Rail Franchising - The Future

[DVL418]

RE: Rail Franchising - The Future

(04/10/2012 14:07)507009 Wrote:  

(04/10/2012 13:53)First Class Wrote:  Virgin has had billions pumped into it, and is no better than East Coast who are doing just as well (if not better) than Virgin with far less investment AND has the profits going to the government rather than Branson.

You've claimed above that the "success" of East Coast under state ownership is a yardstick of why the West Coast (and others) should follow suit. My point is that it hasn't been a success, which doesn't bode well for the success of other state owned TOCs.

Source for your PPM East Coast figures? Or have you just cherry-picked the best ones? Again, over to Wikipedia.

East Coast: "Over the third quarter of the 2010/11 financial year East Coast achieved 81.7% PPM and a moving annual average of 83.3%"
Virgin: "The latest figures published were 87.8% (PPM) for the fourth quarter of 2010-11 and 86.6% (MAA) up to 31 March 2011"

Not the same quarter, but this hardly suggests East Coast are "outperforming" Virgin.

As for your claim of "not just using PPM scores", what else do you want to use? Virgin have a very modern fleet of clean, fast trains, fantastic staff, a clear and vibrant brand and you can get excellent fares if you book early enough. I've never paid over the odds for a Virgin journey to London, always been well served with polite and helpful staff and never had a bad experience. I'm sure I've read that before Virgin took over the WCML, it was less used than the ECML. Now, the reverse is true.

As highlighted earlier in this thread, judging a TOCs 'performance by relying on the PPM indicator, many factors of which are not within its own control, is extremely subjective and unreliable.

Therefore the PPM KPI should always be read with a considerable 'health warning' rather than parrotted out as done by the tabloids as a neat sound bite.

By the way - who paid the lion's share of the WCML upgrade? - not Virgin!! - yet they still wanted to hand back the keys at one point until Stagecoach stepped in and helped blackmail the Govt into letting them delete the payback causes.

At least lets agee on something - the current way we operate our rail system is expensive (infation + fare rises for every one of the past 10 years!, inefficient and broken.

However, the last Govt chickened-out of mending the process, and the current one will not do anything that upsets their spiv, sorry, city backers.