Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

A video I took on holiday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wKTPOcG-M

wigwags4ever wrote:A video I took on holiday:

That's a nice video. The school bus company I work for is also the same company that owns most of those trains. Over here it's called First Student.

http://www.firststudentinc.com/

They don't actually own the trains, the railways work different over here.

It used to be one big company called British Rail that owned everything, but in 1996 it was split up. The track and infrastructure is all owned by Network Rail, stations are owned by the operating companies, such as First Great Western, CrossCountry etc. trains are owned by companies such as Porterbrook who lease them out to the operating companies so they can run services. So all the companies you actually see only own some stations, staff and timetable slots to run their trains in. Unfortunately, this means ticket prices are rising quickly, the government say that if they get too high then the railways will be forced to re-nationalise into British Rail again. It seems this is happening, what with some smaller companies merging to form larger, such as WAGN, First Great Eastern, Stansted Express and Anglia Railways forming to become 'one' (later National Express). Trust me, the railways are a bit of a mess over here, but they are good according to me, I just wish that tickets were cheaper.

Cabman701, thanks for the comments, and incidentally, some of the trains in the video are actually bus bodies mounted on railway chassis!

What you guys have going on over there is the exact opposite of what's going on here. We've gone from six or seven major Class One railroads to just four. BNSF is making a bid to absorb the Kansas City Southern (a Class 2) and rumor has it they've got their sights set on taking Norfolk Southern and/or CSX. Before you know it it'll just be UP and BNSF in this country. What a sad fate.