James Burrage at WebKanix

The Department for Transport have today announced that the Cross Country franchise will go to Arriva in around four months. It includes Cardiff to Stanstead and Aberdeen to Penzance, and Virgin currently run the franchise.

The new service will be run as CrossCountry, with a different name and logo to other Arriva services. Most people I know have been happy with Virgin, so it’ll be especially interesting to see how Arriva can improve. The Pendolino and Voyager trains are comfortable enough, even if they do seem to vibrate more than those on the East Coast Mainline. Annoyances might include those automatic doors between carriages that close on you…

The highlights outlined by Arriva are both encouraging and interesting for the huge number of people taking to the train year on year.

Providing 35% more seats on peak services, extra seats through Birmingham and some reconfiguration for more luggage all sound good. Sometimes you have to be built like a Peperami to avoid the sleepy student in the seat next to you and the big suitcases on wheels being dragged down the aisles. The addition of longer trains in the form of High Speed Trains on the longest routes sounds interesting, but they’ve not been built for 23 years. I was on one yesterday which didn’t look like it’d ever been refurbished, and it did feel surprisingly comfortable.

Arriva also promise to introduce at seat catering for all passengers. Wi-Fi is also mentioned, although this could do with being cheaper and more stable. The service on GNER costs £7.95 for 2 hours, and once you’ve paid up doesn’t feel tremendous value for money.

Booking tickets online is long overdue some improvements, in my opinion. Being able to print tickets at home would be quite cool, but being guided to cheaper routes is also quite important. More information on board in general would be a nice improvement.

The rail network in the UK is a topic which always solicits an opinion. The franchises, privatisation, crowding, prices and the railways themselves are fairly complicated and can be confusing. With the improvements to the Tube, the Crossrail project and ongoing changes to franchises hopefully it’ll make the rest of the UK more accessible to tourists, visitors and business users, especially around events like London 2012.

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This poorly thought out rambling was posted by me, James Burrage, on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Travel. If anyone responds to this post, you can follow them through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.