National Rail and Network Rail
National Rail should not be confused with Network Rail. National Rail is a title used to promote passenger railway services, and providing some harmonisation for passengers (e.g. tickets to all London Terminals), while Network Rail is the organisation owning and managing most of the fixed assets (tracks, signals etc.) of the railway network.
The two networks are generally coincident where passenger services are run. Most major Network Rail lines carry freight traffic and some lines are freight only. There are some scheduled passenger services on their own privately managed, non-Network Rail lines, for example Heathrow Express which also partly runs on Network Rail and the London Underground also overlaps with Network Rail in places.
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Famous quotes containing the words national, rail and/or network:
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will—the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)