ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the governance issues affecting the British railway industry during the period of nationalisation from 1947 to 1994. The railways were a regulated private sector industry from their inception in the early 1820s. According to Keasey and Wright, 'corporate governance concerns the structures and processes associated with production, decision-making, control and so on within an organisation'. In the growing attention to corporate governance, interest has generally focused on the rights of shareholders or stakeholders. The effective deployment and monitoring functions of these directors were a key element in the corporate governance debate of the 1990s, where attention was focused mainly on the private sector. There were variations in management structures in the nationalised industries, affecting degrees of centralisation and decentralisation, the number of management tiers, and the preference for either a planning or an executive board. The initial structure adopted for the nationalised transport industries in 1947 was drawn up inside the Ministry of Transport.
