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UK: Alliance Rail Holdings has started industry consultation on proposals to launch an open access passenger service on the Southampton - London Waterloo route in December 2017.

Managing Director Ian Yeowart told Railway Gazette on November 8 that Alliance aims is to increase capacity on the intensively-used route and make passengers' journeys 'less fraught', by offering a higher standard of comfort than on the current franchised services and helping to enhance rail's overall attractiveness.

Alliance envisages that there would be seven off-peak services a day, calling at Eastleigh, Winchester, Basingstoke and Hook. Two peak services would be added from December 2018, once a major upgrading project has created extra capacity at London Waterloo station. The peak service might not call at Basingstoke, as Alliance believes there is strong demand for travel into London from stations further out.

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More confusion for the passenger. will the fares be the same?

What about season tickets would they be interchangeable.

offering a higher standard of comfort than on the current franchised services

If that's their intended USP, and they can get paths on such a busy part of the network, I would have thought they would be better off with London-Portsmouth than London-Southampton. The latter as far as I know has services which are reliably worked by relatively high quality class 444s, whereas there have been complaints (fairly well-documented) from Portsmouth passengers about the use of class 450s (possibly even on fast services, can anyone confirm?)

UK: The Office of Rail & Road has rejected Alliance Rail Holdings’ application for track access rights which would enable it to launch an open access passenger service between London Waterloo and Southampton Central.

Arriva subsidiary Alliance had applied to operate nine trains each way per day under the Grand Southern brand, calling at Wimbledon, Hook, Basingstoke, Winchester and Eastleigh.

Announcing its decision to the reject the application on August 1, ORR said the ex-British Rail Class 442 electric multiple-units which Alliance had hoped to use were no longer available, and the would-be operator had no developed proposal for alternative stock which would enable it to launch the service if the application were approved.

Infrastructure manager Network Rail had said capacity was ‘technically’ available for the proposed services, and ORR believed that there would have been some passenger benefits from competition with franchised operator South Western Railway. However, ORR was not convinced that the benefits outweighed the risk that the additional services might impact on performance on the South Western Main Line.