Goodbye GNER

It escaped my attention until today when I purchased my return ticket for after Christmas from Stevenage to Leeds that the London-Leeds service is no longer operated by GNER. This certainly hadn’t been a very well publicised change and I guess there was no reason for it to be.

It must be said though that personally I felt GNER ran a very good service. Their trains were comfortable, they operated service on board in a very traditional manor and were one of the first UK operators to enable Wi-Fi on board all of their trains, a boon for technical people like myself. I know GNER weren’t without their critics (including those who claimed they were consistently late running, although I never personally found this), but I will miss them.

The service is now operated by National Express East Coast

 

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5 Comments

  1. Norman Said,

    December 14, 2007 @ 3:41 pm

    I noticed the change the other day myself when Liz got the train back to Lincoln.

    Apparently National Express East Coast now offer free wireless on all their East Coast mainline services. Whch is nice.

  2. Liz Said,

    December 16, 2007 @ 5:08 pm

    Yeah, as Norm said I caught the train back home the other day and was trying to buy my ticket from GNER and then discoverd that National Express had taken over.
    To be fair I had heard on the local news that NE would be taking over the east coast line, but I had no idea if that was the train to Leeds or not!
    Its pretty much the exact same train cept with NE written on the side an not GNER! But you get free WiFi in First Class and Standard, its a bit crappy but its ok I guess!
    But as Norm pointed out, they’ll probably up the ticket prices since htey need to pay for the free WiFi somehow .. :S

  3. Kieran Said,

    December 16, 2007 @ 6:37 pm

    That is of course the problem, free wi-fi, staff retraining, colour changes, sign changes, website changes, etc. etc. doesn’t come cheap now does it *sigh*

  4. Liz Said,

    December 21, 2007 @ 2:04 am

    Not at all my dear! It already costs £26 from Leeds to Lincoln return. I think its only £1 cheaper single!
    Gah!

  5. Kieran Said,

    January 3, 2008 @ 1:25 pm

    Ah well thats good to know.

    I traveled back to Leeds on the new provider a few days ago and I have to say there is no difference in service really. I guess I shouldn’t have expected there to be, after all they are using the same staff and the same trains, lol

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