‘A Lot of Friction at the Interfaces’: The Regulation of Britain's Privatised Railway System

This paper examines the regulation of privatised industries, especially the railways. It focuses on the regulation of the infrastructure company, Railtrack, which collapsed into insolvency less than six years after its flotation. It analyses in detail the establishment of a key interface in the railway system, the track access charges, and discusses the extent to which Railtrack's collapse was a failure of regulation. The paper concludes that the key problem was not the regulatory system, but the fundamentally flawed concept of the rail privatisation, and discusses the implications for the success of privatisation and of Railtrack's successor, Network Rail.