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Of course, it doesn't matter to you, because that's what you want to happen across the board.

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Those two definitions are not mutually exclusive.

Apologies, I'm getting missed up with Cross Country. I did of course, mean National Express.

And GNER before that.

Again you have to define "success". For me success means providing a service to agreed levels that costs the tax payer the least. The debate is can a private company like Virgin ever do that?

Does the above have to come at the expense of customer satisfaction?

Here's something that I have never understood about train travel, and certainly the inter-city train travels rather than the cattle truck local systems - why do they over-sell certain services ?



I've just this morning received a promotional email from Cross Country Trains advising me how to make sure that I get a seat on my next journey, which made me stop and read it twice - why shouldn't I expect to have a seat for my next journey ?



Can you imagine presenting a marvellous new invention called "railway" to the patent office or to a government health and safety committee in order to obtain permission to build thousands of miles of track for your new public transport system, and at the point where they ask you how many seats will be in each carriage you reply "70" and they write that number down and then you say "plus approximately another forty or fifty standing", thats the point when they'd put their pens down and ask you "and how fast did you say these trains of yours will be travelling ?"



You simply wouldn't get permisssion to run a railway if you had to apply for planning permission today.



Surely a scheduled service, like the once-per-hour five carriage train that runs down the length of the country from Aberdeen to Plymouth every day, should have the capability to monitor its capacity between its ten or twelve various sectors and when that capacity is full then refuse to book any more tickets and recommend that you choose a different time ?



You know, like airlines do ?



Virgin for instance ?

They don't, it is usually customers piling on to a train they haven't book on, imagine the uproar if the rail companies insisted on every customer booking a seat for every journey,

Why should it?

Imagine the uproar if they tried to do that at airports ?



Its just a mindset that allows a person to book one service and then do something completely different which no other sector seems to tolorate - if you booked car hire for Tuesday but turned up on Monday for it, booked a ticket for a theatre but went to the cinema instead with the same ticket, you'd be laughed at wouldn't you ?

I use the East Coast line pretty frequently and I've always been impressed with the service since EC took over from National Express.



Punctuality has never really been an issue (and the few delays I have experienced weren't the fault of EC) whilst services are clean and comfortable. I also have to say that, surprisingly, the First class service is a big improvement on National Express' efforts.



The only bugbear is that EC took away free WiFi in standard class - but they're hardly alone in charging for that.

I'm in complete agreement with you on inter-city services. The long-haul coach operators don't allow anyone to stand either. So we have airlines at one end of the spectrum and coaches at the other. In the middle there are the railways who get away with it (and many other elements of poor operational standards), simply because that's how it's always been