Is this the first step on the road to full nationalisation of rail again? Indeed, hard to see much difference between contracts imposed on private firms by a central public body as much different from a nationalised service. Only real difference is that the private companies involved can extract profit from revenues raised from the services they are obliged to offer. In a fully nationalised service there would be no profit extracted out of the rail system and probably out of the public sector altogether, only surplus revenue reinvested in the railways or extracted out of the railways into the central government's treasury for expenditure elsewhere across government. Question: will Great British Railways be setting the profit margin for the rail companies, or will it simply be setting the overall budgets for the companies to operate within and then it's up to those companies to work out how much profit it can extract within that budget?