In 1993, Margaret Thatcher had already sold off many of our public assets - energy, water, buses - but she thought the railway was 'a privatisation too far' and the public agreed. However the Conservative manifesto in 1992 promised to privatise the railway and Prime Minister John Major went for it.

The British railways were privatized by the Conservative government of John Major in the mid-1990s. While Margaret Thatcher had previously privatized many state-owned industries, she famously considered rail privatization "a step too far." It was the Railways Act 1993, passed under Major's leadership, that formally broke up the state-owned British Rail into over 100 separate companies, including track ownership (originally Railtrack, now Network Rail) and various private "Train Operating Companies" (TOCs) that bid for franchises. In a significant shift in 2024 and 2025, the Labour government began the process of re-nationalizing the network, aiming to bring all passenger services back into public ownership as private contracts expire, marking the end of the 30-year privatization era.