With all due respect, from someone who used National Express East Anglia for 2-3 years on a work placement, they were woeful, and much worse than the combination of First and Anglia Railways that they replaced. The new investment in Stansted Express is actually being made by the government rather than National Express itself, so is a red herring of sort.

Part of the congestion, particuarly in the Ipswich area is directly due to the timetable they ripped out when they got the franchise ripping out 2x4 high capacity trains an hour running between London and Ipswich, and replacing them with 1x3 car low capacity DMU which ran the much longer distance of Lowestoft/Peterborough Via Ipswich to London. alongside the 2x Class 90 and MK3 sets that run between Norwich and London an hour. Their idea of improving capacity is to reimplement parts of the timetable there was prior to them coming in.

Their recent refurbishments of the fleet in East Anglia have been very much the cheapest I have seen. The MK3's barely look to have had anything done to them apart from a new seat cloth, and new wall cloth and curtains. If you look at what everyone else has done to similar rolling stock you will see National Express East Anglia very much has the worst one and they have abandoned all plans to do an interior refurb of some of their EMU's (321's) in favour of an exterior only refurb. They spent 10k each on their class 156 trains recently - 10x less than the ones in Scotland have had spent on them.

The thing with C2C is it's pretty much a strech of line with no other companies operating on, and pretty quiet strech of line at that so obviously it's going to be much easier to run a success there, combine that with the modern rolling stock bought by Prism Rail before National Express took it over and it's pretty hard to run it badly

I have to say though this comes as no surprise. As I have posted out on these boards before, National Express is by far the worst of the big four transport companies in the UK. This is good news for all passengers who use their services as they have been cost cutting and doing things on the cheap for longer than I can care to remember. National Express is a take all and invest nothing company, if ever there is investment that needs making, they will always ask for others to do so. For that reason, and that reason alone, this is very good news for UK taxpayers, whilst Virgin and First etc have their faults, least they actually invest.

It is companies like National Express that make people want the railways renationalised, there are some very good franchises out there who have improved the UK's railways, but unfortunately we also have the likes of National Express, who are far worse than British Rail ever was in the same area.

Edited 2 times by Dublin Commuter 07 01/07/2009 11:23:12.