Ownership of the British railway system has been hotly contested since it was first nationalised by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1948, then reprivatised by Conservative Prime Minister John ...

British Railways, as it was initially called, had a difficult genesis. When it was created in 1948, the war had left it with a cruel double legacy: underinvestment and overuse. Moreover, the private ...

Paterson left school in 1946 to start working for the then London and North Eastern Railway, or LNER. This was two years before it was rolled into the nationalized British Railways on January 1, 1948.

From 1948 until the mid 1990s, under public ownership, the then-British Railways (BR) developed from a war-battered service in need of investment and modernisation to be considered by some as one ...