Under the DfT we have the situation where both Scotland to London routes are controlled by Stagecoach and both Yorkshire to London routes are controlled by Stagecoach.
Damn right the current franchising model isn't working.
Neil Williams said:
The service on the WCML is light years ahead of what it was in BR days, in terms of all of speed, quality and frequency. InterCity West Coast was terrible; I am old enough to remember it (many on here aren't).
Whilst I agree with you, I don't see why that is relevant.
Virgin West Coast were just as bad in the first few years of privatisation, given that it was the same trains running the same route; the only thing that changes was Branson knowingly left no price ungouged.
The West Coast modernisation had precious little to do with Virgin, and would have happened under any operator. Indeed it might even have been cheaper under another operator, as Railtrack wouldn't have had Branson fleecing them for billions in "compensation", all of which ended up in the Cayman Islands without passing go and certainly without making it into the pockets of the passengers who were
actually inconvenienced.
I agree Open Access is primarily abstractive. To me on rail competition is a fallacy, and the railway is better acting as one to compete against the car.
Except the evidence is rail fares are lower where there are competing TOCs than where there aren't, and when the competing TOCs are "simplified" then fares rise rapidly. We saw that when Great Eastern and Anglia were merged on Ipswich-Colchester-London, we're about to see it now Thameslink and Southern have been merged on Brighton-London, and we saw it in reverse when WAGN was split in two and there started to be competition on the Cambridge-London route.
I've also seen it, more anecdotally, travelling from London to Yorkshire. It is now all but impossible to get cheap tickets on East Midlands Trains to Leeds now that Stagecoach have both routes, whereas before EMT were a sure-fire way of getting to London cheaply.
The fact is that "the car" isn't a competitor and, even if it is, it has no influence on either pricing or service quality. The only thing that influences prices and quality is competition. We saw that on the ECML when Grand Central started; suddenly East Coast decided that running York-London non-stop was important again, and it has knocked 20 minutes off the journey time from Newcastle to London.