Main UK Companies

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know of any Main UK Companies during WWII?

[BR60103]

Prototype Railway companies?
Southern
Great Western.
London Midland and Scottish.
London and North Eastern.
That's it. The railways were "grouped" into the Big Four in 1923. There were a few small railways that were missed, and London Transport was still a separate unit, but oprated onto some of the steam railway tracks.
The railways were nationalized and became British Railways in 1948.

[Anonymous]

During both World Wars all the major railway companies and some of those missed out of the Grouping were brought under central government control under the powers of an Act of Parliament of the late 1870s or early 1880s (can't recall excatly). WW1 proved the value of not having literally hundreds of medium to small companies with all their paperwork. It took from 1919 to work out the compensation to the rail cos. for the country using the system for the war period and to pay them back. At the same time everything needed to make the Big Four was worked out. Prior to and post Grouping all the paperwaork was sorted out by the Railway Clearing House (RCH). The RCH had to be invented to sort out the new railways paperwork - by hand - ... Next time you hate your bank blame the RCH because Banking clearing developed from/with the RCH. Until the railways there had never been such large business organisations, spread over such large distances with so many share holders, customers etc. The nearest equivalent was the military... and that was still small by comparison.
Afdter WW2 it was basiclly cheaper for the Government to "Nationalise" the railways than put them back together to return them to the Rly Cos. Britain's railways were not State owned. Certainly as recently as 1978 the government were still paying compensation in lieu of dividends to the large share holders... like the crown, the church and old landed families... all. of whom were originally paid for their land taken by the railways in shares more than cash. I've never seen any evidence that the railways have ever been bought from the original shareholders... so even with privateisation they are probably still receiving their cash.

When BR was formed most lines remained in the Region thatcorresponded to the Big 4 Company they had been in... with odd exceptions.

[Anonymous]

Would you like to clarify what you are looking for?
if you are planning to model British outline you should be aware that most British models are 00 -4mm =1ft - 1:72 NOT H0 - 3.5mm = 1ft - 1:87... You can still use 16.5 mm track... but UK track has a different sleeper (tie) size and spacing which really shows up.