British Rail Telecommunications

~ the goodbye ~

British railways entered the telecommunications business in 1837, and that is the literal date. On 4 July that year William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone demonstrated their five-needle telegraph to the directors of the London and Birmingham Railway over the mile between Euston and Camden Town, and the company's engineer, Robert Stephenson, approved a permanent circuit at the railway's own expense. That was the first commercial electric telegraph line anywhere in the world. The Great Western followed with a line to West Drayton, finished on 9 April 1839, where the public could pay a shilling to look at it and send a telegram of their own.

A hundred and fifty years of that produced an enormous private network nobody outside the industry thought about. British Rail ran its own teleprinter system, including the first non-military STRAD electronic exchange at Crewe, which was handling six and a half million messages a year by 1966. It ran a nationwide coaxial bearer network under the National Telecoms Plan, which is what made TOPS possible, the computer system that tracked every locomotive and wagon in the country. And in the early eighties it laid a resilient figure-of-eight fiber route along its own tracks between London, Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, which became the core of Mercury Communications. The railway built the competition to British Telecom.

BR Telecommunications Limited was registered on 25 April 1990 and set up as a separate business in 1992, as part of the dismantling of British Rail. The published histories all date it to 1992; the company number says 1990, which is the shell sitting ready two years before anyone used it. It existed to turn the network into a sellable asset, by exploiting the railway's wayleave rights and finding outside customers for the spare capacity. By the time it was valued it had 17,000 route kilometers of fiber and copper reaching every significant town in the country, plus links into Europe through the Channel Tunnel, and it was the largest private telecoms network in Britain.

Racal Electronics agreed to buy it from the British Railways Board in 1994, for a figure reported at about £132 million and financed by new borrowing. The accounts it bought showed £174.2 million of turnover and £17.6 million of pre-tax profit for the year to March 1995. What Racal did not buy was the operational side, the signal box communications that actually keep trains apart, which stayed with Railtrack. The deal completed on 22 December 1995 and the name on the register changed that day.

~ the chronicle ~

~ seven names and one company number ~

Companies House number 02495998 is still open, and its previous-names list is the cleanest corporate obituary I have read. BR TELECOMMUNICATIONS LIMITED from 25 April 1990 to 22 December 1995. RACAL - BR TELECOMMUNICATIONS LIMITED until 11 August 1997, when Racal folded it together with Racal Network Services and the railway's initials came off for good. RACAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS LIMITED until 17 January 2000. GLOBAL CROSSING (UK) TELECOMMUNICATIONS LIMITED for the next twelve years. LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS UK LIMITED from 30 August 2012. CENTURYLINK COMMUNICATIONS UK LIMITED from 31 January 2018. LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES UK LIMITED since 3 April 2021.

In 2000 the business was cut in half. The trunk cable and the transmission network went to Global Crossing, which is why the company number ended up with an American owner. The rest went to Thomson CSF, taking nearly everyone who had actually worked for British Rail with it, and ended up merged into Thales Telecommunications Services in April 2002. One account of the original sale notes the criticism that Racal never properly understood what it had taken on. Six changes of ownership in twenty-five years suggests nobody after Racal did either.

Then the state bought its way back in. Network Rail concluded in the 2000s that it should not be renting the transmission systems its predecessor had sold, and built a replacement from scratch at an initial cost of £1.5 billion. On 1 April 2009 about 480 telecoms engineers transferred out of Thales into a new Network Rail subsidiary. By 2015 Network Rail was back to owning 16,000 kilometers of fiber and 22,000 of copper.

~ the funny part ~

At the point it was privatized, British Rail Telecommunications owned four diesel locomotives. They were Class 20s, numbers 20075, 20128, 20131 and 20187, and they belonged to the telephone company because the telephone company's job included getting cable trains to the places the cable went. There is no equivalent fact available about any other carrier.

The other thing worth recording is that as late as 2012, the general-purpose railway telephone network in Britain, the one carrying 999 emergency calls and the electrification control lines, was still being operated by Level 3 Communications of Broomfield, Colorado, under the same company number that British Rail had registered in 1990. Lumen Technologies UK Limited has accounts on file through 2024 and is late with the 2025 set. British Rail stopped running trains in 1997 and its telephone company is still trading.

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