Bringing a rail operator back into public ownership after 30 years will save money and provide a better service, a minister has said.
Chiltern Railways will become the 10th rail company to be nationalised on Sunday under Great British Railways (GBR), the government’s programme of public ownership.
Rail minister Lord Peter Hendy met staff at Marylebone Station on Thursday alongside the first Chiltern train to get the new GBR livery.
He said: “We’re doing this because firstly it saves money and secondly we can offer a better service to passengers right across the nation.”
Chiltern Railways operates from London to Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, as well as destinations in the West Midlands.
It said the transfer into public ownership would tackle overcrowding by introducing 25 additional daily services from December.
The company, which was privatised in 1996, said this would provide 10,000 extra seats each week day.
Lord Hendy said: “The most difficult thing on Chiltern is that it’s shorter capacity and those extra trains and those extra seats will make a real difference to people travelling on this line up here from Marylebone every day.”
The rollout of the new trains would also increase capacity while improving accessibility and providing better Wi-Fi on board, the rail operator said.
It also said, from Sunday, passengers whose train had been cancelled would be able to use another operator’s service two hours either side of their train to get to their destination at no extra cost.