The company was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but on 3 October 2002, the main operating arm-the owner and operator of the national railway network, Railtrack plc-was sold by its parent company Railtrack Group plc to " not for dividend " company Network Rail ( a company limited by guarantee ) and was later renamed Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd.

The parent company, Railtrack Group plc, was not put into administration and continued operating its other subsidiaries, which included property and telecommunications interests.

Railtrack's parent company, Railtrack Group, was placed into members ’ voluntary liquidation as RT Group on 18 October 2002.

£ 370 million held by Railtrack Group was frozen at the time the company went into administration and was earmarked to pay Railtrack shareholders an estimated 70p a share in compensation.

An increased offer of up to 262p per share was enough to convince the larger shareholder group, the Railtrack Action Group, to abandon legal action.

The legality of the decision to put Railtrack into railway administration was challenged by the smaller Railtrack Private Shareholders Action Group.

Keith Rowley, QC, the barrister for the shareholders, alleged Byers had " devised a scheme by which he intended to injure the shareholders of Railtrack Group by impairing the value of their interests in that company without paying compensation and without the approval of Parliament ".

It lasted for a year ; on 2 October 2002 the administration order was discharged and a new organisation, Network Rail, bought Railtrack PLC from its parent Railtrack Group PLC.

* Defeat for Railtrack shareholders BBC News, 14 October 2005 49, 000-strong Railtrack Private Shareholders Action Group

Railtrack plc was placed into railway administration under the Railways Act 1993 on 7 October 2001, following an application to the High Court by the then Transport Secretary, Stephen Byers.

Network Rail was formed with the principal purpose of acquiring and owning Railtrack plc.

Originally the Government allowed private companies to bid for Railtrack plc.

However, with limited availability of financial data on Railtrack, the political implications of owning the company and the very obvious preference of the government that the national railway network should go to Network Rail, no bidders apart from Network Rail were forthcoming, and Network Rail bought Railtrack plc on 3 October 2002.

Network Rail's acquisition of Railtrack plc was welcomed at the time by groups that represented British train passengers.

Ownership of the station transferred from British Rail to Railtrack plc in 1994, later passing to Network Rail in 2002 following the failure of Railtrack.

In 2001 the track operator Railtrack plc went bankrupt ; it was reconstituted and renamed as Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd., a private company with no legal owner but effectively government-controlled via its constitution and financing.

Railtrack was a group of companies that owned the track, signalling, tunnels, bridges, level crossings and all but a handful of the stations of the British railway system from its formation in April 1994 until 2002.

Founded under Conservative legislation that privatised the railways, Railtrack took control of the railway infrastructure on 1 April 1994 and was floated on the Stock Exchange in May 1996.

Railtrack was severely criticised for both its performance in improving the railway infrastructure and for its safety record.

Between its creation and late 1998, the company had a relatively calm relationship with its first economic regulator, John Swift QC, whose strategy was to encourage Railtrack to make commitments to improvement.

At times the relationship was stormy, with Railtrack resisting pressure to improve its performance.

In April 2000 it was reported in the Guardian that " Railtrack is adopting a deliberate ' culture of defiance ' against the rail regulator ".

To get Railtrack out of administration, the government had to go back to the High Court and present evidence that the company was no longer insolvent.

A lawyer speaking for one of those groups remarked on GMTV that his strategy was to sue the government for incorrect and misleading information given at the time Railtrack was created, when John Major was Conservative Prime Minister.

A major programme of remedial work on the West Coast Main Line started in 1997 and finished in 2009, far over budget (£ 10bn ), many years late and still not bringing the line up to the standards originally proposed by Railtrack.

The circumstances in which Railtrack had been put into administration were highly controversial, with allegations in Parliament on 24 October 2005 that the company had not been insolvent at the time ( 7 October 2001 ) and therefore that the administration order had been wrongly obtained.

The second phase-completed in the late 1970s-consists of a bus terminal and three low-rise office towers that look out on to adjacent Melton Street and Eversholt Street, and were originally occupied by British Rail, Railtrack, and then Network Rail ( who have largely vacated all but a small portion of one of the towers ).

In July 2002 in the wake of the collapse of Railtrack and the inability of Network Rail to deliver on the 140 mph West Coast Main Line upgrade, both the Virgin CrossCountry and Virgin West Coast franchises were suspended in favour of management contracts.

The route was then operated as a conventional railway, until it was closed by Railtrack after the last train on 31 May 1997, for conversion to tram operation.

Although he was not at the Department for Transport at the time of the collapse of Railtrack, Darling vigorously defended what had been done in a speech to the House of Commons on 24 October 2005.

Ownership of track and infrastructure passed to Railtrack on 1 April 1994 ( replaced by Network Rail in 2002 ), with passenger operations franchised afterwards to 25 individual private-sector operators and freight services sold outright.

With privatisation came open-access railways — the track and infrastructure were owned and operated by Railtrack, who for a fee would allow approved locomotives and trains to operate on their track.

He franchised passenger rail services to private companies including Virgin, Connex ( now known as Veolia Transport ) and the coach companies Stagecoach and National Express, and floated the national railway track and signalling company Railtrack on the London Stock Exchange in 1996.

The leaked email appeared on the day after Byers had announced the placing of Railtrack, the private sector rail infrastructure company, in administration.

The intensity of political intervention came to a head immediately after the Hatfield rail crash in 2000, when Railtrack imposed over 1200 emergency speed restrictions on its network because it did not know where else on the network the type of metal fatigue-called gauge corner cracking or rolling contact fatigue-which had caused the crash might occur.

On 2 June 1997, the West Croydon to Wimbledon Line was closed by Railtrack for conversion to operation as part of the Tramlink tram operations.

He was Chairman of Railtrack from 1993 – 1999 and led the organisation through the early years of its existence including an industrial dispute from June to September 1994.

Following the Hatfield accident, the rail infrastructure company Railtrack imposed over 1, 200 emergency speed restrictions across its network and instigated an extremely costly nationwide track replacement programme.

The crash exposed the shortcomings of Railtrack, which consequently saw speed restrictions and major track replacement.

* 2000 – Train crash at Hatfield, north of London, leading to collapse of Railtrack.

Railtrack resisted regulatory action to improve its performance, and as the regulator probed ever more deeply, serious shortcomings in the company's stewardship of the network were revealed.

According to Christian Wolmar, author of On the Wrong Line, the Railtrack board panicked in the wake of Hatfield.

Because most of the engineering skill of British Rail had been sold off into the maintenance and renewal companies, Railtrack had no idea how many Hatfields were waiting to happen, nor did they have any way of assessing the consequence of the speed restrictions they were ordering-restrictions that brought the railway network to all but a standstill.

In 2001, Railtrack announced that, despite making a pre-tax profits before exceptional expenses of £ 199m, the £ 733m of costs and compensation paid out over the Hatfield crash plunged Railtrack from profit to a loss of £ 534m.