From dream to reality: Go-op, Britain’s first cooperative railway | Rail industry

The idea for the country’s first cooperative rail service came to Alex Lawrie in 2004 after another frustrating trip across Somerset.

Having moved to Yeovil four years earlier with his young family, his job as a cooperative development manager involved daily trips across the south-west trying to set up member-owned businesses.

A reluctant motorist, he quickly became frustrated with the rail service he was depending on to get around.

“It baffled me, trains came at seemingly random intervals, there were only a few trains serving a big town like Yeovil, hours would pass without a train coming,” Lawrie says. “I couldn’t understand it, I was like, ‘There are the rails, they all link up, more or less, how hard can it be to get a better service?’”

While most passengers would grumble and leave it at that, Lawrie took the matter into his own hands.

Despite having no experience in the sector, he bought a rail atlas, and so began the process of trying to improve services through the creation of a new operator.

Fast forward 20 years and the 56-year-old’s plan that began as notes jotted down on a sheet of A4 paper is close to becoming a reality.

The plan for the cooperative railway – Go-op – has received approval from the Office of Road and Rail (ORR) to run a new service between Swindon, Taunton and Weston-super-Mare.

If it meets ORR requirements, including by demonstrating that it has the finances to begin operations and has secured the necessary rolling stock, Go-op services could start in 2026.

Its cooperative model means the business will owned by staff, investors and the local community to meet shared needs, and profits will be reinvested back into improving services.

While popular in the farming, housing and retail sectors – most notably in companies such as the Co-op, John Lewis and Arla foods – the member-owned business model is not common in UK transport.

In the cafe at the Albemarle Centre,five minutes from Taunton’s railway station and the scene of Go-op’s early meetings, six of the group’s current and former directors sit discussing the state of the UK railways.

“Just travel on a train in France or Spain and it will make you cry what we have to put up with here,” says Kate Whittle, a former director and secretary at Go-op, and the second person to join the project after Lawrie.

Beside her sits director Nick Kennedy, a consultant anaesthetist of 22 years and Somerset resident, who joined in 2015 after growing frustrated at the lack of rail connections in the area. Across the table is the chair, Martin Bond, a retired rail worker of 30 years who joined after reading a newspaper article about cooperative railways that mentioned Go-op.

“I remember [in a meeting in 2011] rail expert Ian Yeowart spoke at one of our annual meetings,” he says, remembering the advice they received from the managing director of the operator Grand Union, who has been involved in starting several open-access operators. “He said ‘You are doing a great job but I think you have underestimated the amount of time it will take you to do this.’”

In the nearly 15 years since then, Lawrie and the directors have received their fair share of setbacks and false dawns.

The route has also undergone a number of changes, says Chris Phillimore, who drew up Go-op’s first route evaluation process in 2009, with the initial plan stretching as far as Oxford.

The route it has chosen would lead to Go-op running 11 daily return weekday services and eight return weekend services between Taunton and Weston-super-Mare, as well as services between Taunton and Westbury, and Taunton and Swindon. Fares will be part of the national ticket pricing system, so Go-op cannot charge less than its rivals.

It will run as an open-access operator, meaning it will compete against the current franchise operator Great Western Railways (GWR).

GWR said it recognises that additional rail services could bring benefits for customers but said its investment in new services over the past 15 years has built up demand to create these opportunities.

Along with other open access operators such as Lumo, which runs services from London to Edinburgh, Go-op will take on full commercial risk and require no government subsidy.

“We have nine stations in the whole of the county, but they’re not connected together, so moving across the county is really difficult,” says the Go-op timetable and performance director, David Northey.

The Taunton native previously worked as a strategic planner at Network Rail, in a role that involved liaising with Go-op, before retiring and joining the project.

“We have great services from Taunton if you want to go to London or to Bristol but if you want to get to Frome, which is one of the biggest towns in Somerset, it’s really difficult by train and you can only do it twice a day,” he says.

A team will be employed for the day-to-day running of Go-op services, including 10 new drivers. Behind this, users and social investors can pay to become members, giving them a say in how the operator is run.

In the case of social investors, a minimum of £500 can buy community shares in the company.

Investors will be credited interest to their share account at rates of 8% after 2026, but will probably be paid four years after its investment or longer, depending on the success of the service.

But Lawrie says it is Go-op’s position as a start-up, rather than a co-op, that has made some people more wary. “There was no track record, you couldn’t ask what the performance of our parent company was, because we didn’t have one,” he says.

And this is reflected in the conditions that have been set by the ORR before it can run a service. Go-op must show in the next 12 months that it has the finances to start operations and fund £1.5m of level-crossing enhancements. It must also show it has secured rolling stock and star running services before December 2026, or lose its licence.

To satisfy the regulator, Go-op launched a crowdfunder this month to raise the £2.8m it needs to become operational. This is well above the £500,000 it has already raised, and will require a significant boost to the 280 members it now has.

The group is hoping that fundraising might be easier now with ORR approval.

“We talked to many investors from private equity firms to social banks and also individuals, and without track access guarantees which effectively guarantees an income, it was just about impossible [to get their backing],” Kennedy says.

Securing the right rolling stock will also be a challenge with the cost of trains and availability. However, Go-op is in discussion with a leasing company over diesel models developed in the late 1980s and 1990s.

In the longer term, Go-op has visions of low-carbon emission trains, a car-sharing platform for passengers, and even expansion to other stations in Somerset and Devon.

For Lawrie though, the focus for now is turning the 20-year-old dream into a reality and he is already fantasising about journeys on the line, which he can join at Castle Cary, just one stop away from his home town.

“What I would really like to do is catch a train to Frome, catch a concert at the Cheese & Grain music venue there, and be home in Yeovil the same night,” he says.