airports include Stansted Airport in Essex and Luton Airport in Bedfordshire, both about north of London, Birmingham Airport in Solihull, Newcastle Airport, Liverpool Airport, and Bristol Airport. Outside England, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast, are the busiest airports serving Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland respectively. The largest airline in the United Kingdom by passenger traffic is easyJet, whereas British Airways is largest by fleet size and international destinations. Others include Jet2, TUI Airways and Virgin Atlantic. Rail transport The rail network in the United Kingdom consists of two independent parts, that of Northern Ireland and that of Great Britain. Since 1994, the latter has been connected to mainland Europe via the Channel Tunnel. The network of Northern Ireland is connected to that of the Republic of Ireland. The National Rail network of in Great Britain and 189 route miles (303 route km) in Northern Ireland carries 1.7 billion passengers and 110 million tonnes of freight annually. Urban rail networks are also well developed in London and several other cities. There were once over of rail network in the UK; however, most of this was reduced over a time period from 1955 to 1975, much of it after a report by a government advisor Richard Beeching in the mid-1960s (known as the Beeching cuts). The UK was ranked eighth among national European rail systems in the 2017 European Railway Performance Index assessing intensity of use, quality of service and safety. Great Britain The rail network in Great Britain is the oldest such network in the world. The system consists of five high-speed main lines (the West Coast, East Coast, Midland, Great Western and Great Eastern), which radiate from London to the rest of the country, augmented by regional rail lines and dense commuter networks within the major cities. High Speed 1 is operationally separate from the rest of the network, and is built to the same standard as the TGV system in France. The world's first passenger railway running on steam was the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened on 27 September 1825. Just under five years later the world's first intercity railway was the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, designed by George Stephenson and opened by the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington on 15 September 1830. The network grew rapidly as a patchwork of literally hundreds of separate companies during the Victorian era, which eventually was consolidated into just four by 1922,