Good morning. The crisis facing the rail franchising system in Britain has worsened after Stagecoach, Virgin and the French rail group SNCF began legal action against the Department for Transport. A consortium made up of the three companies was disqualified last month from bidding for the contract to operate the West Coast franchise, which includes trains from London Euston to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Scotland as well as High Speed 2 services in the future, in a row about who would take on billions of pounds of staff pension liabilities. Stagecoach, one of Britain’s biggest transport groups, has already started legal action over being disqualified from the East Midlands franchise and has confirmed this morning that it has issued a high court claim together with…

Source: The Times May 24, 2019 08:04 UTC