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It will be interesting what the Labour city mayors say about such legislation...

It is surprisingly difficult to cover any variations in work when the union have got the contracted week down to just 35hrs and even voluntary paid overtime is considered 'over and above'. If the company council can spend all day in the pub that suggests thet should be driving trains instead...

The incredible cost of electrification has diverted £bn in recent years away from improving services and providing extra carriages. Cross Country crowding levels are a significant factor in respect of Flybe.

Look at how many TOCs are in trouble over Sundays and/or getting staff trained on new routes and stock. There is one common denominator in all of these problems, changing the MD wont change the fact the unions behave as if they have nothing to lose from scorching the earth. Public sector...

To be fair all these MDs are operating in a phoney market where the militant trade unions have zero stake in the commercial success of their business and manage to use paid overtime as a bargaining chip. In any other business a certain union would have succeeded in losing most of their members...

It isn't faster unless the trains go faster. If Voyagers can keep up on the WCML and 180s on the ECML why is electrification seen as being a panacea for slow journey times? Even the express 5 3/4hr Newcastle - Southampton paths have 19min pathing and 10min excess station time in them. Nobody...

It is that dreaded electrification word. Electrification isn't an improvement. 99% of passengers don't care if it is an electric train not, 70% couldn't tell if a Bi-Mode is running on diesel or not, while nobody flying short haul domestic cares about CO2. Have any of these improvements...

Even in London buses are massively subsidised. Why would the London Mayor want to take on responsibility for that?

The weight, space and cost of rail vehicles should make a lot of this much easier to overcome. For example battery costs are a tiny fraction of vehicle costs, unlike electric cars and on many routes the trains connects to the grid every 60mins.

Tesla Model X is now 100KWH in an £85,000 car weighing about 2.5-3t. It would be nice to Modern Railways run with this story and technology as their title suggests rather than pointing at diesel trains and saying E-L-E-C-T-R-I-F-I-C-A-T-I-O-N which would cost £ billions and take decades. This...

SWT and SWR have had numerous strikes in its various guises under various management. Similarly the fact multiple TOCs under multiple owning groups have had similar probably suggests this isnt that management who are militant. Even LUL outside of rail franchising have regular ballots for...

Of course the cancellations aren't just a Sunday problem? They are a Saturday problem, a Christmas Eve problem and a Friday before the holidays problem. It is pretty clear that the staff choose when they prefer to work and not the company paying them.

Why aren't they getting trained on them? A contracted 35hr week and unions who use even paid voluntary overtime as a negotiating chip makes it impossible to do any large scale retraining without decimating the day to day service. Most companies have the power to enforce a degree of mandatory...

The fact the scheme spent 4 years trying to get through consultation is informative. Ordsall was around £85m this scheme was down for £200m including rebuilding two stations rather than just running lines. There was to be a far greater impact at street level. Like most of the CP5 enhancements...

One moral of this tale is if you are planning on taking up a franchise with lots of infrastructure change assumptions, lawyer up. Complaining you can't deliver a timetable because the other side didn't do what they promised won't cut it.

I will propose that only those changes under package CS5 were necessary to move from TSR1 to TSR2 as that is the only remapping date referenced to this. Some of the minor electrification works around Manchester don't sound material if for relatively little mileage they can be deferred for...

A court case would provide some much needed disinfectant over this sorry episode. An alphabet soup of ECAMs, PRs, GRIPs, ORR Determinations, HLOS, SOFA, EDPs, ITTs and many more and the result is a bloody shambles. Someone is making a good living out of this lot.

That is a start. Next, make the ones that do longer!

They have 393 trains and 1500 drivers. Is that enough? The fact they have enough 4 days a week may prove they do, only they choose when they want to work, rather than the company paying them.

The IAD may not be published but the Franchise only has one mapping date in it and that says CS5. Piccadilly / Oxford Road timescales were GRIP 3 by March 2014. The project doesn't even go to ORR for determination until then. They have no business publishing delivery plans for projects that...