JFC Travel Blog

A lot of people seem to mistakenly believe that the East Coast franchise will be the first attempt by National Express at operating a railway. This is not true, but it is the first time they’ve decided to name their rail operation after their parent company. Giving a high speed rail operation the same name as a slow moving coach service seems to be a big mistake but it is part of a plan by National Express to expand the scope of their brand.

The ex-GNER route will be the first to suffer National Express branding but they plan to expand it to their other rail operations as well as their local bus services (i.e. Travel London, Travel West Midlands, etc). As quality expectations for each mode of transport differ I think it’s a mistake combining brands.

National Express have experience in running an InterCity railway, they used to run Midland Mainline until they lost their franchise in November. The last time I used Midland Mainline was in 2002 and they seemed reasonable, they were the only railway that offered free tea and coffee in standard class, I’m not sure whether they continued offering this until the end of their franchise though. Back at that time I did notice that their prices were higher than GNER for similar length journeys, I don’t know if this changed later on.

The largest franchise they ran was ScotRail which they lost to First around 2004. I remember reading that customer satisfaction was higher with National Express than it was with First but I do remember that ScotRail was registered in England and it did state this on the back of their timetables. I’m sure this would have offended some patriotic Scots.

Other franchises they have lost include Central Trains which operated local services in the Midlands, Wales and Borders, Wales and West, Wessex Trains, Valley Lines and WAGN (West Anglia Great Northern) whose franchise was split - the West Anglia section became part of ‘one’ railway (which is still run by National Express) and the Great Northern section was merged with Thameslink to become First Capital Connect.

They still operate c2c services out of London Fenchurch Street, the Gatwick and Stansted Express services and the terribly named ‘one’ railway out of Liverpool Street. ‘one’ was a merger of the West Anglia part of WAGN, First Great Eastern and Anglia services - this service will be rebranded National Express East Anglia in 2008.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Rail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.