Just out of interest, do they actually kick Fort William people out at Edinburgh? I haven't used the sleeper for a while.
Yes, the operating arrangement is that on arrival at Edinburgh, the portion shunting is done and, at around 4.30am, Fort William seated passengers walk down the platform from the Aberdeen seats to the Fort William train.
You've misread what I said. Here I was talking about East Coast Trains's market, not about overnight services.
If there was to be an overnight service, as has been said before, it would be much slower, like the sleeper.
Sorry, I think I took the discussion to be about overnight services as that was where it was at the point you made your point.
There is a small market for overnight travel between London, Newcastle and Scotland which East Coast Trains could be part of. Until March 2020, I made a lot of overnight travel by coach and train. I contend that it is not a market which East Coast Trains have any chance at all of making money in.
Maybe there are certain times of year when they could but they aren't going to be able to do so with the lights turned down and their trains aren't going to have reclining seats because they are configured for daytime travel. I appreciate that, like the Glasgow to Edinburgh coaches, they could run for the short period of Edinburgh festival, for example. Year round, it just isn't going to be worth their while.
Again you have misinterpreted what I have said. By 'cheaper' I meant to the customer. The type of service I am talking about would be comparable to LNWR's London to Liverpool service or Southern's London to Southampton. I appreciate that demand for an overnight service would be low, but I am making a more general point about a slower lower spec service to compete with the intercity one, as in the two examples I have provided.
Cheaper to the customer means less revenue for the organisation providing the service.
Both the examples you mention make their money, if we assume they make money, by stringing together short distance capacity throughout the day on the relevant routes and have done so running fairly short trains to build the market. However, as 'Ianno87' wrote in another thread today,
'to some extent TOC-only fares are basically abstraction of revenue from one TOC to another. When it's now all ultimately the same DfT bottom line, that now makes less sense. There's only a few examples where it could be argued such fares actually generate more demand revenue / overall in a net industry sense.' There is a limit as to whether a slower lower-spec service on a route with a full service operator is actually a good use of paths.
In this thread, and others discussing the timetabling of the East Coast Trains service, it has been mentioned that it is shame their paths aren't quicker from a competitive point of view.
I was not aware of the fact that the sleeper seating coaches are subsidized, nor was I aware of the fact that they were cheaper. I had actually heard somewhere that they were usually more expensive, but what you are saying about it being cheaper makes a lot more sense to me. If this is the case then that is certainly the type of service that I am after, and there would be no need to run a separate service on its own.
Clearly, there isn't a separate subsidy for sleeper seating coaches from the subsidy for providing berths. While there are cheaper fares than £50 for travel between London and Scotland on day trains, I would have thought that, on average, £50 is broadly the average fare paid. That is roughly what the seated sleeper was pitched at, and the Caledonian Sleeper required a large subsidy even before March 2020.
If the discussion is about East Coast Trains operating overnight, then I don't think they are going to be able to offer cheaper fares just because they run an extra service overnight (and neither should we expect them to).
If the discussion is about the daytime services operated by East Coast Trains, then I wish them luck with their earlier first and later last services, but don't see why we should be expecting them to offer substantially cheaper fares than LNER.
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