Comment: all-rail subscription pass - possibility or pipe-dream?

Our cover of just two issues ago led on train operating companies’ further moves into open access, and how it could offer them a new life after nationalisation. The cover image showed the Prime Minister and his new Transport Secretary at Hitachi’s Newton Aycliffe facility, where they talked up the government’s role in the latest rolling stock orders - for open access services.

This growth in private service plans is against a backdrop of renationalisation - not necessarily a contradiction in itself, as you can have both. But Peter Plisner looks at how the government has been backing the growing plans for open access, and to what extent that could lead to a potential clash between public and private approaches to rail.