Grace's Guide To British Industrial History

Registered UK Charity (No. 115342)

Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 164,585 pages of information and 246,144 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.

Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 147,919 pages of information and 233,587 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.

British Rail

From Graces Guide
1983. Speedlink Distribution.
1983. Rail Express Europe.

British Rail (1948-1997) aka British Railways

1965 The name of British Railways was shortened to British Rail for promotional purposes[1]

BREL was the engineering division of British Rail until the design and building trains in the UK was privatised.

Specialised freight services included Freightliners and Condor

1968 Herbert Morris supplied 30 Goliath cranes to British Rail Freight.

1981 June. Unveiled the new Class 140 prototype twin-car railbus.[2]

1981 June. Sir Peter Parker was BR's chairman. British Rail teamed up with private industry to develop what was to be the world's first all-electronic railway signally system. GEC General Signal and Westinghouse Signals took BR's four year old research project to production prototype stage with an aim of installing a £1,500 000 pilot scheme at Leamington Spa within three to four years.[3]

1982 Developing ideas to get Advanced Passenger Train (APT) into production.[4]

1994 Privatisation of the rail network began.

1996 Following privatisation the name British Rail was removed[5] but the British Railways Board remained owner of the operating companies until privatisation had been completed[6]. The track and infrastructure was placed in a newly-created public company called Railtrack

1997 Privatisation was essentially complete.

See Also

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Sources of Information

  1. The Times, Mar 22, 1965
  2. The Engineer 1981/06/04
  3. The Engineer 1981/06/18
  4. The Engineer 1982/03/11
  5. The Times, November 25, 1995
  6. The Times, November 25, 1995