Quite impressed having met Jamie Burles this evening. The way discussions have run up until now painted a picture in my head of a management figure not fully in touch with the workings of the company underneath, the sort of guy who would offer generic PR responses to queries and complaints. That picture was pretty inaccurate.
Jamie attended for a full 4 hours, until almost everyone except me and Ian had left. He seemed very approachable and more importantly honest about the shortcomings of the operation so far, as well as having detailed knowledge of the answers to every issue without having to consult any documents to look stuff up.
The Stagecoach joint venture proposal was immediately explained as a means of bringing on better experience of new rolling stock deployment to the organisation and quite interestingly, Burles' (and therefore the company's, it seems) opinion regarding 321 refurbishment is that he'd much rather cascade the lot of them and introduce fleet of new stock if the ITT actually allows it, conceding that now is the time to push as much influence forward as possible into making that happen.
The cleanliness argument has been met with a well-known public response of additional cleaners, but what I wasn't aware of (perhaps I just haven't been looking) is a schedule adjustment to how often the units are deep cleaned, down from current 45-50 days to 28 days, the current interval apparently already being a marked improvement on the past.
IF, and that's a big if, Abellio stick to what was discussed this evening and the bidding process is condusive to it, I actually think the Stagecoach partnership is my preferred option. Hopefully they won't bid themselves into a whole with the franchise this time round. Running the operation at break-even due to the premium payments explains quite a lot about some of the goings on.
