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:
“The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate, so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)