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:
“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“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)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)