east coast main line

I wonder if this debacle will tarnish the Virgin Brand? Irrespective of the operator I alway find the staff on this service good and the service itself relatively punctual. Perhaps we should put more store in the people less in the brand when we think about and procure services!!!

Rail services on the East Coast Main Line are being brought back under government control, following the failure of the current franchise.

Operators Stagecoach and Virgin Trains will hand over control from 24 June.

The Department for Transport will run the service until a new public-private partnership can be appointed in 2020.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said it would smooth the transition to a new operator, but critics said it was evidence of private sector failure.

Mr Grayling said the franchise had failed because Stagecoach and Virgin Trains had “got their bid wrong”, overestimating the profitability of the line.

It is the third time in a just over a decade that the government has called a halt to the East Coast franchise.

The London to Edinburgh line has been run by a joint venture between Stagecoach and Virgin, since 2015.

The companies promised to pay £3.3bn to run the franchise until 2023, but at the end of last year it become clear they were running into trouble.

In February it was announced that the franchise would end early, leading to accusations the government was bailing them out.

This is ostensibly good news for rural communities in the hinterlands of those places with more potential rail services. I do wonder however if the large price paid for the franchise will make some of these promises unsustainable. What is clear is that infrastructure improvements are crucial to the future of rural communities even if they enhance the connectivity of cities. This article tells us:

The Department for Transport today confirmed (10 December 2014) it has officially signed the East Coast rail franchise contract with Inter City Railways, a venture between Stagecoach and Virgin.

The 8 year deal will give passengers between London and Edinburgh more seats, more services and new trains from March next year. Under the franchise agreement, Inter City Railways will provide passengers a host of benefits, including:

▪       new services from London to key destinations, with 75 more station calls a day

▪       plans for new direct links to Huddersfield, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Dewsbury and Thornaby

▪       more trains to London from Bradford, Edinburgh, Harrogate, Leeds, Lincoln, Newcastle, Shipley, Stirling, and York

▪       3,100 extra seats for the morning peak time into and out of King’s Cross by 2020

▪       2,200 additional seats – a 50% increase – across the entire train fleet

▪       65 state-of-the-art Intercity Express trains brought into service from 2018, totalling 500 new carriages

▪       reduction of journey times from London to Leeds by 14 minutes, and from London to Edinburgh by 13 minutes