About us

The Rail Delivery Group exists to enable rail companies to succeed in transforming and delivering a successful railway.

Rail plays an ever more crucial role in Britain, with long term growth in passengers and freight. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) brings together all passenger and freight operators with Network Rail and HS2, providing services and support to enable them to succeed by delivering better services for their customers. This ultimately benefits taxpayers and the economy.

We do that by organising our activity into four portfolios with the following objectives:

• Customer experience - modernising ticketing and improving door-to-door journeys;
• Today’s railway - improving punctuality, reliability and value for money;
• Industry reform - improving industry structures to enable excellence; and
• Tomorrow’s railway - better planning for the railway’s future.

This activity is supported by communications and engagement with stakeholders, and improvements in how the RDG is organised and operates.

We also provide support and give a voice to freight and passenger operators, as well as delivering important national ticketing, information and reservation services for passengers and staff on behalf of member companies.

In this section of the website, you can find out more about who we are.

Railway Upgrade Plan

The £50bn plus Railway Upgrade Plan is the biggest programme of investment in our railway since the Victorian era. This investment is needed to maintain and build the railway passengers want and the country needs and to meet future demand. To deliver this plan, we are going to need more skilled people to design and build the railway, and to operate it.

The £50bn-plus Railway Upgrade Plan includes:

• £11.6bn being spent on over 5,500 new carriages.
• £31.3bn of renewals and enhancements to the railway infrastructure between 2014 and 2019 by Network Rail, including:
  • electrification of the Great Western Mainline bringing faster, cleaner, more reliable journeys plus new intercity express trains;
  • a series of improvements to the railway in the North of England to allow thousands more trains to run, plus replacement of old Pacer trains;
  • and, completion of the Thameslink Programme which will see a ‘tube frequency’ service with up to 24 trains an hour running through the heart of London.
• Spending to complete the £14.8bn Crossrail project, fully opening between Reading and Heathrow to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in December 2019 – which will increase central London’s rail capacity by 10%, with trains carrying up to 1,500 passengers running through central London every two and a half minutes at peak times.
• £7.7bn on HS2 by April 2019 – to lay the foundations for a vital new railway that will create space to run many of the extra trains Britain’s rail network needs.

For further detail on these projects, digital railway and more, please visit Network Rail's Railway Upgrade Plan site.

Our history

ATOC (Association of Train Operating Companies) was set up after privatisation in 1993, to bring together all train companies to preserve and enhance the benefits for passengers of Britain’s national rail network. In 2011, it was joined by the Rail Delivery Group, which was responsible for policy formulation and communications on behalf of the whole rail industry. In October 2016, the single name of Rail Delivery Group was adopted to describe the two organisations.