Running an integrated railway: South Western Railway MD Lawrence Bowman interview

On the morning of Sunday 25 May 2025, the Secretary of State for Transport, Heidi Alexander MP boarded the first South Western Railway service to depart London Waterloo.

The company’s new Managing Director, Lawrence Bowman, has been steadily working hard since to create an integrated SWR and Network Rail team, responsible for both train operations and infrastructure.

As Great British Railways continues to develop and form, Lawrence Bowman finds himself in arguably the hottest of all hotseats. The last 11 months has been a challenge for all sorts of reasons, and those opposed to renationalisation have wasted no time pointing out that at times, performance has dipped below what it was under private operation. As ever, the story is much more complex than that.

To find out what has been going on and more importantly what is planned, I have come to Wimbledon Train Care depot to meet with Lawrence and ask what the plan is and how challenging it’s going to be to deliver it.