by Mark Found

Mmm, tough one this. Obviously when we went to film this item all was rosy in the Virgin garden - but there's been a few sleepless nights since then. The problems with the cross country services have been well documented elsewhere, and we are the programme that celebrates the railways rather than panning them as everyone else seems to - but it does make life difficult, and hard, to ignore it when a company makes such a huge change in its operations and suffers the consequences.

There are outside influences to consider, of course, the weather doesn't help for one, but railways have been around for a long, long time and to have brand new sets failing because of sea water soaking them in the Dawlish area is really not on. We know the railway runs along the sea wall, we know that the sea can get rough, man is an ingenious animal who can problem solve - somebody at Virgin should be asking for a partial refund from Bombadier.

Sometimes the fault is in one's own hands - shorter trains running more frequently doesn't seem to be a good policy, it invariably means shorter trains packed to the gills, and running late. This shorter train thing is something I've never understood, take, for example, the replacement of the loco-hauled Waterloo - Exeter service, which invariably ran with eight carriages, by a service provided by two class 158 units coupled together. A shorter, cramped train with a refreshment service provided by a trolley more appealing than the old Mark 2 stock and a buffet car? I don't think so.

From my own experiences part of the problem seems to be that these cross country services, and I don't just mean Virgin here, seem to just be an incredibly long stopping service. Take, for example, my own experiences on Central Trains Stansted - Liverpool route. During filming of the series I used this service a couple of times in order to travel to Birmingham, Crewe and Liverpool. It's five hours to do this trip, and I noted that there were people doing the whole journey, yet we seemed to be forever stopping at what seemed the smallest stations picking up and dropping off local customers.

Having said that, I've just checked the Central Trains timetable and they seem to have sped the whole journey up by missing out some of the smaller stations, and Virgin have told me that they're doing the same, so maybe all will be well, I certainly hope so.

On the plus side (for me) Virgin are just about the nicest guys to deal with, they bend over backwards to help and the PR department is one for Richard Branson to be proud of. Special thanks to Lee West and Dennis Lovett for all that they did for me, and I really, really hope that Virgin Cross Country, and Virgin West Coast, go from strength. At least the trains being packed tells us instantly that the passengers are out there, up 40% I believe, let's not lose them (again!).

Trainspotting.links (will open in a new window)

www.virgin.com
it's their official website, very nice and the rail pages are pretty good.