Regulation of Railways Act 1889

The Regulation of Railways Act 1889 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is one of the Railway Regulation Acts 1840 to 1893. It was enacted following the Armagh rail disaster.

Safety

It empowered the Board of Trade to require any railway company to:

adopt the block system of signalling on any passenger railway;
provide for the interlocking of points and signals on such railways;
provide for and use on all passenger trains continuous brakes; the brakes must be instantaneous in action; self applying in the event of any failure in continuity; capable of being applied to every vehicle of the train; and in regular use in daily working.

Provision was made to enable the railway companies to issue debentures to pay for the capital cost of the equipment.
There were also provisions regarding reporting the number of persons in safety-related employment who worked more than a specified number of hours.

Tickets

The Act also requires passengers to show tickets and to pay a penalty if travelling without a ticket. It also gives powers to agents of the railway to request a name and address and to make it an offence not to provide these details when requested. Prosecutions are still brought under the Act today.

Misuse of the Act

Several rail companies from 2020 privately prosecuted cases of alleged fare evasion under the Act using the Single justice procedure, whereby a lay magistrate can try cases without a court hearing. However, the SJP cannot be used for the 1889 Act, and in August 2024 the UK's chief magistrate declared six test cases as void, as the process should never have been used. This led to plans to void over 74,000 other similar cases. At least some of the prosecutions were clearly not intentional evasion, which could not be tested in the SJP procedure; for example a man prosecuted for trying to pay a £3.50 fare at his destination as the ticket machine at the station he boarded from was not working, and there was no guard on the train.