The term's meaning has completely changed, to describe train services that continue to be run with reduced frequency, often to the minimum required one train per week, and without specially low prices, to avoid the cost of formal closure of a route or station, retain access rights, or maintain crew training/familiarity requirements on short sections of track.

[3] Political pressure caused the Board of Trade to investigate, and Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government enacted the Railway Regulation Act 1844, which took effect on 1 November 1844.

[5] The basic comfort and slow progress of Victorian parliamentary trains led to a humorous reference in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado.

The Mikado is explaining how he will match punishments to the crimes committed:[6] The idiot who, in railway carriages, Scribbles on window-panes We only suffer To ride on a buffer In Parliamentary trains.

So-called parliamentary services are also typically run at inconvenient times, often very early in the morning, very late at night or in the middle of the day at the weekend.

[8][2] When the closures brought about by the Beeching Report had reached equilibrium, it was recognised that some incremental services or station reopenings were desirable.

Examples include: Bordesley is served by a single train on Saturdays only, however the station remains open for use when Birmingham City Football Club are playing at home when additional services call there.

The temporary replacement bus tactic was used from December 2008 between Ealing Broadway and Wandsworth Road[48] when Arriva CrossCountry withdrew its services from Brighton to Manchester, which was the only passenger service between Factory Junction, north of Wandsworth Road, and Latchmere Junction, on the West London Line.

This service was later replaced by a single daily return train between Kensington Olympia and Wandsworth Road (as above) operated by Southern until formal consultation commenced and closure was completed in 2013.