In attempting to meet government-mandated profitability and efficiency goals, the British Rail Board behaved not simply as the government directed, but rather according to internal needs and initiatives, as this careful examination of the implementation of sector management demonstrates. Even in the early days of movement toward privatization, the board tried to develop its own policies, and, though it soon became clear that full divestiture was to be the goal, events proceeded through various stages, rather than in a forced march along a government-designed path.

An examination of the chief executives of leading British railways from 1850 through 1922 indicates that they emerged from predominantly upper-middle and upper class origins, and that they represented a new kind of bureaucratic business elite which enjoyed rising incomes and growing social status. In addition, available evidence reveals nothing to suggest that “executive immobility” was characteristic of British railway management, or that the railways were particularly inefficient or unprogressive in their choice of senior managers.

There has been comparatively little research into regional prices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and historians have customarily relied upon indices of London's wholesale and contract prices to indicate the fluctuations and trends of British prices as a whole. Our knowledge of price movements, and especially of retail price movements, in other parts of the country is therefore scanty. It is not suggested that this situation may easily be altered, but evidence of bread prices in Glasgow at least may add further brush strokes to those which “supplied the first rough outlines on an otherwise blank canvas.”