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Last Great Western

Posted January 6th, 2007 by Tom

My 2007 prediction that First Great Western's new style suicide premium franchise would be going Falco within a few months is looking good. The latest gen from the West Country doesn't look quite as good:

Julia Thomas, Public Transport Campaigner at Transport 2000 said: “People are being crammed onto trains like sardines – it’s completely unacceptable. The timetable for the region and length of trains has been set by DFT rail ‘experts’ in London but it is clearly unworkable. First Great Western has their hands tied on this.

“It is unbelievable that just a few weeks ago the Government’s own Eddington report stated how important rail is to the economy, yet here we have huge rail cuts affecting employment opportunities, business trading and development opportunities in the region.”
source

Angry rail users say they are fed up with overcrowding linked to timetable changes brought in by First Great Western in December.

The new timetable coincided with a rolling stock maintenance crisis and has left passengers battling to find a space on packed carriages - with some left stranded on platforms.
source

Meanwhile on the uk.railway newsgroup, the natives are restless:

Tonight a driver mentioned to me that he considered the situation
intolerable, over 700 cancelleations, he'd never seen it that bad.
Under the new franchise term, FGW are working to a timetable template
dictated by the Department for Transport which took effect from
December. As part of that, FGW has sent 4 class 153s back to the
leasing company, and 8 150/2s to Arriva so it can bolster its trains.
All of this was planned, according to FGW sources, and they say they
are paying for 9 extra carriages - 1x153 and 4x158s - from their own
funds. The net deficet is still 7 carriages, roughly 450 seats which
equates with diagramming to a loss of around 2,200 seats per day. source

From that, if DfT Rail forced FGW into giving up capacity (thus damaging their brand and ability to attract the new custom required by the contract) while expecting massive premia (a billion quid), and even considering that First's growth forecasts exceeded those originally envisaged, then the prospective collapse of a second InterCity rail franchise can be laid at the door of the Government's over-prescriptive, nannyish, professional-ignoring ethos. Standard Operating Procedure for New Labour, in other words.

However, it's not all bad news for the bus bandits at First Group:

New Year's Honours List 2007
Order of the British Empire:
Rodney William Dickinson business development director, FirstGroup, services to public transport

He's going to have to develop a lot of business to pay the millions promised to DfT Rail for the privilege of running the franchise they overspecified to death.

Like everything else the

On January 6th, 2007 barnacle_bill (not verified) says:

Like everything else the NuLabor twats have touched - it's all starting to fall to bits.
I should imagine the poddle is chortling to himself when he thinks what Gordimmo is going to inherit!

I thought the conspiracy

On January 7th, 2007 Dick Cheney says:

I thought the conspiracy theorists were bad. Now, we have the trainspotters.

On January 7th, 2007 Dick Cheney says: