Parliamentary train

Parliamentary trains in the UK were passenger services required by an Act of Parliament passed in 1844 to allow inexpensive and basic railway travel for less affluent passengers. The legislation required that at least one such service per day be run on every railway route in the United Kingdom.

Such services are no longer a legal requirement, and the term has come to be used instead to describe train services that continue to be run to avoid the cost of formal closure of a route or station, but with services reduced sometimes to one train per week, and without specially low prices. Such services are also often called "ghost trains".

In the earliest days of passenger railways in the United Kingdom the poor were encouraged to travel in order to find employment in the growing industrial centres, but trains were generally unaffordable to them except in the most basic of open wagons, in many cases attached to goods trains.

Political pressure caused the Board of Trade to investigate, and Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government enacted the Railway Regulation Act, which took effect on 1 November 1844. It compelled "the provision of at least one train a day each way at a speed of not less than 12 miles an hour including stops, which were to be made at all stations, and of carriages protected from the weather and provided with seats; for all which luxuries not more than a penny a mile might be charged".

The legislation no longer applies and "parliamentary trains" in this sense no longer run.

The basic comfort and slow progress of Victorian parliamentary trains led to a humorous reference in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado. The Mikado is explaining how he will match punishments to the crimes committed:

"The idiot who, in railway carriages
Scribbles on window-panes
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
On Parliamentary trains."

In 1963 the nationalised British Railways produced a report, The Reshaping of British Railways, designed to stem the huge losses made by the railway industry. The chairman of British Railways was Richard Beeching, and the report became known as the Beeching Report. It proposed very substantial cuts to the network and to train services. The Transport Act 1962 included a formal closure process allowing for objections to closures on the basis of hardship to passengers if their service was closed. As the objections gained momentum, this process became increasingly difficult to implement, and from about 1970 closures slowed to a trickle.

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