UK rail tickets?

Question

How do the individual train companies get money from the tickets, which passengers buy in UK? Today i travelled on three different companies trains to complete my journey. How do they know how much to give to each company, when i could have used another companies train instead? I used Central trains to get from Birmingham to Derby, but could have used Virgin instead

Answer 1

Just before the railway was privatised, compehensive surveys were carried out on each and every train to determine loadings and to find out where passengers on each train had started and were finishing their journeys. On the results of these surveys, revenue was allocated to individual train operating companies on a percentage basis.

Before railway nationalisation in 1948, a body known as the "Railway Clearing House" did a similar job and worked out revenues for each of the "Big Four" companies, those being the big operators formed out of many smaller and independent companies.

Nowadays, revenues from non-specific tickets, i.e. those describing the journey as "Any Permitted", are divided between the relevant operators on the permitted routes by the Association Of Train Operating Companies, or "ATOC", as they are known.

Where train operating companies offer discount tickets such as Virgin Value, or similar, the issuing company takes all the revenue, because the nature of the ticket involves travel solely on their services and are not valid on any other operator's services.