...same as the old boss, to quote the wonderful Who.

Last night, I was aiming for the 1820, which I could probably have caught if I wanted to stand. Both it and the 1833 had the 'Reservations in coach X are in Y' note, which usually means it's a carriage short, and seats are at a premium. Not being in overmuch of a hurry, I caught the 1837 FCC instead.

Got the 0640 this morning, and... well...

It was a train. It left P'boro the usual minute or so late, got in around about 0733, there was a trolley, there were crew, no-one inspected my ticket, no-one stopped people leaving from the first-class end of the buffet car, I didn't have the leg/seat room to use the laptop, but the mobile phone picked up the WiFi just fine.

The Brave New NXEC World isn't that different, really.

(Relax, I'm not going to be blogging every single journey!)

(Edit: hah. well, not for long. The 1530 today? No reservations at all.)

Mixed. That's the best word to discribe my first experience with NXEC yesterday. The mornings trial and tribulations are well detailed in my last post but the trip home was much better. Not perfect, just better.

I caught the 16.10 to get home so I could watch my sons nativity play (Peter Kay would have been proud of that comic performance) and decided to see if the rumours were true that the Wifi was indeed free in Std. It was and for the first time ever, it worked for me throughout the journey. Everything else was pretty much the same as GNER - Warm beer, no trolley service, some tit fer brains trying to argue with the guard that his ticket was valid on that service when clearly it wasn't. You know the sort of thing? We did however leave and arrive on time which was the 2nd bonus.

This morning was no better of worse than yesterday PM. If the chit chat on the platform is anything to go by, word is getting round Std class the the Wifi is now free (which is going down a storm with the poor folk) but we're going to be paying for it through inflation busting increases to fares (which isn't going down too well). Nobody seems to like the proposed livary and most seem to be sceptical that NXEC are going to be able to deliver on their promises to improve punctuality and reliability. Time will tell.

For some reason this blog was one of the 'Featured Blogs' on blog.co.uk yesterday. I've no idea why or how but we were. You can also google both GNER and NXEC and we appear on page one of the returns. Again. Don't know why and how but we do. Visitors and page views on this site are also rising which I find odd since neither I, Platform6 or Penfold could be described as serial bloggers over the last 3 months. We've been lucky to put one post a week on here between us.