The National Transport Model (NTM) played a key role in the formulation of the UK Government's Ten Year Plan for transport. Since then, it has been undergoing a comprehensive programme of development to make it more integrated and spatially oriented. One important element in this development has been the creation and inclusion within the NTM framework of the National Rail Model (NRM), to enable the impact of various transport policies to be assessed in a truly multi-modal fashion. As such, the emphasis has been on developing a model capable of capturing the strategic interactions between rail and other modes, rather then aiming to model in detail demand on particular rail routes.