Not everyone wants to work for a TOC, you're right you CAN'T say its going to be fantastic because you dont know anything about them. No one other than the handful working for them can comment here.
This mighty TOC vs OAO underdog attitude is getting really boring.
Compare this to airline, Virgin and BA being the mighty TOC and Jet2/Easyjet being the underdog... I can tell you now which ones (in my opinion) are better to work for now, and its certainly not the traditional companies.
Comparing airlines (all truly private companies) with TOCs and OAA misses the fundamental difference between them. I’m not sure why there are people on this forum who seem to think they know better than those in the industry.
I have no axe to grind here. I couldn’t care less about OA because I don’t work for one, and never plan to. Theoffer worse Ts and Cs, less pay, less security than the TOC I currently drive for! But the purpose of this forum is to advise prospective applicants who are new to the industry and might not appreciate those differences.
As has been said above, if someone is desperate to get into the industry and cannot do so any other way then perhaps it’s worth considering. But I would caution against it, and at the moment wouldn’t necessarily want to take the leap if I was coming from an already safe and established career like many railway applicants are (police force, etc.).
Hull and East Coast trains are part of First, there are plenty of opportunities if you want to move around you dont just have to stay within the same TOC to do it.
Also both Hull and. GC have been going for some time now, 20yrs for HT and around 14yrs for GC.. I'd say theyre fairly secure, we need to get away from thinking just because you're franchised you're safer.
They might be run as ringfenced parts of the wider ownership group, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same! First group TOCs haven’t ceased operations for months at a time.
The simple fact is both open access operators have both made redundancies and furloughed workers during the pandemic. TOCs have not (at least not front line safety critical workers).
Not quite right in this case, being an new company there is ZERO people already doing the job at the minute so there will be a big intake over several courses, and of course being a smaller fairly unheard of company the numbers applying are probably less than the large numbers applying for a handful of positions with say LNER.
Probably best we stop being negative about ECT and come back in a year and see how they're getting on.
I doubt numbers per place are all that much lower, for trainee driver roles especially. Most who know enough to sign up to TOC websites will also know about OA.
There’s a clear theme emerging from these threads, which is that open access TOCs are praying on the naivety of applicants. Candidates are clearly being fed a load of corporate flannel about how OA is “disruptive”, “new and fresh”, “modern” etc. with Union membership actively being discouraged etc. All any of that means is that things will be worse for employees overall. It’s simply delusional to think otherwise.