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Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has said that today’s announcement that the government will take over the running of the East Coast mainline is ‘common sense’ and a natural progression of the wider model that the government already has in place.
Grayling, known as ‘Il Dulce’ within his department, said today, “From the day Theresa May first addressed the cabinet, she insisted that, amongst other things, she would make the trains run on time and seemed keen to follow the example set by her Uncle Benito.”
As neither Stagecoach nor Virgin could make the line profitable, it is thought that the government will take an alternative stance, with carriages segregated in a similar way to the country.
First class carriages will be provided free for politicians, anyone who has met a member of the Royal Family and the BBC, proportionately downgrading through to tenth class, where nurses, members of the armed forces and the disabled will have to pay £5,000 per ticket, with a surcharge should they require access to the ‘toilet hole’.
However, Labour has criticised the move, saying that they would have separate trains for ethnic groups, especially the Jewish community, which would take a different route entirely.
Mr Grayling continued, “We will rebrand the trains so that people know that they are travelling on the new service. The new stock will be known as the ‘Fairly Adept, Somehow Competent, Intercity State Trains’, but will be shown as an acronym to save space.”
It is expected that public confidence for the project will be high, given the government’s excellent performance with the rest of the transport network, such as the immaculate state of the roads, despite minimal disruption due to roadworks and so on.
