One public buyer could give rail’s founders a single door in place of fourteen or a single wall. We look at what has opened so far and what has not.
If you are a founder with software for the railway, your sales calendar may look like a timetable of its own: one conversation with a train operating company, another with Network Rail, a third with whichever operator runs the route you want to trial on.
Founders in the sector describe the number of stakeholders as a barrier to growth, and the structure of the industry shows why, because 14 train operating companies contract to the Department for Transport, and each has run its own ticketing website and app.
Great British Railways is meant to gather much of that under one roof, bringing together more than 17 organisations, Network Rail and the operators among them. The Railways Bill that creates it cleared the Commons on 10 June and is still moving through the House of Lords, with the new body due to be operational around 12 months after Royal Assent.
Operators are already crossing over under the public ownership programme: Chiltern Railways transferred on 20 September, Great Western Railway is due on 13 December and Avanti West Coast on 7 March 2027.
For a founder, the practical question is whether one buyer means one door or one wall.
A Door With a Name
The door has a name: GBRX.
GBRX was created during the transition to Great British Railways, it is the railway’s strategic innovation body, and its managing director, Toufic Machnouk, has said its purpose is to remove the structural obstacles that slow innovation across the industry.
On Find a Tender, Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, through its division GBRX, has published a pipeline notice (21 May) and a preliminary market engagement notice (7 July) for a dynamic market in rail innovation and technology.
Run under the Procurement Act 2023, it would let suppliers join by meeting proportionate conditions of membership and then compete for requirements issued against defined problem statements.
Network Rail, the Department for Transport and DfT Operator Limited could all buy through it, and the scope runs from data analytics and computer vision to train positioning and energy management.
The notice is open about how long that route may be.
Opportunities may move through market engagement, research and development, trials, pilots and demonstrations before any contract is awarded, and awards come only “when funding and business needs are confirmed.”
Machnouk has joked that the rail industry runs more pilots than British Airways. How many of this market’s pilots will end as contracts?
“to break the pattern of slow adoption that has historically held our railways back”— Lord Peter Hendy, Minister of State for Rail
Who Has Walked Through So Far?
A West Midlands company, MoniRail, shows how the route works in practice, it has won Innovate UK funding under the Quantum Missions Primer Phase 2 to commercialise a quantum navigation system that locates train and track faults where satellite signals cannot reach, with GBRX in a consortium that includes Imperial College London, Transport for London and QinetiQ.
The system is being developed for the London Underground, and the innovation body is involved to make sure it can also serve heavy rail.
Asset management sits inside the market’s scope as well, which is where we would expect predictive maintenance companies to look first.
The money beneath companies like this is modest.
The Department for Transport and Innovate UK put £4.8 million behind the ninth round of the First-of-a-Kind competition, and Universal Signalling’s chief executive, Stephen Head, has made two trips to the Slush start-up event in Helsinki to look for investors.
“Out of 7,000 people there, I only found three who were involved in rail” — Stephen Head, Chief Executive, Universal Signalling
That gap between the size of the opportunity and the size of the cheques raises a question we find hard to answer from the outside.
Is rail tech a venture business, or a grant-funded supply chain waiting for a buyer with the budget to scale it?
The Great British Railways App and the Ticketing Question
Ticketing is where the change is most visible to passengers and most closely watched by established players.
Great British Railways will sell tickets directly through a website and the Great British Railways app, combining the operators’ separate sites and apps into one and switching the old ones off, while independent retailers, open access operators and devolved operators will keep selling as they do now.
The same organisation will also take over the retail back office that the Rail Delivery Group runs today, including licensing third-party ticket retailers and setting their commission, kept structurally separate from the commercial side and held to a Retail Code of Practice that the Office of Rail and Road will own.
The ORR published its draft on 9 October, and consultation runs to 11 December.
Delay Repay, which has been off-limits to independent retailers, is open to them once the new body exists.
Read next: How Does Trainline Make Money? Inside Its £6.3bn Ticket Business
Someone also has to build the Great British Railways app.
A market engagement notice from DfT Operator Limited describes an end-to-end accredited ticket retailing solution, a payment gateway and a customer relationship platform, with API access for later development.
The question of who ends up writing that code- whether it is a startup, a consultancy or an established supplier- remains open.
Would a young company have the accreditation, the balance sheet and the patience to bid?
Who Owns the Map?
Then there is the data underneath.
The official maps of the national rail network that National Rail publishes include operator route maps, a London and South East map and an interactive accessibility map covering every station it serves, and the copyright on each stays with the organisation named on it.
Developers have meanwhile built their own live and route maps from the open data feeds Network Rail publishes, and the Rail Data Marketplace, which the Rail Delivery Group runs with £5 million of government funding behind its development, exists to open more of that data to app developers and technology companies.
Where the Rail Data Marketplace sits once the Rail Delivery Group’s retail functions move into Great British Railways has not, as far as we can see, been set out.
For a founder building routing, accessibility or live-tracking products, that matters more than it sounds, because the quality of anything built on maps of the national rail network depends on who controls the feed and on what terms.
Will developers get the same access to the data as the organisation’s own app? And will the rules that govern fairness in ticketing extend to the data every map and journey planner depends on?
What We’re Watching
The doors are opening in sequence, and none has opened fully yet.
The dynamic market is still being built, the Office of Rail and Road’s code is out for consultation, and the Lords have yet to finish with the Bill.
When the pilots end, will the first awards from GBRX go to companies that already hold rail contracts, or to founders with no history on the railway?
If Great British Railways becomes the buyer that startups asked for, does it also become the only one that matters? And when the ticketing data, the journey planners and the maps of the national rail network all depend on one organisation, who checks that a startup gets a fair hearing?
This piece is based on secondary research. If you are building for the rail sector, we would like to hear from you.
Sources: GOV.UK (DfT public ownership programme guidance; Railways Bill factsheets on tickets and retail; First-of-a-Kind competition announcement) · Find a Tender (Network Rail Infrastructure Limited dynamic market notices; DfT Operator Limited market engagement notice) · Railway Gazette · Rail Business UK · RailBusinessDaily · Rail Director · Rail Engineer · Startup Coalition · National Rail · Rail Delivery Group · Network Rail open data · Trainline plc announcements and annual report · Office of Rail and Road
