Eventually the railway system in Britain had become so complex and busy that more than 120 individual railways were all running separately to one another whilst requiring universal strategy in order to operate. On 1 January 1923 under the Railways Act of 1921, the government required the grouping of these separate railways into just four. In this part of the country, it simply became ‘London, Midland and Scottish Railway’. The companies merged into the LMS included the London and North Western Railway, Midland Railway, the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, several Scottish railway companies including the Caledonian Railway, and numerous other, smaller ventures. The idea was to streamline operations and work towards a nationalised system.