First post here so apologies if I've put it in the wrong place or the formatting is incorrect.
I was wondering earlier about which franchises are the hardest, or easiest, to manage. There's obviously a large range of factors affecting this - passenger volume, character of areas served, extent of operations, interactions with other freight and passenger operators, mixes of services, infrastructure quality, availability of rolling stock, political considerations etc...
To kick things off, I'll give two examples which jump to mind:
Hardest:
Northern. Covers a huge area, with a wide variety of lines and services - long-distance (Blackpool-York), commuter (CLC), semi-rural (Tyne Valley), rural (Esk Valley) - and a multitude of stock, hemmed in by inadequate infrastructure and highly complex interactions with other operators, especially TPE and with freight (and even light rail) in certain areas.
Easiest:
C2C (Essex Thameside is the name of the franchise I think). Essentially a pair of glorified, electrified branch lines, operating almost all of its own stations and catering largely for traffic into London in the morning and out of London in the evening.
I was wondering earlier about which franchises are the hardest, or easiest, to manage. There's obviously a large range of factors affecting this - passenger volume, character of areas served, extent of operations, interactions with other freight and passenger operators, mixes of services, infrastructure quality, availability of rolling stock, political considerations etc...
To kick things off, I'll give two examples which jump to mind:
Hardest:
Northern. Covers a huge area, with a wide variety of lines and services - long-distance (Blackpool-York), commuter (CLC), semi-rural (Tyne Valley), rural (Esk Valley) - and a multitude of stock, hemmed in by inadequate infrastructure and highly complex interactions with other operators, especially TPE and with freight (and even light rail) in certain areas.
Easiest:
C2C (Essex Thameside is the name of the franchise I think). Essentially a pair of glorified, electrified branch lines, operating almost all of its own stations and catering largely for traffic into London in the morning and out of London in the evening.