Who are Virgin Trains being taken over by?
Avanti West Coast
Avanti West Coast has taken over from Virgin Trains as the operator running the West Coast Main Line. The new operator’s parent company is a partnership between Aberdeen-based firm FirstGroup and Italy’s Trenitalia.
Is Virgin Trains closing down?
Virgin Trains has waved goodbye to its passengers, making its last trip after 22 years and almost 500 million journeys. Its routes have now been taken over by Avanti West Coast, which has pledged to deliver a range of passenger enhancements, including new trains and 263 more weekly services by 2022.
Is there a shop on Virgin Trains?
Virgin Trains on Twitter: “The onboard shop is in Coach C, one of our Standard coaches ^CB… “
Are Virgin Trains still running to Manchester?
Virgin Trains in Manchester will come to the end of their journey – after 22 years – just before midnight on December 7.
Why has virgin changed to Avanti?
Avanti is the Italian word meaning “forward”. According to First Rail’s managing director Steve Montgomery, the brand was chosen to ”enshrine the type of forward-thinking operation we intend to run”. He said the new train operator will “generate national prosperity and pride”.
Will Virgin Trains ever come back?
In December 2018, it was announced that Virgin Trains had been granted a one-year extension until March 2020. In August 2019 it was announced that the Inter-City West Coast franchise had been awarded to Avanti West Coast, thus confirming that Virgin Trains would cease to operate trains after 7 December 2019.
Why are Virgin Trains closing?
The end of the franchise comes after Virgin Group and Stagecoach had their bid to continue running trains on the line disqualified by the Department for Transport (DfT) in April because they did not meet pension rules. The companies are suing the DfT over its decision.
Who owns Virgin?
Virgin Group
Virgin Travel Group Limited
Virgin Atlantic/Parent organizations
Richard Branson is Founder of the Virgin Group. Virgin is one of the world’s most irresistible brands and has expanded into many diverse sectors from travel to telecommunications, health to banking and music to leisure. Having started Virgin as a mail order record retailer in 1970, Richard founded Virgin Records.
What happened to all the Virgin Trains?
Virgin Trains, which began serving the West Coast Main Line in 1997, is being replaced by Avanti West Coast. Almost 500 million journeys have been made with Virgin Trains, which is co-owned by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and Stagecoach.
Why did Virgin Trains lose the franchise?
At the time, Branson said he was ‘devastated’ by the decision, which resulted in the distinctive Virgin-branded trains disappearing from the network in December. Virgin and Stagecoach lost the East Coast Main Line franchise in 2018, which was nationalised after they ran into financial difficulties.
Why did Virgin Trains shutdown?
How much profit did Virgin Trains make?
Since the start of the franchise in April 2018, Virgin Rail paid a total of £504million to the taxpayer, through a combination of franchise, revenue share and profit share payments. Virgin Rail’s profit for the year ended 31 December 2019, after taxation, amounted to £39million (2018: £44million).
Who is the guy in the Virgin Trains advert?
An early series took the tagline “Business brains take Virgin Trains” and centred on a hapless executive played by Rik Mayall, who refused to take Virgin Trains in favour of his car, getting into a series of misadventures along the way.
What was the net profit of Virgin Rail?
Yet Branson and his shareholders could declare a cumulative net profit of £538m and trouser £499m in total dividends. No wonder some canny infants like to play with train sets. These sums are what got Virgin interested in rail in the first place.
What did Shriti Vadera say about Virgin Rail?
The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by “thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind”. And as a former investment banker, she’d know what those looked like. But the Virgin boss also loves to shout about the virtues of private ownership of public good.
Which is the only train operator to advertise on TV?
Virgin Trains has been a consistent on-screen advertiser, the only train operator to make such a sustained effort. But its Big Train series of TV spots from the mid-2000s were cartoon-y and self-consciously humorous, with twee sound effects.