VIRGIN DEMISE
IT WAS at the end of November 2019 when I found myself on the concourse of Euston station ready to take my last trip on Virgin Trains. An array of the now familiar red tilting trains was waiting to ply its trade: 10.20 to Manchester, 10.23 to Birmingham New Street (for Shrewsbury), 10.30 to Glasgow Central, 10.36 to Blackpool North, and by 10.40 and 10.43 it was time for the next clockface, 20 minute-frequency departures to those first two cities, the 10.43 running forward to Edinburgh. Had it really been 22 years since fanfares had heralded the entry of Richard Branson’s global brand name into the gladiatorial forum otherwise known as British railway passenger operation?
Virgin Trains was never an organisation known for understatement and, as such, it had a tendency to hype expectations that resulted in criticism if there was disappointment. Those early years were dogged by poor punctuality, often caused by the unresponsive infrastructure provider, Railtrack. When failure did occur, blame was often deflected towards decades of neglected maintenance under the nationalised emblem of British Railways, whereas the structural deficiency of having a monopolistic provider of track, signalling and overhead electrical supply was often to blame.
Arguably, the greatest single mistake of Virgin Trains in those early years was the decision to re-equip the cross-country arm of the franchise with shorter trains than those they were to replace. Despite improved frequencies, seating capacity was insufficiently increased. In the scenario where two Class 220 four-car ‘Voyagers’ an hour might replace a barely hourly 2+7 HST, seating capacity was actually slightly lower. In an hour where say a Class 220 and a Class 221 five-car ‘Voyager’ replaced a seven-coach loco-hauled formation, the increase was still only about 20%. Even such a boost failed to recognise that passengers would crowd onto a small train at times of peak demand, regardless of there being another train 30 minutes later, or to identify that British Rail handled such weekly and seasonal situations by wheeling out
