Photo courtesy of R J McNaughton
On 13th May the School of Law at the University of Reading hosted a round-table discussion entitled, ‘Reversing Beeching? Law and the New Railway Revolution.’
The event focused on the legal challenges and opportunities which has been created by the railway renaissance of the past 20 years or so covered everything from light rail projects to High Speed 2. Participants included specialist lawyers working in the field together with academics from law and economics. There was much debate about how the legal landscape has changed since the nineteenth century railway revolution and the impact of judicial review and environmental impact assessment. There was also a fascinating debate about how it is difficult for community rail projects to get off the ground due to competing interests in the industry.
We hope to run future events on various aspects of law and the railways as part of a long term project to establish a research hub in this field.
With the 900m Shift2rail EU Joint Undertaking kicking off, it is somewhat sad that the regulatory aspects of railway and barriers and complexity in the market have not been included by the commission. But I guess that they might not want to do that in the open, should the results not be politically palatable. (with the differences in all the member states, his is bound to happen somewhere….or everywhere)