In a statement released on Monday, Mr Higgins said: ?We?re devolving accountability to the route level so that we can get closer to our customers and be in a better position to deliver improvements to passengers and freight users, while reducing costs.
?Each new route managing director will, in effect, be running their own infrastructure railway business with significant annual turnover and resources.?
From April, work will start to devolve power to the first two routes, Scotland and Wessex, which matches the lines operated by South West Trains from London to Surrey, Berkshire, Hampshire and Dorset.
Under Mr Higgins?s plans, all nine regions will be semi-autonomous within a year. However, insiders said the break-up could result in more than nine regions in the end.
The overhaul will be the biggest change since the company?s privatisation in 1996. It marks the latest stage of the painful evolution of Britain?s railways.
When it was created eight years ago, Network Rail was designed as a fiercely centralised organisation to get to grips with the dire performance and safety records of its predecessor, Railtrack.
However, the vast improvements in performance have come at a cost of a big, top-heavy bureaucracy that has been criticised for being too expensive and cumbersome.
Last summer, Tom Winsor, who was the rail regulator for five years, said that Network Rail was a ?beast ripe for slaughter?.
He urged the new Government to take a radical approach to railway reform.
He is proposing that Network Rail be split into ?three or four regional companies?, bringing them closer to their train operator customers and allowing regulatory benchmarking between them to drive efficiencies.
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