The InterCity 250 was an electric railway project undertaken by British Rail in the late 1980s. The InterCity 250 train would have consisted of a Class 93 electric locomotive, nine Mark 5 coaches and a Mark 5 Driving Van Trailer operating in a push-pull formation. The British Rail project was cancelled in July 1992.

In 1985, work began to fully electrify the East Coast Main Line (ECML). This project, which saw the line fitted with overhead wires between London King's Cross and Edinburgh Waverley, took five years to complete. At the same time, a new generation of rolling stock was introduced, with the Class 91 electric locomotives combined with the Mark 4 coaching stock to form InterCity 225 sets – so called because the Class 91 locomotives had a top speed of 225 km/h (140 mph).

Upon the completion of the ECML project, British Rail turned to the West Coast Main Line (WCML). This had been electrified in several stages over a fifteen-year period between 1959 and 1974. However, unlike the ECML the extensive curvature of the track along the route meant that it was ill-suited to running high-speed trains (generally defined in Britain as trains capable of 125 miles per hour or 200 kilometres per hour or more), and so its services were limited to more modest speeds of 100 to 110 miles per hour (160 to 175 km/h). In order to achieve the same standards as the ECML, major upgrades of the track, signalling and overhead lines, as well as a new generation of rolling stock, were required.

During the late 1970s, British Rail had planned to address the WCML limitations with the Advanced Passenger Train project; this circumvented any requirement to make significant infrastructure changes by using tilting train technology. The project reached the prototype stage, with the introduction of three Class 370 electric multiple units into passenger service in 1981. However, initial failures of the tilt technology led to them being withdrawn. They were then used from 1984 to 1986 as test trains for researching the technologies and specifications required for what would become the Class 91.

In November 1990, after several years of internal evaluation and development of business and technical specifications, British Rail announced the InterCity 250 project. This would address the problems on the WCML through the delivery of new rolling stock and enhanced infrastructure required to operate them. The proposal came at a time when journey time improvements on the West Coast Main Line were needed to increase revenue and improve InterCity's profitability. However the West Coast Main Line infrastructure at the time was incapable of supporting operation of 155 miles per hour (250 km/h) trains in normal service and in need of widespread renewal, therefore a number of factors would be required to deliver this:

Concept models for the Class 93 locomotives for the InterCity 250 were styled by Seymour Powell and invitations to build the rolling stock were called for with GEC-Alsthom, Bombardier, Prorail, and an ABB/British Rail Engineering Limited joint venture responding.

It was planned the InterCity 250 trains would have commenced operating at 125 miles per hour (200 km/h) around 1995, with incremental increases up to the maximum speed by the end of the 1990s following the implementation of in-cab signalling. The ECML high speed test site between Stoke Tunnel and New England North, used in the trial runs of the InterCity 225, was likely to have been used in the development and testing of a prototype InterCity 250 set. In 1993 it was suggested that the InterCity 250 could provide a suitable specification for future replacement rolling stock on both the Great Western and East Coast Main Lines.

In total the project was valued at around £750 million, with each InterCity 250 set estimated to cost £10 million (1992 prices).