The Government have announced today that they will be splitting up the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern franchise in 2021, and consulting on a new West of England franchise.
This is not before time, we all know that the GTR franchise has been a complete disaster and the operators are clearly not up to the job of running it. Hopefully by splitting it up we will have smaller companies focussing on their passengers not an enormous franchise trying to please all of the people all of the time.
In my opinion this has long been what is needed but I am disappointed that the Government are waiting until 2021 to split the franchise up. However I do appreciate that the Government wants to see the improvement plans finished before splitting up the franchise, as they do not want to cause additional delays.
Read more here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/strategic-vision-for-rail
