People today generally view competition as a good thing, but a century ago businessmen usually preceded the word “competition” with “ruinous,” as too much competition prevented corporations from earning profits. At that time, Britain had more than 100 railway companies, many competing with one another. So when a railway executive named Eric Geddes became Minister of Transport in 1920, he conceived of the idea of merging them all into five regional monopolies.
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To divvy up the rail network, he cut England into four parts with London as the nexus, while he proposed to put all Scottish railways into a fifth company. Parliament, however, decided that the connections between Scotland and England were too important to require a change of trains midway, so the Railways Act of 1921 divided the Scottish railways between the two northern companies. Continue reading