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:
“The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.”
—James Baldwin (19241987)
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (18921983)
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)