Future
It was announced in December 2011 that when the franchise is renewed in 2013, all services that FCC run will continue in the new Thameslink franchise and be merged with the Southern franchise when that ends.
The Department for Transport has announced that at the conclusion of the Southern franchise in July 2015, the South Central franchise will be merged into the Thameslink Great Northern franchise to form a Thameslink Southern Great Northern franchise.
On 29 March 2012 the Department for Transport announced Abellio, First, Govia, MTR and Stagecoach have been shortlisted for the new franchise.
The Invitation to Tender was to have been issued in October 2012, with the successful bidder announced in Spring 2013. However in the wake of the InterCity West Coast refranchising process collapsing, the government announced in October 2012 that the process would be put on hold pending the results of a review.
Read more about this topic: First Capital Connect
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The difference between Pound and Whitman is not between the democrat who in deep distress could look hopefully toward the future and the fascist madly in love with the past. It is that between the woodsman and the woodcarver. It is that between the mystic harking back to his vision and the artist whose first allegiance is to his craft, and so to the reality it presents.”
—Babette Deutsch (1895–1982)
“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone
That science may have staked the future on?
He seems to say the reason why so much
Should come to nothing must be fairly faced.....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)