The story
Origins
As a consequence of the privatisation of British Rail during the mid 1990s, railway operations were segmented into various franchises, one of which being the South Western franchise. These franchises were awarded to various privately owned companies following an evaluation of competitive bids. During 1995, it was announced that the Director of Passenger Rail Franchising had awarded the South West Trains franchise to the Scottish transport group Stagecoach. Operations commenced on 4 February 1996, with South West Trains' first train, the 05:10 Twickenham to London Waterloo; it was the first privatised scheduled train to operate for 48 years.
In April 2001, the Strategic Rail Authority awarded Stagecoach a new franchise for the region, its bid having been judged to be superior to those from its rivals, FirstGroup / NedRailways and Sea Containers. The 2001 franchises awarded were (as promulgated) to run for twenty years; however, only one year later, the Strategic Rail Authority decided to reduce the duration of franchises, thus South West Trains was awarded a three-year franchise starting on 1 February 2004. Shortly following this award, SWT placed a substantial order for new rolling stock for the network, it was described as being the largest such order in British history.
During the early days of its franchise, SWT gained notoriety for enacting severe cuts to its services, which were typically attributed to the shortage of drivers; the company sought to remedy this by seeking to hire additional drivers. SWT also implemented significant improvements upon the network, including replacing much of the inherited British Rail-era rolling stock, along with the refurbishment of most stations, which included increasing their accessibility to disabled passengers. There was also an emphasis on the improving the customer experience, such as better access to service information. During the early 2000s, improvements included the introduction of new rail services and the reopening of Chandler's Ford station in Hampshire.
Changes
From May 2004, a smoking ban on all SWT services was introduced; this move, which came partly in response to a fire caused by a cigarette left next to an under-seat heater during the previous year that raised safety concerns, also pre-empting the public smoking ban that was introduced two years later. Additional staff were deployed onboard trains to help enforce the change. At the time, most other commuter services had already banned smoking, and the measure was claimed by the Evening Standard to be popular with the majority of the travelling public.
On 12 December 2004, the company completely recast its timetable, the first occasion that such an exercise had been performed in the South West region since 1967. This was reportedly motivated by ambitions to bring service provision into line with changing demand and to take into account the different characteristics of modern rolling stock. Within a year, the new timetable had delivered an increase in reliability and punctuality across the network, measured as a 12% improvement in the operator's Public Performance Measure. Further major changes to the timetable followed in subsequent years, including the restoration of services between Yeovil and Yeovil Pen Mill that had been withdrawn under the Beeching cuts.
During December 2005, the Department for Transport (DfT) announced that Arriva, FirstGroup, MTR/Sea Containers, National Express and Stagecoach had been shortlisted to tender for the new South Western franchise, which combined the South West Trains and Island Line Trains franchises; National Express later withdrew. In September 2006, the DfT awarded the franchise to Stagecoach, the new franchise starting on 4 February 2007, for a period of ten years.
Throughout the operation of the franchise, passenger numbers grew year on year, along with rapid spikes in numbers occurring in some years. While many franchises required government funding to sustain their services, SWT operated without any subsidies and was a profitable venture. This outcome was largely on account of the high proportion of commuters that made frequent use of its services. One of the franchise's major ongoing concerns was the overcrowding that occurred on some services, particularly around rush hour, thus SWT's management paid considerable attention to increasing capacity when feasible.
Major measures performed by SWT to expand the network's capacity included improvement works at London Waterloo station and the procurement of new rolling stock. Christian Roth, SWT's engineering director, claimed in 2015 that the firm was in the process of delivering similar capacity improvements to the Thameslink programme at a tenth of the cost and a quarter of the time. While some rival companies chose to pursue driver-only operated trains, eliminating the necessity of a guard, SWT senior manager Brian Souter promised to keep a guard on every service; one consequence of this agreement was strong relations between the company and the trade unions.
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Further measures were also proposed by SWT; Tim Shoveller, the company's managing director, periodically spoke out on his desire to eventually introduce double-decker trains to serve its busiest commuter routes. While typically viewed as an effective means of increasing capacity, such ambitions were complicated by multiple factors, the principal of which that there were no double-deck trains in operation that were believed to be suitable for SWT's needs, thus likely necessitating the development of an original design. Procuring a small fleet of bespoke rolling stock would certainly incur a steep price rise over conventional rolling stock, while handling the increased dwell times typically necessary when operating double-deck trains would also adversely impact the timetable; finally, no such rolling stock could be operated until the completion of track lowering across substantial portions of the network, particularly around bridges and tunnels, for sufficient headroom to be achieved.
Between 2012 and 2015, Stagecoach partnered with the British railway infrastructure owner Network Rail to jointly operate London Waterloo via a single management team that operated both tracks and trains in and around the station from a on-site joint control room. At the time, the partnership was hailed as an advancement for rail operations, However, the arrangement was dissolved in 2015 without any official explanation, although anonymous insiders claimed the cause to be Network Rail's reluctance to devolve power over its centralised infrastructure to individual routes, while Stagecoach desired local decisions to be made in partnership.
Demise
In March 2013, the Secretary of State for Transport announced the DfT was in talks with Stagecoach to extend the franchise until April 2019. At one point, it seemed certain that the franchise would be renewed, information to that effect having been included on the Government's published Rail Franchise Schedule in October 2014. However, in July 2015, Stagecoach confirmed that talks had failed and the franchise would be relet. This outcome was viewed by several industry commentators as being unexpected and inconvenient in its timing; the periodical Rail speculated that Stagecoach's rejection had been largely due to government officials feeling that the state was not receiving a sufficiently large share of the profits being generated.
Stagecoach and a FirstGroup / MTR Corporation joint venture were shortlisted on 4 February 2016 to bid for the new franchise. On 27 March 2017, the franchise was awarded to South Western Railway, in spite of concerns that it would result in a single company holding a monopoly on services between London and the West of England, Dorset and Somerset, due to FirstGroup also operating the Greater Western franchise in those regions.
From Wikipedia’s article on South West Trains, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3