Having said that, they might need to fill up the London - Birmingham/Manchester off-peak services, but the Glasgow services (via Wigan - Carlisle stations) carry healthy loads in standard class for most of the day!
As I recall (this is from old memory so I hope the details are correct), Virgin's original plan back when Pendolino's werefirst being built was to run two trains an hour over the London-Lancaster stretch, with one of them being a Glasgow train with first stop Preston. When the line upgrade went wrong and it became apparent that 140mph wasn't going to happen, you had same number of trains but longer journey times hence not enough trains for the original plans, and that route was the one that got cut back, with the London-Lancaster hourly service scrapped and the Glasgow service getting a couple more stops south of Preston instead. I imagine that's the reason that that route has had the worst overcrowding of Virgin routes at the London end.
My understanding of First's proposals is that they are roughly speaking going to restore the originally intended pattern (which is presumably how they'll be able to speed up the London-Glasgow run), with the exception that some of the slow trains will run to Blackpool instead of Lancaster.
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Considering some of the public thought that first would bring in their own pacers/sprinters/313s to run the expresses and virgin would now scrap their voyagers and penidilinos id say no capacity...
True. But on the other hand, how many millions of UK citizens scarcely understand the first thing about how Governments or political parties work, but I doubt you'd argue for restricting the right to vote on that basis
It seems to me that the fact passengers are going to be the ones most affected by the proposals does give a good reason for ensuring that there is some mechanism for listening to passengers' voices.
