Southeastern (train operating company)
British train operator owned by the Department for Transport
SE Trains Limited, trading as Southeastern and GBR South Eastern, is a state-owned British train operating company in the south east of England. It operates services to destinations in Kent, London and East Sussex, including the domestic services on High Speed 1.
It is owned by DfT Operator, which took over operating the South Eastern franchise from privately owned London & South Eastern Railway (which also traded as Southeastern) on 17 October 2021.
History
In September 2021 the Department for Transport (DfT) announced it would be terminating the South Eastern franchise then operated by the Govia-owned London & South Eastern Railway after revenue declaration discrepancies involving £25 million of public money were discovered. On 17 October 2021, an operator of last resort (OLR), SE Trains Limited, took over operations under the Southeastern brand; at the time, the DfT stated the OLR would manage the franchise for a six-year period.
Southeastern has been one of several train operators affected by the 2022–2023 United Kingdom railway strikes, the first national rail strikes in the UK in three decades. Its workers are amongst those who are participating in industrial action due to a dispute over pay and working conditions. These actions have led to Southeastern occasionally being unable to provide a full service level, and due to the often abrupt nature of the industrial action, which has included overtime bans and strikes, has sometimes not been able to arrange for rail replacement buses in time.
On 1 June 2023, both e-scooters and electric skateboards were banned from being carried onboard Southeastern trains; the reason for the ban was that the lithium-ion batteries that power these compact vehicles posed a fire safety risk. Most electric bicycles may still be taken on board, however.
“Southeastern (train operating company)” enters the record as british train operator owned by the Department for Transport. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Southeastern, train and operating can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108888230. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 2022 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Southeastern (train operating company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.