A joint railway is a
railway operating under the control of more than one railway company: those companies very often supplying the traction over the railway.
United Kingdom
There are many examples of joint railway working in the
United Kingdom. The more important ones included:
Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway (M&GN):
Midland Railway and
Great Northern Railway (MR/GNR), latterly
London and North Eastern Railway and
London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LNER/LMS). This was the UK's biggest joint railway system at 183 miles (295 km) and operated with its own locomotives and
rolling stock. The system stretched mainly east-west from Great Yarmouth via South Lynn to Bourne and Peterborough and thence via the parent companies' systems to Leicester and the Midlands and to London King's Cross. A north-south route ran from Norwich City to Cromer. The two routes crossed at Melton Constable, the joint railway's main engineering centre.
Norfolk and Suffolk Joint Railway (N&S): the Midland and Great Northern and the
Great Eastern Railway). There were two stretches of line: the most important ran along the East Anglian coast from Lowestoft to Yarmouth, while a much shorter stretch ran from Cromer to Mundesley on the North Norfolk coast. This line was a unique joint railway in that one of its parents was itself a joint railway.
"Joint railways" are called
terminal railroads in the
United States. Most true example of joint railways are in terminal areas, including
union stations. Terminal railways are often co-owned by the railroads that connect with them. Among the more prominent joint operations were:
Conrail Shared Assets Operations (CSAO), the last corporate remnant of
Conrail, which was formed from the remains of several bankrupt railroads in 1976; that company was split between CSX and Norfolk Southern, which formed CSAO in northern
New Jersey, greater
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and greater
Detroit, Michigan. Unlike the BRC and TRRA, CSAO uses crews and locomotives from its two parent companies, though the former Conrail paint scheme is still seen on numerous locomotives and freight cars that CSX and NS inherited.
The
Powder River basin joint line, co-owned by BNSF and Union Pacific to serve the area's numerous coal mines.
The concept of
trackage rights is more common than joint railways in the United States. The railroad that owns the track permits trains from another railroad to use the line. The owner railroad normally charges a fee, but sometimes there is no charge because the arrangement results from a merger or sale of a line. For instance, when the
Louisville and Nashville Railroad acquired the
Monon Railroad a condition of the sale imposed by government regulators was a trackage rights arrangement over the southern part of the Monon for the
Milwaukee Road, an agreement that was handed down to successive owners of the Milwaukee Road and finally the
Indiana Rail Road.
Variations on trackage rights include "direction running" agreements between two railroads with parallel lines through an area, usually done to facilitate greater traffic volume. For instance, CSX and NS have a directional-running agreement between downtown
Cincinnati, Ohio and nearby
Hamilton, where northbound trains generally use NS trackage and southbound trains (with the exception of
Amtrak's Cardinal) use CSX tracks. North of Hamilton, NS trains use CSX tracks on a traditional trackage-rights agreement for a two-mile (3 km) section.
Bibliography
Casserley, H. C. (1968). Britain's Joint Lines. Ian Allan.
ISBN0-7110-0024-7