Great Western Coffee Shop

Latest "Rail" mag states that Dft have admitted that 3 TOCs are in serious financial trouble(Red Flagged is their jargon) but they wont say which ones.National Expess East Coast has been widely tipped as being one.I wonder if FGW is among the other two given its onerous subsidy profile and the rapidly deepening depression that is already having a widespread effect on the economy in general.

Could Network Rail find it self being a train operator again like it did with Connex SE, possibly would ORR allow NR to continue as a TOC

NR isn't a TOC and never has been. The government ran SE Trains directly after Connex was ousted. If a franchise failed then the likelihood is that the existing franchisee would run it as a management contract whilst it was retendered. That was what happened for the last few months (up to a year?) of GNER's existence. Unless of course the failure annoyed the government enough for them to run it directly as they did with Connex.

Remember, hand back the keys to one and you hand them back to all.

If any TOC were to 'hand in the keys' to its franchise, then it would initially be run by the DfT's "Operator Of Last Resort", First Class Partnerships, who previously fulfilled the same role with South Eastern after Connex were stripped of their franchise.  See http://www.firstclasspartnerships.com/operator-of-last-resort.php

I understand they are tacking on budget, cap and collar issues apply anyway. In the longer  ;)term its as clear as mud, from memory First Group have a lot of debt, but they are not in the mess that Nat Ex finds itself and the sooner First Class Partnerships take over that lot the better.

Welcome to the forum Class 50.

Hiya Hoover!

I read in The Times that if the government needs to step in with a franchise, a tempory nationalisation of the franchise may be implemented, I posted a link in another thread in Fare's Fair.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article5799500.ece

Third Paragraph

FGW don't seem to be panicing about anything too much, they've started the odd cut back but nothing like the scale of NXEC, me thinks FG are just being careful at the moment, the share price jumped from ^2.01 to ^2.54 in one day this week. Not much compared to the ^9.00 odd that it was two years ago mind!

The share price at the moment seems to be linked the $.  The jump last week was down to the US Fed announcing some stuff which weakened the dollar, and made the value of FG's debt in the US reduce.  Of course anytime the pound weakens, this makes the US debt rise and sends the share price down (hence the reason it got down to ^1.97 in the first place - and nearly got kicked out of the FTSE 100!)