In Europe, many countries have completely separated their railways into totally separate infrastructure managers and railway undertakings (train operators) and the European Commission has sought to make such complete vertical separation a legal requirement.

<title>A<sc>bstract</sc> </title> Benchmarking of rail firms has become a matter of substantial interest and many authors have emphasised the importance of transaction costs in regard to assessing the desirability of vertical separation. However, due to data and methodological limitations, previous rail efficiency...

This paper provides an up-to-date review of the previous literature concerning the impact of passenger rail franchising on productivity and costs in Britain, and also presents important new evidence. In particular, the extension in time of previously-used datasets offers the first opportunity to...