News today that National Express has won the East Coast mainline franchise after GNER owner Sea Containers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Some “vox-pops” contained thoughts about a bus company running a rail company, as they did when Arriva won the cross country mainline, and even Look North trailed it that way tonight. Truth is, both companies have experience with the railways.

Arriva has bus and rail experience in the UK, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands and other European countries. In the UK alone National Express group runs ‘one’ (a ‘one’derful name for a train company) in the East of England, Stanstead Express and Silverlink.

To go to Harwich last week I used a ‘one’ service and can’t complain. All journeys were on time and the prices weren’t too bad. Apart from updating the livery (some of which is two franchises out of date) and some refurbishment, it’s hard to see what real improvements have been made over First Group. The newest trains were put there by First and still carry the purple Great Eastern livery. Some of the older stock has been refurbished, but not yet the majority.

Travelling back on a GNER Mallard service always leaves me satisfied, like I’ve got what I paid for. I never think “wow, that was an amazing and comfortable journey”, but equally I never feel hard done by as I have done with other services, even on older British Rail trains. A post on a Guardian blog sums it up perfectly, as do all of the comments at time of posting. GNER … is the dream over?.

Yesterday I was sitting across from an American who joked about the luxury travel at our table seats, someone listening to the radio on a Sony Ericsson phone (like me) and reading the Guardian (like me), and next to a 20-something eating food from the buffet and reading a celebrity/style magazine. It didn’t feel spacious, but wasn’t crampt. It wasn’t hot considering the weather, but equally wasn’t being air conditioned to the extreme. It didn’t glide in silence, but wasn’t rattling and noisy. I’ll miss GNER not because they’re fantastic, but because they were good and you knew what you were getting. Not “no frills travel” nor a luxury service, but pretty good for a rail journey in the UK.

It’s not just trains, but stations too. Someone commented on BBC Tees this evening that Darlington station could do with tidying up; I couldn’t agree more. Whenever I find myself there I start reflecting on life with that cold wind that blows harshly through the station and the tens of leaks in the roof which let rain fall down on you like a fine mist. Tickets could be expensive on the day and I don’t bother with the Wi-Fi any more, but I think they generally did a good job.

National Express have promised to improve punctuality, which is good, but in my experience it’s normally out of anyones control. On all the GNER services I’ve used it’s always been other companies or conditions causing issues around the timing of a service. Safety checks in Edinburgh station, a broken train in St. Neots and overhead powerlines down in Peterborough come to mind this year.

National Express also promise a better way of booking a journey in March 2009, as do Arriva, and free Wi-Fi in standard class. I’m less keen on the above inflation fare increase which will end the availability of a sub £13 fare booked a month in advance from London to Durham.

WordPress is an excellent blogging platform; I’d have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. However, there are a few plugins which will make life as a blogger easier, as well as a bit more fun.

As soon as you start getting popular, the amount of comment spam you get will start to go up. Akismet can help get through it - it checks comments against its own webservice to see if it’s likely to be spam or not. You can still retrieve comments, telling Akismet they’re not spam with a single click.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/

If you’re a podcaster, podPress could be of real interest. I see many bloggers and podcasters using WordPress to detail what’s in their podcast, maintain a seperate feed and link to the MP3 file. Plenty of useful features and an inline player for folk who don’t want to download.

Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

I think Flickr is fantastic and post up any photo I take which is interesting. Whilst it’s easy to paste in the code to show a photo on a page, flickrRSS will display the most recent photos added to your flickr account in your sidebar by checking the RSS feed. Not essential, but it can add a lot of colour to the design. Since adding it here, I noticed the four photos shown for a while have had 170+ views, whilst the rest have had less than 10.

Download: http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/

I send a lot of emails with attachments through the day, mostly on GMail now.

This involves going in to directory after directory to find the file, and if you’re sending a new version of something this can happen several times a day. More by accident I discovered this cool way to help out.

The shortcut appears under Favourite Links

There are two ways of adding a shortcut to Favourite Links. Either open up My Computer and drag a folder to the Favourite Links - it’ll be added automatically, or open up My Computer and find C:\Users\username\Links and add the shortcuts there.

When I was thinking of setting up a podcast (more on that soon) I stumbled across Boagworld - a podcast by Paul Boag, a web designer and usability/accessibility specialist.

I’ve seen many, many blog posts by Paul over the last year and really like the style in which web design is discussed. There’s no preaching at the reader and the content is both good for people coming into web design and those who have been at it for a while.

I heard Paul’s most recent podcast over the weekend and then went back and listened to the first two going round Asda. I can’t recommend them enough for everyone involved in developing and managing websites - it’s not overly technical, it flows extremely well, the length is just right and the audio quality is great.

You don’t need to go back and listen from episode one - but the show notes are good, so if something interests you it really is worth downloading.