundabout way, a rail problem. People who cannot easily reach employment centres by affordable public transport are less likely to enter the labour market. A genuinely functional national rail network has economic multiplier effects that go well beyond commuting convenience. The Treasury understands this. Whether it will fund the gap accordingly is a different matter entirely.
My take, for what it’s worth, is that Great British Railways is a necessary step and an insufficient one. The structure needed reforming. But structure without investment is just reorganising the deck chairs. Until the government commits real capital to signalling, rolling stock renewal, and the northern routes that were promised and then quietly shelved, passengers will keep paying European premium prices for decidedly non-European service. And at some point, even the most patient commuter runs out of patience.