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Parliamentary trains in the UK were passenger services required by an Act of Parliament passed in 1844 to allow cheap and basic railway travel for less affluent passengers. The legislation required that at least one such service per day was run on every railway route in the United Kingdom. Such services are no longer a legal requirement, and the term has come to be used instead to describe train services that continue to be run to avoid the cost of formal closure of a route or station, but with services reduced sometimes to one train per week, and without specially low prices. Such services are also often called "ghost trains". ==Nineteenth-century usage== In the earliest days of passenger railways in the United Kingdom the poor were encouraged to travel in order to find employment in the growing industrial centres, but trains were generally unaffordable to them except in the most basic of open wagons, in many cases attached to goods trains.〔D.N. Smith (1988) ''The Railway and Its Passengers: A Social History'', Newton Abbott: David & Charles〕 Political pressure caused the Board of Trade to investigate, and Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government enacted the Railway Regulation Act, which took effect on 1 November 1844. It compelled "the provision of at least one train a day each way at a speed of not less than 12 miles an hour including stops, which were to be made at all stations, and of carriages protected from the weather and provided with seats; for all which luxuries not more than a penny a mile might be charged".〔MacDermott, E.T., ''History of the Great Western Railway'', London: Great Western Railway, 1927, Vol. 1, part 2, page 640〕 The legislation no longer applies and "parliamentary trains" in this sense no longer run. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Parliamentary train」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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