The following email from Managing Director David Horne was sent to all Virgin Trains East Coast staff.

Hello team, 

As you know we've been in discussions with the DfT for some months now and they're going well. 

I updated you recently about the Secretary of State's (SoS) announcement on 5 February 2018 around the future of the franchise, and in this statement he also commended the great job we've done to keep our customers happy. 

For the moment we're experimenting with automatic ad placement on this site. This is where Google Adsense places the ads in the most optimum location. We'll be monitoring it over the next week or so to see whether they're more obtrusive, they may appear in some odd places to begin with.

In the blog 'Why we have ads on this site' (basically we don't make much off them but they cover our website running costs and also give us the chance to run the occasional prize draws).

A look at railcards available to anyone...

When Crossrail announced they were doing a 'behind the hoardings' event for Canary Wharf station I had to take a look. The event was free but required pre-booking and space was limited. I couldn't get my preferred timeslot as it ran out within minutes of going live but fortunately I did manage to get another time. The event was held on 28 February 2018 which had heavy snow throughout the UK but it wasn't severe enough in London to call off the event so an email was sent round confirming it was still happening. It did mean queuing for a few minutes outside in the cold though.

It's not uncommon for companies to give special offers to encourage new customers or indeed to win back former customers but there is a major issue with the way Virgin Trains East Coast handles this. They only appear to care about attracting new customers (even if they're just occasional customers on very cheap fares) and neglecting those who travel regularly even if they're spending a lot.

A lot of 2017 was spent covering the failings of Virgin Trains East Coast. It's easy to forget that they did some good things too. Let's look at some of the positives.

Hop on Board

After GNER stopped selling bottled guest ales in 2002 there's not been anything in the way of interesting beer on board. On the west coast Virgin Trains had partnered with a local brewery to make Tilting Ale and so it was nice to see Virgin Trains East Coast come up with Hop on Board brewed by Rudgate Brewery in the Vale of York.

Although Stagecoach were quick to issue a statement after this week's news that their franchise was in trouble, we've not heard anything so far from Virgin. Although Virgin only own 10% of Virgin Trains East Coast they're always happy to take the credit when things are going well and also act as the face of the company when some publicity is needed.

What we'd like to see from a new East Coast

It's time to ensure that going forward the East Coast franchise needs to remember to be more customer focused. Although it's easy to think of the VTEC route as a captive market there's actually a lot of competition.

The future of VTEC

At the moment there's a lot of information going round saying that Stagecoach can't meet their financial obligations with Virgin Trains East Coast (VTEC) but it's difficult to accurately comment until we get further information.

Cycling on Virgin Trains

This is about Virgin Trains West Coast. I normally write about East Coast but this is the blog section and I can be off topic. My blog post about bikes on Virgin Trains East Coast actually talked about the booking engine (which has sadly been replaced) more than the actual experience of taking the bike on the train. As that was my first trip taking my bike on a train I had nothing else to compare it to.