Dear Mr Hairy Face.

As you seem unable to understand, here are the reasons that your company, Virgin, lost the franchise for the UK Cross Country Rail Route.

Firstly despite being told by various media people, the general public and unless they are all very stupid (or a bunch of well to do ‘Yes’ men), your higher management staff, your newest trains are not long enough. That is to say you retired all those wonderful HST’s with their eight quiet and comfortable mark three carriages and replaced them with 4 or 5 car, underfloor powered, DMMU’s. The Voyagers were a terrible thing to unleash on a travelling public. Yes they accelerate well, but that is where the love story ends. They are cramped, have little baggage area (despite being used on a cross country service that by definition would require passengers to be loaded up with bags and cases). They have pointlessly small LED displays for the reservations and the shops only stock Virgin bloody cola which, if you pardon the phrase, tastes of arse.

Having travelled on the damn things I would like to say the designers must make bloody good aeroplanes because their trains are useless.

Secondly you decided to increase the timings for all your trains to fifteen minute intervals. Marvellous. But shat on because the trains are half the length.

Actually that is all I think you lost it on. There is not that much to running a rail service from a passengers (STOP calling us CUSTOMERS, we travel, we don’t buy) point of view. All a PASSENGER wants is for a clean, comfortable and relatively quiet train to pull into a station on time, take them where they want to go with no hidden surprises mid way through and to walk off the train at the other end feeling refreshingly happy and unstressed.

Train travel shouldn’t be an ordeal. It should be a journey through the country, a little adventure in an ordinary day. we can’t return to the days of the sixties where railways ran to every point of the British Isles. But with the help of a decent company (and First I am looking very big daggers at you, you scabby bastards, charging £102 for a return to London on a Saturday just because I wish to spend more than 50 minutes wandering around the damn place) the pleasure of train travel can be brought back to life.

*****LATE NEWS*****

Should mention that the above blog was sent as a letter to Virgin Trains themselves. I will let you know if I get anything back.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 10:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.