Investing in Rail

We’re making it easier for other organisations to invest in, and build on, the railway.

Providing valuable opportunities for other organisations to invest in and build on the railway reduces the taxpayer burden. Increased competition drives down costs while also boosting efficiency, creativity, and innovation.

As Network Rail owns and operates Britain’s railway, we can sometimes be seen as a gatekeeper and difficult to work with by other organisations wishing to invest or build on the railway. To address this, we commissioned a third-party working group to investigate how we could remove barriers and make it easier for other organisations. We are now implementing the recommendations of this working group.

Easier to invest

We’re making it simpler for other organisations to invest in the railway. We’ve published a list of opportunities for third parties to fund, finance or deliver improvements, and we are committed to keeping it regularly updated. To support this new approach, we are enhancing our capacity and capability by establishing a dedicated project financing team to manage the increased market interest. Additionally, a new team of business development directors, located across the country, will guide investors through their projects from start to finish.

Easier to get involved

Railway projects are governed by a set of detailed requirements known as ‘standards.’ While these standards ensure the proper delivery of improvement projects, they are often perceived as overly complex and costly. To address this, we are updating and streamlining our railway standards to reduce complexity and cost, fostering innovation. Additionally, we have introduced a standards challenge process, allowing other organisations to propose better safe railway.

What we’re trying to encourage

We want to attract partners who can invest resources and share the social and economic benefits generated by the railway.

We are excited to present our latest brochure, highlighting the remarkable achievements of third-party investments in the railway sector. This brochure showcases a variety of successful projects where external organisations have partnered with us to enhance and expand the railway infrastructure. By sharing these success stories, we aim to inspire and encourage more organisations to explore the opportunities available for investing in the railway. Discover how these collaborations have driven innovation, improved efficiency, and delivered significant benefits to the rail network and its users.

Learning from lessons library

To help share knowledge across the industry, improve processes, reduce cost and speed-up the delivery of our projects, we’ve opened-up our ‘learning from lessons’ library to the entire industry. The library is an online repository of lessons, pictures, videos and documents from a wide range of projects and major programmes, including those of our delivery partners. It showcases best practice, but also highlights where we could do better so future projects can improve. You will need to register to request access to the learning from lessons library and complete a short training session if you want to upload content.