Achievements
- In December 2008, London Midland began operating more services, with more seats, including introducing direct services between London and Birmingham and a new service connecting London, Northampton and Trent Valley stations.
- December 2009 saw the introduction of the Watford shuttle - extra peak-time services for passengers travelling into London from Watford, Bushey and Harrow. This has enabled our longer distance services into London to be quicker and have more available seats.
- Better stations - we are investing £11.5 million in improving our stations. Work has already started on extending car parks, increasing security, and keeping them cleaner and tidier.
- New trains - our fleet of four-car state-of-the-art Class 350/2 electric Desiro trains and two and three car class 172 diesel trains represents an investment of over £270m in new rolling stock.
- Responding to passengers - as well as our monthly Meet the Managers sessions at London Euston and Birmingham Snow Hill stations, we now actively engage through our award winning London Midland twitter account, @londonmidland.
Better services
London Midland's new services between London and Birmingham, along with a number of other key services which the franchise is based around began in December 2008. Key features of the timetable included:
- Direct London Euston - Birmingham services
- New direct services connecting stations along the Trent Valley, Staffordshire and the north west with London
- A new timetable for the Birmingham-Northampton route
- Liverpool became London Midland's northern focus with trains operating half hourly between Birmingham and Liverpool including Saturdays
- Extra evening and weekend services in the West Midlands
- More carriages for commuter trains into London Euston
- Improvements to the connections to the West Coast Mainline from the Abbey and Marston Vale branch lines
- Extra services from London Euston to Crewe
- Increased off-peak and evening frequency on the Walsall - Rugeley line, plus direct links at Rugeley Trent Valley to the new London Midland London services along the Trent Valley
Better stations
- Refurbishments to all of our stations, including major upgrades at Milton Keynes Central, Northampton, Watford Junction and Birmingham Snow Hill as part of our £11.5m investment
- A start made on providing more than 3,000 extra parking spaces
- Better electronic information boards
- Ticket machines and help points at all our stations, connected to a 24-hour information centre
- More cycle storage at 22 stations
- A significant increase in stations being made more accessible for wheelchairs, part of our annual £250,000 investment
- 80% of our customers will travel through our stations that have Secure Station Accreditation, meeting police-approved standards
- New CCTV systems at 29 stations
- Introduction of the London Midland Task Force, a combination of London Midland staff, security personnel and British Transport Police to target crime and disorder across the network
New trains
- Our new £190 million fleet of four-carriage Desiros is at the heart of our new West Coast Main Line service.
- We have refurbished most of our existing fleet of trains – Class 153s, Class 323s, and Class 170s – to make them smarter and more reliable.
- Almost all our trains use regenerative braking, recycling heat from brakes, saving energy and helping the environment.
- We are in talks with the government over many of the trains we will receive when it redistributes rolling stock between companies.
Responding to passengers
- Meet the Manager sessions at main stations so passengers can meet company Directors to make their views known.
- The roll out of our Passenger Panel.
- Loading sensors on our trains, so we know immediately where more carriages are most needed.
- Information at stations on how busy specific services are.
- Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) for passenger-facing staff, keeping them informed.
