Ok my thread is to do with Arriva's recent change of loco's on their Holyhead to Cardiff services..... What i cant understand is why they haven't replaced their 57's with the Voyagers from their Cross Country brand? Instead they went with RENTED 67's!!!!
I just wanna know what you guys think of it and should they have used Voyagers on the route?
Sam in an ideal world using hired in locomotives/stock when, on the face of it, XC have other more suitable stock does seem a tad preposterous.
However, we do not live in an ideal world and XC are governed by their franchise and contractual requirements to use that, seemingly more suitable stock, in a different way. That is before their internal commercial pressures and decisions are brought to bear which may play a part in helping the company select which stock is used on which route. We must also consider if the infrastructure is suitable for the use by Voyager trains and whether, or not, a relatively low speed, long distance, low passenger number rural route, is the best place to utilise scare 125mph capable units.
This, therefore, means that Arriva have little option to hire in stock to operate this service. So you see those good people at XC may well want to use their lovely voyager trains on the Welsh services but they are forbidden from doing so by the current franchising stipulations.
However, assuming that Arriva did use the XC Voyager fleet on their WAG services we generate another problem. What would XC use to replace their lovely Voyager trains on the core XC services?
In an ideal world the TOC would be incentivised to do this and select suitable rolling stock to a high standard from the numerous train builders (or even their own internal construction centre) without having to deal with a ROSCO. However, unfortunately, thanks to the fragmented nature of the privatised British Railway Network this is not the case. Stock levels have been cut so low that their simply isn’t the level of spare or stand by coaching stock that we once saw. This has had an impact on both operational flexibility and the potential to run new or improved services, such as the WAG.
Finally, as the WAG service is heavily subsidised by the Welsh Government it would be highly unlikely that any TOC would wish to take the commercial risk in operating such a service should that generous subsidy be removed. You see with out that subsidy in the harsh financial world in which we live (rather than the ideal world many people seem to occupy) there simply wouldn’t be the need for XC to transfer any stock as the service simply wouldn’t exist in the format it does today.