What rubbish. Of course it matters.

Of course, it doesn't matter to you, because that's what you want to happen across the board.

Those in the real world can point the the other, successful, franchises.

Did you find those figures, by the way?

tut tut, you should know better, profit is BAD, socialism is GREAT, that is the Sin Bin mantra

the fact none of them can earn over 40K a year tells you everything you need to know.
(edit:adjusted for London weighting)

POJ/E as always.

Virgin did not run East Coast.

:31tbqkwu

Of course, it doesn't matter to you, because that's what you want to happen across the board.
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Those two definitions are not mutually exclusive.

Apologies, I'm getting missed up with Cross Country. I did of course, mean National Express.

And GNER before that.

Again you have to define "success". For me success means providing a service to agreed levels that costs the tax payer the least. The debate is can a private company like Virgin ever do that?

Does the above have to come at the expense of customer satisfaction?

Here's something that I have never understood about train travel, and certainly the inter-city train travels rather than the cattle truck local systems - why do they over-sell certain services ?

I've just this morning received a promotional email from Cross Country Trains advising me how to make sure that I get a seat on my next journey, which made me stop and read it twice - why shouldn't I expect to have a seat for my next journey ?

Can you imagine presenting a marvellous new invention called "railway" to the patent office or to a government health and safety committee in order to obtain permission to build thousands of miles of track for your new public transport system, and at the point where they ask you how many seats will be in each carriage you reply "70" and they write that number down and then you say "plus approximately another forty or fifty standing", thats the point when they'd put their pens down and ask you "and how fast did you say these trains of yours will be travelling ?"

You simply wouldn't get permisssion to run a railway if you had to apply for planning permission today.

Surely a scheduled service, like the once-per-hour five carriage train that runs down the length of the country from Aberdeen to Plymouth every day, should have the capability to monitor its capacity between its ten or twelve various sectors and when that capacity is full then refuse to book any more tickets and recommend that you choose a different time ?

You know, like airlines do ?

Virgin for instance ?

They don't, it is usually customers piling on to a train they haven't book on, imagine the uproar if the rail companies insisted on every customer booking a seat for every journey,