Campaigners in Aylesbury are calling for a section of the former Great Central main line to be upgraded to passenger standards, so that their town will be connected to East West Rail. The Aylesbury Action Group says the Aylesbury spur from Claydon Junction is not merely a proposal for a future

FirstGroup will be launching its open access Lumo service between Stirling and London this month. Access rights were granted by the Office of Rail and Road in March 2024, but more recent applications for other routes have not succeeded. Alstom has signed a contract worth £50 million with FirstGroup and Eversholt Rail

Cambridge South station will open to passengers on 28 June, the Department for Transport has announced. Trains will start calling then at the £250 million station, and there will be an official opening ceremony the following day. As many as 20 trains an hour will be calling during the peaks, and the

GWR will be renationalised in December The Department for Transport has revealed that it will set up a new publicly-owned railway operating company before Great British Railways has taken over. The new company will be a subsidiary of DfT Operator Limited, which has been taking control of operators as they are

FirstGroup’s National Rail Contract for Great Western Railway will be renationalised on 13 December, after Chiltern Railways has returned to public ownership on 20 September. The current GWR contract started on 26 June 2022, but privatisation began on 4 January 1996, when a first-generation franchise lasting ten years had been signed

Class 175s will be running on a Cornish branch line from later this month. The units, built by Alstom some 25 years ago and cascaded to GWR from Transport for Wales, were already planned to be used on services on the Devon and Cornwall main line, and also on the branches

The Government has rejected concerns voiced by the Commons Transport Committee in its report on skills in transport manufacturing. The Committee had warned that skills gaps are posing ‘significant challenges’. Four of the report’s recommendations were partially accepted, including the call for Skills England to consult on the benefits of a ‘competency

David Statham is leading the new FirstGroup TfL concession for London Overground, which started on 3 May. He was most recently commercial director for First Rail, and before that was managing director of Govia’s Southeastern until it was renationalised in 2021. The Overground was launched in 2007, when it took over

The RMT has claimed that Network Rail’s ‘Modernising Maintenance’ programme and reductions in staffing were the real cause of major disruption at Manchester Piccadilly after 400m of overhead wires on the station throat had been damaged earlier this month. Services at Piccadilly had to be suspended after a wire had broken

The government has refused to amend the Railways Bill to clarify the relative powers of the transport secretary and Great British Railways. The Commons Transport Committee had said that the proposed law should be changed to iron out ‘potential tension’ between the DfT and GBR. In its response to the Committee, the