Virgin CrossCountry

Virgin CrossCountry was a train operating company in Great Britain, part of Virgin Trains, from January 1997 until 11 November 2007. The company's operations were former InterCity services centred on Birmingham New Street, operating across the country (but usually avoiding London).

History
The franchise was the first of two awarded to Richard Branson's Virgin Group in 1997; the group later sold a 49% stake to the Stagecoach Group. The company inherited a fleet from British Rail which dated largely from the 1960s and 1970s. An important franchise commitment was the replacement of these trains, which happened in 2001 when the new Voyager and Super Voyager trains entered service. However, by this stage, the company had acquired a poor reputation for reliability with passengers. In September 2002, Virgin launched Operation Princess, a new timetable launched to coincide with its new trains, which were meant to solve the reliability problems blamed on the elderly rolling stock. The new timetable proved difficult to operate and cutbacks to services were ordered by the government's Strategic Rail Authority. Some destinations, were eliminated from the Cross Country network altogether, while others saw considerable reductions in services. Many of these changes reversed some of Virgin's earlier expansions.



Fate
The Virgin Cross Country franchise finished on 11 November 2007 as part of reshuffle of franchises which primarily affected the Midlands. A new CrossCountry franchise was created, incorporating the majority of Virgin's Cross Country services, along with some former Central Trains "Citylink"services. However, services between Birmingham New Street, Glasgow Central and Edinburgh via the West Coast Main Line were transferred to the West Coast franchise, and thus continue to be operated by Virgin, while services between Manchester Piccadilly, Glasgow and Edinburgh were transferred to First TransPennine Express in December 2007. These services have subsequently been extended to serve Manchester Airport.

The Department for Transport (DfT) announced on 19 September 2006 that four parties had pre-qualified for the new franchise, including Virgin. On 10 July 2007, it was announced that Arriva had been awarded the Cross-Country franchise, from 11 November 2007 until April 2016. Virgin sought an "early meeting with the DfT" in order to obtain an explanation for their bid being unsuccessful.

Operation Princess
In September 2002, Virgin Trains employee Paul, Trains Manager launched Operation Princess, the new timetable was introduced to coincide with the introduction of the new Voyager and SuperVoyager fleet and to create a 'string of pearls' network with shorter trains running more frequently. However the new fleet suffered from a number of technical faults which coupled with infrastructure and capacity issues led to endless problems for Virgin. Between September 2002 and January 2003 punctuality fell to 54.1%, it was therefore agreed with the Strategic Rail Authority that certain services would be cut to improve performance and increase capacity on the core network.

When Operation Princess was launched in September 2002 the Cross Country network served these destinations:

When the franchise came to an end in 2007 the network had been stripped back to serve the following core destinations:

Fleet
Latterly, the Virgin CrossCountry routes were operated by Class 220 Voyagers and Class 221 Super Voyagers. These were introduced in 2001 to replace the High Speed Train fleet that had been so successful at building passenger traffic on these routes, but was over 20 years old. They also replaced the elderly Class 47s and Class 86s. The principal differences between the Voyager and Super Voyager fleet are that the Super Voyager usually consists of five carriages rather than the Voyager's four, and like the Class 390 Pendolino can tilt when going around curves in order to allow higher speeds. This means that Super Voyager units have significantly more sophisticated bogies than Voyagers.