Go-op, the UK’s first ever co-operatively owned rail service, is one step closer to becoming a reality. The Office of Road and Rail (ORR) has just given Go-op’s bid to run journeys around southwest England the thumbs up and agreed to its application for track access.
The open-access operator will be owned and managed by staff and the local community with all of its profits invested back into improving the service. It’ll compete with Great Western Railway, running return weekday and weekend journeys between Taunton and Weston-super-Mare, Taunton and Westbury, Taunton and Swindon, and Frome and Westbury.
Go-op doesn’t plan to use any public subsidy and instead will be funding a mix of loans and crowdfunded investment. Members will be able to invest in ‘community shares’ focusing a blend of social and financial reward and broad-based, democratic management.
Before it gets going, Go-op still has to provide evidence to ORR that it has the money to start operating, can fund £1.5m enhancements to level-crossings and has secured all of the railway vehicles that it needs. If everything goes to plan, it’s hoped that Go-op services will start running in December 2025 at the earliest and no later than December 2026.
Alex Lawrie, Go-op’s chair, said: ‘We’ve been working on this project for over a decade now and it has its origins in a group of frustrated rail passengers in the West Country.
‘We noticed that there were plenty of statements, plenty of train tracks but the trains seemed to go straight through our counties, with the connections within Somerset and Wiltshire were actually very poor.
‘This is a big breakthrough for us, it’s the point which we can safely say this is going to happen.’
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