Analysis of Property Rights on Problems of the British Railway Reform

Based on the way of analysis of property rights, the paper attempts to explain the problems occurred in the British railway reform. After the privatization of the BR railways, Railtrack became a strictly regulated company because of the regulatory systems, and its truncation of property rights was one of the root causes for Railtrack recently be taken over by the government; the outright break-up of the British Rail greatly increased the cooperation interfaces among the railway industry, caused costly transaction costs; the reform put the safety on the public domain, without specially set up safety monitoring sector, the public tragedy of safety was one of the root causes for continuing happened severe accidents; the high level of assets specificity of rolling stock has not been deeply taken into account,the vertically separation blindly replacing the vertically integrated of rolling stock sectors with the operation companies.