In the United Kingdom, a community rail line is a local railway which is specially supported by local organisations. This support is usually through a Community Rail Partnerships (CRP) – comprising both the railway operator, local councils and other community organisations – or sometimes by Rail User Groups (RUG). Community railways are managed to fit local circumstances recognising the need to increase revenue, reduce costs, increase community involvement and support social and economic development.
The Association of Community Rail Partnerships (ACoRP) supports its fifty or so member CRPs in the United Kingdom and also offers assistance to voluntary Station Friends groups that support their local stations through the Station Adoption scheme. Since 2005 the UK's Department for Transport has formally designated a number of railway lines as community rail schemes in order to recognise the need for different, more appropriate standards than are applied to main line railway routes, and therefore make them more cost effective.
Read more about Community Rail: Association of Community Rail Partnerships, Designated Lines and Services, Station Friends
Famous quotes containing the words community and/or rail:
“Fortunately art is a community effort—a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will—the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)