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Nanaimo, I dont know quite where to start with your post. The grouping ocured not long after the first world war when the government merged the railways into THE BIG 4 on 1st January 1923. The big 4 were the LMS, London & North Eastern (LNER), Great Western (GWR) and Southern Railway. The LMS was the largest and ran from London Euston to Birmingham, Liverpool, North Wales, Manchester, Lancashire and Glasgow. In Scotland the situation got somewhat confused as the LMS (The West Coast Route) also ran to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness which are geographically in the east of Scotland. The LMS also served Licester, Nottingham and Sheffield from London Saint Pancras. The LNER ran from London Kings Cross to Leeds, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. It also ran from London Liverpool Street to Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich, a territory it had to itself. The GWR ran from London Paddington to Birningham, Bristol, South Wales, Plymouth and the West Country. GWR fans generally have a chip on each shoulder and say things like "there are two ways to do something, the GWR way and the wrong way" Lastly the Southern ran fron several South London termini to places like Dover, Folkstone, Brighton, Hastings, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Exeter and the West Country. The Southern ran what was probably the buisiest suburban network in the world between the wars and in some ways perfected many operating practices that are still current, with regular interval time tables, EMU's for all classes of sevice and continous electrification as a way of uping train miles and cutting operating expenses. There was a core that each railway called its' own but they did overlap at mant places, however where they did overlap they generally served different intermidiate points. Before the grouping even the smallest railways built thier own locomotives and this carried on during the Big 4 era. There were many private locomotive builders in Britain, but thay only tended to get orders from home railways when the railways own workshops were too busy. In this case they builder would get a complete set of drawings from the railway and build to an exact spec. The two largest private builders were Bayer, Peacock of Manchester and North British Locomotive Co of Glasgow. most of thier products were exported to the British Empire and South America. In 1948 The Big 4 were nationalised. They had plans for the future involving Deisel Traction in the case of LMS and LNER, Gas Turbines for the GWR and more electrification for the Southern, but apart from a few prototipes ordered before nationalisation nothing was done for a few years after nationalisation to replace steam. The LMS managed to turn out a mainline deisel with LMS on the side, but the GWR's gas turbine locos were not delivered until after nationalisation. The LNER acepted tenders for 32 prototype diesels but thse were cancelled by the government on nationalisation. I hope that whets your appitite on British Railway History.
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