Great Western Coffee Shop

Northern Rail has been crowned ^Train Operator of the Year^ and ^Rail Business of the Year^ at the prestigious 10th annual HSBC Rail Business Awards (link below.)
http://www.northernrail.co.uk/news/462

Interestingly, in addition to winning the two prizes, Northern was highly commended in the ^Rolling Stock Excellence of the Year^ award.

They only won it because the government love them.
They say they need stock so they get it. GRRR!

Thing is qprrule, Northern, like pretty much every rail operator, FGW included, DOES need the stock to cope with rising passenger numbers. Some of the most overcrowded trains in the country outside London are around Leeds and Manchester. Maybe their management team is just more persuasive and on better terms with DfT and the train leasing firms than the people running FGW up until last autumn were.

Bollocks. The difference is that the north is predominantly Labour whereas they don't have a hope in hell of being elected in the south west! Consequentially we get repeatedly screwed on everything including transport and allocation of rolling stock!

Coincidently FGW won 2 awards, both for the HST refurb.

Which was very good.
P.S. Does anyone have a link to the awards?

http://www.railbusinessawards.com/winners.html

Thanks.  ;)

Northern rail appear to run 91 pacers!!

Ah, the conspiracy theory of rolling stock allocation. So if it's for political advantage, why are they taking trains from Labour-voting South Wales to give to FGW?

And the last time I looked, Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol were in the South West, with seven Labour MPs between them (and they held Camborne 1997-2005), plus, more widely, they have seats in FGW commuter territory out to Slough, as well as Reading, Oxford, Swindon, Gloucester, Worcester, Portsmouth, Southampton and Weymouth.

Lose that lot and they would be well on the way to defeat at the next general election, so if it's about politics, they should be pouring trains into FGW territory to shore up their support in 2009 or 2010, rather than wasting them on areas where they will win anyway.

Do you actually think that transport ministers, who usually seem to last no more than a year in the job under both the current Labour and past Tory regimes, have the time and enough knowledge of the rail system to cook up the kind of thing you are suggesting? The DfT civil servants do what their fellow civil servants in the Treasury tell them to do - find the cheapest bodge-up way to do things - hence the franchise agreement FGW signed up to.

Recent related Parliamentary Written Answer :