Who gets my rail fare when I buy an open ticket?

The calculation is made from the ticket office/ticket machine computers and based on an agreement based on passenger ratios and service levels etc. I believe on this route Virgin get around 80% of the Open Return ticket fare and London Midland 20%. This is based on the fact that obviously the majority of passengers with an Open Ticket will choose Virgin as its services are far faster. If you want the exact percentages you would need to contact the rail companies concerned, but I doubt that they would reveal this information to the general public

The simple answer is they don't!

The powers that be know you've bought the ticket and so will apportion part of the ticket price to all the train operating companies you could use, according to the likelihood of your travelling with them. Virgin will get the biggest cut, followed by London Midland and Chiltern - and other companies like Great Western and Cross Country will also get their share.

There's also commission for the people who actually sell you the ticket - I don't know who runs the ticket office at London Euston - but they'll get a bit of money because you bought the ticket there.

In the earliest days of the British railways, as soon as connections were made between two or more railway companies, a means had to be found to divide the revenue from 'through' fares - passenger and goods - between the companies concerned, and thus between them the British railway companies established the Railway Clearing House at the beginning of 1842. Over a hundred years later, the RCH became unnecessary after Nationalisation in 1948 and its residual functions (such as setting engineering specifications and so on) passed to the British Transport Commission.

Since the re-privatising, the function of dividing revenues is carried out by the Association of Train Operating Companies through its Rail Settlement Plan division.

ATOC, the body which represents the various train operators, carry out surveys to find what proportions of open ticket holders use each operator. In the case of an open return between Birmingham and London the journey each way might be made with Virgin (fast sardine cans from Birmingham New Street to London Euston), London Midland (slow trains Birmingham New Street to London Euston) or Chiltern (medium-paced comfortable trains from Birmingham Moor Street to London Marylebone).

The rail companies often check who has what kind of ticket and based on the results of those checks they share the income out of the tickets.