UK update: Sunderland gets direct trains to London

Britain's Rail Regulator approved Grand Central Railways' new service on March 23, over the objections of the operator GNER, the primary user of the East Coast Main Line.

Seems a little odd to your conductor that even though GNER doesn't own the tracks (Network Rail does), it would still claim dibs on who gets to use them.

Grand Central now joins Hull Trains and the airport shuttle Heathrow Express among the "open access" operators on the UK's rails. And so the Great UK Rail Privatization Experiment rumbles on.

There really aren't many parallels between the UK passenger-train network and Amtrak (a topic we'll examine regularly), but here's one: Outside the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak functions much like an open-access operator. It gains access to the rails only through careful negotiation and occasionally government intervention--and the process can take time. Lots of it. No clearer example of that, of course, than what it took to get Amtrak's Downeaster running between Boston North Station and Portland, Maine.