There is now a new train company running through Sandy: First Capital Connect. This is rather a rubbish, overlong, and ambiguous if innocuous name. By my reckoning, First operate 6 services ‘connecting’ to the capital in some way. Still, it’s amusing to hear the announcers at King’s Cross stumbling over the name. I expect they were glad when the old franchisees, WAGN (West Anglia Great Northern) initially lost the West Anglian bit of their franchise, forcing announcers to say WAGN as a word or initials to prevent the name being a nonsence. They’re not laughing now. When I set up my own train operating company, I’m going to call it Red Lorry Yellow Lorry Rail or some such.
No dramatic changes yet. Although I notice that they were very quick to get their staff in new uniforms and the automated announcements (not used at Kings Cross) changed immediately. Either they dug that man who’s been doing the announcements across the south east for the last fifty years out of retirement or they’ve got some flashy voice sampling system going. The WAGN website has also disappeared very quickly. I wonder if FCC, as those of us in the know will no doubt start calling them, will change the livery of the trains and the stations as quickly. It took WAGN ages to do the latter, although I prefer their purple to FCC’s blue (you could have guessed that). As for the trains, the old ones have changed a lot, but the networkers are still mostly in British Rail Network Southeast colours.
Most importantly, I missed out on the FCC goodie bags yesterday as I came in late and my train came into platform one at King’s Cross. Damn.