Pan Up
Over 6,000 new vehicles on order. If it was Network Rail buying them, that would be ‘the most since Victorian times’, certainly the most since the Modernisation Plan in the 1960s when steam was displaced in haste. Today the driver is capacity, which can now be bought at reasonable cost. Suddenly the winning number on the carefully-audited franchise spreadsheet comes from new trains, but have we thought through the consequences? Of course not, it’s a spreadsheet.
INDIFFERENCE
This is not all about the rolling stock leasing companies (ROSCOs), but let’s get them out of the way first as the most obvious losers. So who cares if these bankers lose a load of money? Some will be delighted, having been on the receiving end of 20 years of no choice. Now there are new sources of finance, untainted by experience of the UK market, and seemingly unwilling to draw the comparison between early scrapping of someone else’s stock and the expected life of your new stock.
The three ROSCOs were set up as the minimum number to create competition and, since we have that competition now in the open finance market, they are all vulnerable to sale or merger. They have all been bought and sold a few times over the years, …
