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Title: Shortlisted bidders announced for Northern and TransPennine franchises from 2016 Post by: JayMac on August 24, 2014, 00:49:17 The Department for Transport have announced the shortlisted bidders for the Northern and TransPennine franchises:
Northern
TransPennine
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/shortlist-for-northern-and-transpennine-express-rail-operators-revealed A few things to note. Keolis and Go-Ahead entering joint bids for both franchises but with reversed percentages. First Group going it alone for TransPennine, dissolving their partnership with Keolis. Serco were believed to be bidding separately (currently, with Abellio, joint operator of the Northern franchise) for the Northern franchise but didn't to make the shortlist after failing to submit a pre-qualification questionnaire. Serco also bid for TransPennine but didn't qualify for the shortlist. Both franchises are due to be awarded in October 2015 with the them starting in February 2016. Title: Re: Shortlisted bidders announced for Northern and TransPennine franchises from 2016 Post by: Chris from Nailsea on August 24, 2014, 21:22:20 From The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/22/sale-of-century-privatisation-scam):
Quote Sale of the century: the privatisation scam Privatisation promised to turn the UK into an island of small shareholders. It failed: the faceless state bureaucrats have been replaced by faceless (better-paid) private bureaucrats ^ and big foreign corporations. How did we get to this point? Train fares are going up. We learned that last week, although "learn" is putting it strongly. We knew they would. It's not as if they would go down: train fares go up, like electricity bills, gas bills, water bills, rent and chief executives' salaries. To the loyalists of the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron succession, higher train fares are a positive, because they mean lower subsidies: another incremental step in a 35-year programme to shift the burden of paying for infrastructure from the well-off to the strugglers. To most of us, it's another sign of the folly of selling off the railways. But amid the dismal annual round of fare rises, it's easy to miss another, stranger, more gradual sign of the failure of the vast social and economic experiment conducted on the British people since 1979: privatisation. A trio of awkward synthetic words has begun to appear among the owners of private train companies that looks as if a computer has been asked to name the new musketeers: Abellio; Govia; Keolis. What these bland corporate signifiers mask is state-owned but commercialised European rail firms. Collectively, European state railways now own more than a quarter of Britain's passenger train system. I imagine they will do a decent job. And that's the trouble. If competition shows that the best companies to run Britain's privatised railways are state-owned railways from other countries, what does that say about the justification of privatisation? And what does it say about what privatisation has done to Britain? How did we get to the point where this country's railways, power stations and postal service were ready to be taken over by foreign versions of British organisations that our own government, claiming patriotism, systematically took to pieces? This page is printed from the "Coffee Shop" forum at http://gwr.passenger.chat which is provided by a customer of Great Western Railway. Views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned. Visit www.gwr.com for the official Great Western Railway website. Please contact the administrators of this site if you feel that content provided contravenes our posting rules ( see http://railcustomer.info/1761 ). The forum is hosted by Well House Consultants - http://www.wellho.net |