Guardian: Passengers abandon northern flights for Virgin's [trains]

In September 2004, Virgin Trains' West Coast service had a 40% share of the London-Manchester market. Then everything changed.

Virgin rolled out new Pendolino trainsets, in a launch timed to coincide with new timetables that cut 35 minutes off the travel time between the 2 cities.

When those shiny new trains hit smoother, faster rails, guess what happened?

• Share rose to 60%, as reported in The Guardian
  
• Virgin West Coast's operating results improved and subsidy dropped--from 12.1 pence per passenger-km in 2003-04 to 3.3 pence per passenger-km in 2004-05.
  
• And the airlines are on the defensive. The regional carrier BMI saw its London-Manchester trade cut 26%.
  

What brought the speeds up and travel times down? A £7.6 billion public investment in the West Coast Main Line, the corridor that connects London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh. (PDF map here.)

That's billion with a B, and we're talking about pounds, not dollars. (Look up today's exchange rate here.)

And with these improvements in place, Virgin launched an ad campaign trumpeting "the return of the train." Download the MPG file of Virgin's TV commercial here.

Moral of the story: Where appropriate capital investment occurs, more travelers consider trains and more travelers choose them.