That is true to be fair. They've refurbished the whole VTEC fleet to some extent.
I think that a cosmetic refresh costing around £20,000 per carriage was the extent.
It was his Patrick McLoughlin who awarded the East Coast franchise to VTEC. Also Northern to Arriva and TPE to First, if I remember correctly. They may be the next ones to have problems as a result of electrification schemes running late.
Although I accept that it's perhaps only implicit here, it's also perhaps worth repeating that others report that
no infrastructure 'promises' have not yet been met on the ECML. Future ones may be in doubt, but Virgin Trains East Coast's financial performance to date is entirely its responsibility, as I understand it.
I assume the Azumas will still be zooming in 2019
The Satsumas are nothing whatever to do with the operating company. They will come, whether it's Waitroserail or Alditrains or Co-Opcarriages. In the meantime, I hope that the DfT and Agility Trains will bill Virgin Trains East Coast for the fruity mobile billboards that they've been providing for the last few years.
I suspect that in addition to the fact that they have lost 200M after payments to government of 800M, thus are making an operating loss of at least 200M, they are also faced with upcoming competition from the Transpenine TOC and from Open Access First which they probably did not (correctly) account for in their bid.. I am not a supporter of VTEC but what is happening causes me to question the whole methodology by which Franchises are let.
Again, nothing about the current predicament is anything to do with what may or may not happen in the future. Their over-promising and underdelivering is entirely down to what's likely to be a complex combination of poor judgement, ego, self-belief in their own rhetoric, DfT complicity, shopfloor disaffection and, critically, customers voting hard in the face of shoddy service and marketing that's variously perceived as irrelevant, patronising, arrogant or just plain irritating.
It all went wrong when they got rid of Rewards.
In a nutshell, I think that you may well be right. It's a symptom of their approach to customers, and most especially the ones that deliver solid reliable patronage that covers the base costs of a business. As
@SaveECRewards has alluded to before, it's perhaps worth looking (in case it's a barometer) at the postholder in charge of the new website and their professional experience, their proclamations and presentations at various conferences, and to reconcile that with the reality of the rail retail website that we're now presented with.
No one comes out of this cleanly - Stagecoach/VT, in hindsight, have overbid (but who COULD predict circumstances like the last year?), but seeing as a lot of their bid needed investment and infrastructure that NR and the Government haven't delivered - I fear this is one mess no one can fix.
Again, what circumstances? The company didn't sell enough tickets, to enough people, for enough money.
The question must surely be: what can be done to ensure that the operation of the principal service on a key piece of national infrastructure is delivered in the most sustainable, efficient and growth-orientated manner? And how can this be done with reference to environmental considerations, issues of other modal capacity constraints, generating wealth and prosperity, addressing regional developmental and economic aspirations etc., etc?
