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In the early hours of tomorrow morning 11/11/2007 the Cross Country Franchise transfers to Arriva.

The last 'official' through VXC service is the 17:46 Bournemouth to Manchester Piccadilly, scheduled arrival at 23:59, although the 19:24 Manchester Piccacilly to Southampton Central, scheduled arrival at 00:21, will be the last VXC from which passengers will alight.

All VXC services I have seen today have been de-branded and nameplates have been removed and many were also displaying on their front and rear destination displays, "VXC 1997 - 2007 R I P"

Hi

Not wishing to prejudge Arriva XC, it will be sad to see Virgin XC to go.

They where not a perfect franchise, but over the ten years of the franchise the improvement in the service and level of growth achieved puts most other franchises to shame!

The franchise finishes at 0200 tomorrow morning, not wanting to be predantic! ;D

Yes farewell Virgin. IMHO you did everything right apart from getting rid of the HSTs, replacing them with Voyagers and having an airline interior designer design the interiors. (Hull Trains and Midland Mainline show you that you can make something of them but I still dont like them)

Here's a pretty obvious prediction for you all. My guess is that in seven years time they will take Cross-Country back by which time IEP will be rolling out...lets hope they are more HST then Voyager!

Goodbye Virgin Cross Country.
The improvments they made were vast, so they were weren't perfect but they introduced new trains and a better timetable. They used to be the laughing stock with there poor punctuality and reliabilty now they put others to shame. A brilliant effort at transforming a forgotten network to a state of the art modern network.

As much stick as the Voyagers get they're much better than most of the units in this part of the country. Kudos to Virgin for demonstrating how to run a franchise with new rolling stock, role model staff and still turn over a profit.

VXC is actually heavilly subsidised!

Whoever runs the XC franchise will need as subsidy. It is arguably the most important franchise in the country because it 'glues' the rail network together and if anything needs expanding to include more routes.

Instead over the past few years routes have been cut with more to come next year  :(

Its goodbye (and hello) to several others as well (link below.)
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=4686.msg8555#msg8555

I stand by a previous post that I made in this forum and believe that XC is a drain on the Taxpayer! It should have been disbanded and split between other operators, more government money for other improvements then.

More in the links below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7089398.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/7089597.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7090232.stm

Here is a link showing the new Arriva Cross Country Livery which , I notice from other forums , has been far from universally welcomed.
http://www.crosscountrytrains.co.uk/AboutCrossCountry/News.aspx

They were quick off the ball painting that. It looks strange  :-\. I don't like the pink though, no way nere as good as FGW's new livery.

Looks quite nice!

Why are the residents of SW England imposed to boarding trains through pink doors  :-\

The problem with all other main line operators is that they favour routes to London and forget about the rest of the country.

Virgin XC virtually tripled the customer base during their tenure. Their franchise agreement with the government included a significant subsidy to improve the service by replacing poor rolling stock and adding routes. This they did, and should not be criticised for it.

Finally, the government has decided to to reduce the subsidy to zero, and Arriva have agreed to run the franchise on that basis, and to increase capacity. It will be interesting to see if they can do it!

An Arriva Cross Country advert , sorry article from this is Somerset (link below.)
http://thisissomerset.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=147472&command=displayContent&sourceNode=243687&home=yes&more_nodeId1=242222&contentPK=18949484

Our of interest, do VT still operate some XC routes?

just National rail picks up the ones from scotland as VT trains still

Erm - Yes and no.

Until the timetable change they are jointly run between Glasgow and Manchester/Brum (i think) and as a reslt are either advertised as Virgin or AXC. This is until TPEx take over the running of Glasgow - Manchester with 100mph units (whats the DafT up to here???)

At the moment services between Birmingham and Glasgow/Manchester are jointly operated by AXC and Virgin West Coast, although Arriva list all services in there timetable. From December AXC services won't run via Preston to Glasgow/Edingburgh only as far as Manchester. VWC will operate between Birmingham and Glasgow/Edingburgh using 5-car SuperVoyagers. Also Holyhead-London will only operate using SuperVoyagers. So AXC are losing some 5-Car SuperVoyagers so 4-Car Voyagers will operate on other routes.

that explains it then.

i do hope the daft see the mistake they made in not renewing the xc franchise for virgin, and that they get it back come the next renewal, as they did a superb job