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:
“These South savannahs may yet prove battle-fields.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)