South West Trains (SWT) is a train operating company in the United Kingdom owned by Stagecoach Group operating the South Western franchise.
It operates passenger services, mostly out of London Waterloo station, to the South West of London and in the counties of Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, Somerset, Berkshire, and Wiltshire and on the Isle of Wight. The area of operation, essentially the former South Western division of Network SouthEast, is also roughly that of the pre-1923 London and South Western Railway (excluding everything west of Exeter). The Stagecoach Group took over the franchise on the privatisation of British Rail in 1996 and retained it in 2004 and again in 2007 making it, along with First Great Western, the longest-running franchise. It is the largest passenger franchise in the UK and is a particularly complex operation due to the large number and variety of services.
Read more about South West Trains: History, Train Services, Routes, Performance, Rolling Stock Details, Criticism of South West Trains
Famous quotes containing the words south, west and/or trains:
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East,—to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them,—who were above such trifling.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)