Cross Country services

[1] This was at a time when those cities were separated by a bumpy and circuitous road bypassing Chat Moss with divergent main industries: shipping of goods/materials and shipbuilding in the case of Liverpool and textile mills in Manchester thus in economic terms this line can be considered inter-regional.

A highly successful and economically cohesive example of this was the West Coast Main Line which worked in conjunction with Portpatrick and Wigtownshire Joint Railway and another in Scotland to timetable services from London Euston to the Belfast ferry at Stranraer.

During the 1920s the Liberal and Labour Governments identified unacceptable railway costs, with more than 100 operators, and a national interest desire to achieve better economies of scale led to major statutory Grouping in 1923 almost wholly into the Big Four.

As such Cross Country services from an early slight blossoming in the 1880s[2] were free to develop within and even across these four regions, without fear of facing intense competition to strategic routes.

Franchises are granted periodically on a territorial basis so present a degree, as in the United States, of monopoly in many regions however Britain has a significant overlap of areas providing for certain competition, such as on the West Coast Main Line and several joint ventures exist to provide inter-regional direct routes spanning the areas of more than one of these franchise zones.