Great Western Coffee Shop

Roger Ford writing "Informed Sources/November Modern Railways Magazine", presents a very convincing argument for recreating "Inter-city" citing the present confusing and wasteful plethora of liveries,company names,web sites,ticket offers,variations in on-board services and exclusive timetable books and returning to what he calls one of the most successful brands ever created and quoting what Transport Secretary Lord Adonis recently called the "wanton destruction of British Rail".He says the franchise system has simply become a money machine to sqeeze the maximum amoumt of money out of passengers to offset the massive costs of privatisation with stakeholders now taking priority over passengers.
 As a starting point he offers a possible 5 year scenario for the recreation of "Inter-City" as a national business in which interestingly he assumes the First Great Western Franchise reaching financial breaking point in April 2013.
Thoughts on the matter!.

Good idea. Few of the Intercity routes compete, so there would be no danger of routes being downgraded.

The benefit of merged franchises is that profitable intercity routes subsidise loss making rural branch lines etc

That is true. It was the profitability of InterCity that helped the loss making NSE and RR.

Great idea.  Why not go futher and create something like the following:

Intercity (all current intercity operators + crosscountry HST and Voyager routes)

London & South East (made up of the ex - Network SouthEast and some other routes eg. Salisbury to Bristol/Cardiff)

Local (made up of the lines in Devon + Cornwall and similar rural areas)

Scotrail (Scottish regional services)

Welsh (Welsh services with a seperate sector for Cardiff and Valleys eg. Metro)

Of course, could just create a railway for the whole of Britain that owns all trains, stations, tracks etc. why not call it something like, say... British Rail?

No. Time to introduce real competition and reverse the single operator per London Terminus rule to start with.

Issues relating to open access and the devolved administrations would prohibit the recreation of BR, and of course the main reason against being the power to stop the network completely by a strike of the operators staff which should be avoided at all costs.