The announcement

Earlier this year, Rail Minister Lord Peter Hendy announced the creation of GBR-X, a new body within Shadow Great British Railways, tasked with driving strategic innovation across the network. Its mandate, in Hendy's own words, is to "break the pattern of slow adoption that has historically held our railways back due to fragmentation, contractual complexities, and the way our system operates, particularly across the track and train interface."

Lord Hendy is, by most accounts, exactly the kind of operator we need in Rail - which is why this particular move puzzles me more than it would coming from someone else.

The logical problem

Read that mandate again carefully.

The reasons Hendy gives for slow adoption, fragmentation, contractual complexity and the track/train interface, are precisely the structural problems that GBR itself is designed to solve. Unifying track and train under one organisation, removing the contractual misalignments that made cross-system investment so difficult, and simplifying the management structure are GBR's core purposes.

So if fragmentation is the disease, and GBR is the cure, what exactly is GBR-X treating?

That is a genuine request for clarity. As far as I can tell, the announcement doesn't provide it. One of three things must be true:

1. GBR-X is redundant, because the problem it's solving disappears when GBR is fully operational
2. The diagnosis is wrong, because fragmentation isn't actually the root cause of slow adoption, in which case GBR-X is solving the wrong problem and GBR won't fix it either
3. GBR-X is a political deliverable, a visible, nameable innovation initiative that can be announced before GBR is fully legislated

I suspect it's closer to option 3. That doesn't make the people involved cynical. These things often begin with genuine intent. But it does mean the structural logic deserves scrutiny.

The innovation department problem

There's a second issue, independent of the first.

When you create a department specifically for innovation, you implicitly give everyone else in the organisation a pass. Innovation becomes someone else's job. The psychological burden is transferred, and with it the motivation to think laterally, challenge assumptions, or bring unconventional ideas forward. This is a well-documented organisational failure mode, not theoretical risk.

The question isn't whether the people inside GBR-X will be talented or well-intentioned. They probably will be. The question is what signal the existence of GBR-X sends to the thousands of engineers, operators and procurement managers who aren't in it. It risks creating a hierarchy of innovation chops and in/out group psychology.

There's also a scaling problem. Any department is bounded by its headcount. Real innovation in a network as large and complex as Britain's railways, which will be second in size as an employer only to the NHS, requires distributed behaviour, with people at every level looking at problems differently. A central unit, however well-resourced, cannot reach most of that surface area.

What actually works

This is where I want to be careful, because the "public sector never innovates" claim is too strong, and I'd be wrong to make it.

DARPA produced the internet, GPS and foundational AI research. The NHS produced genuinely world-leading data science work during the pandemic. These weren't accidents, but they share a few characteristics:

• A narrow, concrete problem, not "foster innovation"
• Real consequences for failure, such as military threat, pandemic, competitive pressure
• Structural autonomy, with bureaucratic layers stripped out
• Time-bounded projects, not permanent departments with headcount to protect

The GWR battery train project is a closer-to-home example. A private venture, Vivarail, began converting redundant London Underground D-stock into battery-electric trains in 2012. When Vivarail went into administration in 2022, GWR bought the IP and continued the work. The result: Britain's first 100% battery-powered passenger train entered service in January 2026. In August 2025, this same train set a world record of 200.5 miles on a single charge, beating the previous record set in Berlin by over 60 miles.

What drove that outcome? A concrete engineering problem, replacing diesel on branch lines where electrification isn't viable; a specific operational specification, charging enough in 3.5 minutes to complete the return trip in worst-case conditions; and real accountability. Vivarail failed, and GWR had to step in or lose the investment entirely. It was run, in the words of one participant, as "a bit of a skunk works within GWR - just far enough away to be innovative, but close enough to have big-firm support."

No innovation department. No strategic mandate to foster new thinking. Just engineers with a problem and accountability for the result. Indeed the project was beset with hurdles and barriers in the path towards a successful outcome, and they were all overcome.

The questions GBR-X needs to answer

I'm not arguing GBR-X should be abolished before it's started. I'm arguing it should be held to a standard of clarity that the announcement so far hasn't met.

Specifically:

• What problems is GBR-X solving that GBR's structural integration doesn't? If the answer is "the same ones," the mandate needs rewriting.
• How does its remit differ from other bodies we already have? All of these already work across industry and academia on rail innovation. The Rail Engineer piece covering the announcement noted overlap without resolving it.
• What does success look like in three years? If we can't define it, we can't evaluate it. Without evaluation, the department becomes self-perpetuating regardless of outcomes.

These aren't hostile questions. They're the questions any serious public body should be able to answer on day one.

What I want to be wrong about

Here's what proof of error would look like for me:

If GBR-X operates like a genuine skunk works, small, autonomous, project-bounded, with clear problem definitions and real consequences for failure, I'll update my view. If the overlap with existing innovation bodies is resolved through consolidation rather than addition, that's a good outcome. If it ends up functioning as a capability-builder and barrier-remover for the rest of GBR, rather than a delivery team in its own right, that's closer to useful.

The risk is that it becomes none of those things: a well-intentioned department that produces reports, pilots initiatives and attends conferences, while the wider organisation treats innovation as covered. At a recent conference I attended, one quote which stuck was "UK Rail has more pilots than British Airways". We should be conscious of that sentiment.

Lord Hendy diagnosed the structural problems in British rail correctly. GBR is the right response to most of them. I just haven't yet understood what GBR-X adds that GBR doesn't already provide, and I think that question deserves a clearer answer than we've had so far.

Sources: Rail Engineer, Railway Gazette International, GWR/Vivarail project documentation. I've tried to represent the GBR-X announcement fairly. If I've got anything wrong, I'd welcome the correction.

Post script

Evolving the piece via Linked In Discussions. Thanks to Richard Rowson.

On the spectrum of innovation

Innovation in rail isn't one thing. ETCS rollout and AI-driven customer experience require fundamentally different structures, risk tolerances, and timescales. If anything, this strengthens the case against a single centralised unit: the more heterogeneous the problem space, the less a one-size-fits-all process can serve any of it well.

On the rewritten history

The franchised era produced genuine world-leading achievements, e.g. eTicketing, booking via Alexa, Google Maps integration, Apple and Google Wallet, the Class 390 introduction.

The people inside those organisations, in my experience across three train operators, had the right intentions and deep expertise.

Where outcomes fell short, the structural constraints may provide some explanation: operators who didn't own the trains, couldn't set the timetable, had limited control over pricing or stations.

There is also something practically dangerous about institutional amnesia at this particular moment. GBR will need the expertise of people who built and ran the franchised system. Writing off their experience as tainted by association is wrong.