Britain's Train-Leasing Firms Paid Almost £400m to Shareholders as Boss Pay Hit £3.5m
The bosses of Britain's three main train-leasing firms were paid a combined £3.5m last year while their companies paid almost £400m in dividends to shareholders The Guardian.
These firms, known as rolling stock companies or ROSCOs, own most passenger trains and rent them to operators for a fee. It is similar to airlines leasing planes rather than buying them. A dividend is a share of profit paid to owners.
Porterbrook Holdings paid £80m in dividends in its latest accounts. Its chief executive Mary Grant was paid £1.44m, up more than 10% on the year before. That made Grant the highest paid of the three bosses.
Eversholt Rail paid £200m in dividends in 2025, shortly before it was sold by CK Hutchison to Beacon Rail. Its departing chief executive Mary Kenny was paid £1.33m. Eversholt had been a subsidiary of CK Hutchison, the Hong Kong firm controlled by Li Ka-shing.
Angel Trains paid £111m in dividends. Its chief Malcolm Brown was paid £700,000, roughly half the packages of his two counterparts. Angel Trains has separately committed a £300 million investment in new electric tri-mode rolling stock from Hitachi for Grand Central. Tri-mode means the trains can run on three types of power.
Train operators spent more than £4bn leasing trains from these companies last year, according to the rail regulator. The regulator put the net profit margin of the leasing firms, the profit kept from each pound of revenue, at 18.5%. The RMT union said the three biggest firms paid £2.4bn in dividends over the last 10 years. In a separate statement, the RMT said the three main companies paid £390 million in dividends in 2025 and called for a levy, an extra tax, on their profits RMT.
The UK government is considering direct ownership of trains through Great British Railways rather than leasing them from the private sector. No decision has been framed in the disclosed figures, but the option would alter procurement for future fleets.
The broader context here is the durability of the ROSCO model privatised in the 1990s. For specialists, the question is less the annual pay disclosures than the cost of capital embedded in leases, the age profile of fleets, and who bears residual-value risk when traction and decarbonisation requirements change.
Looking at what this means for Great British Railways, outright ownership would give the state control over specification and cascade, the choice of train design and where older trains are reused, and remove the dividend layer from the cost chain. It would also move financing, maintenance liability and obsolescence risk onto the public balance sheet. The Eversholt transaction shows private capital still values the cash flows. Whether ministers judge that value as efficiency or as rent will shape the next rolling stock orders.
