Last night thousands of people took part in a party to commemorate the last day that alcohol was allowed on the tube. I didn’t attend the party but as I was working late yesterday I decided to grab a few cans before jumping on the Hammersmith and City line home, then I got a bit more curious and made a bit of a diversion. (more…)
I have to say that overall I’m not too happy with the first few months of the National Express East Coast franchise. In fact, the only good thing I can say about them is that gner.co.uk redirects to their website so I don’t have to type the ridiculously long nationalexpresseastcoast.com if I’m on a computer where it’s not bookmarked. I suspect the people at the NXEC commuter blog are wishing for a return of GNER, their blog was originally set up to criticise GNER and they were happy that they lost their franchise. Perhaps now they can admit that GNER wasn’t all that bad really 
So far I’ve noticed the following on my travels with NXEC… (more…)
I’ve written a lot about NXEC recently but I’ve not yet came to a verdict on whether they’ll live up to GNER’s standards. Today marks the launch of National Express East Anglia which is just a rebranding of the franchise formerly known as ‘one‘. In this case it’s no change of ownership, just a simple rebranding. As a name anything is an improvement over ‘one’ but I don’t know why they didn’t just use their official name London Eastern Railway.
As mentioned in a previous blog post, the only problem I had with GNER’s new online booking engine (which has continued to be used by National Express) was that it did not accept American Express. I was promptly told that support for Amex was due to be added in January and, as promised, it arrived towards the end of the month. (more…)
From The Guardian: Trains on the money-go-round
Christian Wolmar with a not too optimistic look on rail franchising. London Overground is mentioned in this article, it’s going to be interesting to see how this TFL managed franchise is going to perform.
The new National Express East Coast franchise has started today. Although I do have my doubts as to whether the franchise will be a success (as I believe they’ve overbid for the franchise like GNER did in 2005) and I’ll miss the GNER branding, I do wish them well for the future and hope that they prove me wrong with regards to their bid. They have ideas for the future, some are totally new ideas and others are based on GNER’s original 2005 bid, if they can deliver and remain profitable then travelling the East Coast route will still remain a pleasure.
It looks like the future of GNER’s new web site and booking engine is safe. If you visit nationalexpresseastcoast.co.uk at the moment all you get as an ‘under construction’ notice, however if you look up the IP address of the site you will see that it is the same as the GNER site. Also tickets.nationalexpresseastcoast.co.uk currently displays the GNER booking engine. Presumably from midnight all they need to do is change a setting and the new National Express brand will appear in place of GNER. It’ll be a shame to see the GNER brand disappear but at least the new website will be used for more than a couple of weeks.
UPDATE: new site is live at www.nationalexpresseastcoast.com (.co.uk has not been set up yet - looks like the .com form will be the official one).
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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. (more…)
In most of the UK the trains look a mess thanks to the way the franchising process works. When a new company takes over a franchise it always takes a few years before all their trains are rebranded. In many cases it’s even longer, in London you still often see trains in the old British Rail Network SouthEast colour scheme or the colour scheme of the past franchisee, many times you see a mix of colour schemes over various carriages on the same train. It doesn’t do a good job of setting brand identity. (more…)