LNER

Good.

I don't really want to see an LNER train riding through, you know.

So I thought that was good.

I liked that.

mean? And I'm there with my watch going, oh, come on, let me pay you this.

Literally last week on LNER, on my way down from Edinburgh to London, so when I'm travelling, I have the QR code for my LNER ticket on my watch.

So a person coming through, doing tickets, and I showed them my watch, my QR code, and they went, What's that? That's your ticket QR code.

And he scanned it and he went, in all the years I've been on trains doing this job, I've never seen anyone present it like that.

The Treasury said quite openly that any savings that are made will be used to cut the taxpayer subsidy.

One thing people might not like to look at as the government gets hold of all the long distance operators is the rail minister said he wants to move to dynamic pricing so they'll get rid of the off-peak return as they've done on LNER and move to dynamic pricing.

move to a flexible fare system with advanced fares being the lead.

And on a busy day and on a popular day or a day where there's a huge event on, fares will be higher.

He's the founder and creative director at Deadpan Agency.

a comedy video studio built specifically for b2b brands he spent 15 years running a corporate video agency before deciding he'd had enough of making polished b2b videos that looked a lot like everyone else's so after a bit of time out from traveling he took what he'd learned about video production and built deadpan around a very different question what if b2b brands were funny Deadpan is only a year old at the time of recording this episode and they work with brands including Client Boost, LNER, Ahrefs, Swarmier and as I mentioned our shared client Vector.

And Luke has plenty to say about what it takes to get a comedy idea from a client brief to something that makes it into the world.

Listen on to hear us discuss why Luke thinks comedy has a proper place in the B2B sales cycle, particularly when a brand is trying to get on a new audience's radar.

Even though Reston is a ScotRail station, it's not served by any ScotRail trains.

It gets a train every two hours run by TransPenn and Express, alongside a token daily LNER train in either direction, giving it annual passenger usage of around 30,000, about the same as Stranraer station, but still well down the list of stations along this leg of the East Coast mainline.

So its train service might be a bit weird and not great, but the station does have a bus interchange of sorts, connecting with the local service to Eymyth, which is good.

I'm not going to go into detail about bus integration at our Scottish stations because Scottish bus regulation is another whole episode and I think I'd end up repeating myself from earlier.

In other words, how the intercity, regional and city region services will relate to each other.

First of all, four trains per hour are going to be long distance intercity services.

So those that are currently operated by LNER Cross Country and TransPenn and Express that of course will be integrated into our intercity operator.

There is no room for open access.

The service actually runs and runs on time.

Like LNER, miles better than Avanti.

But obviously you've got to get to Leeds and get home.

And like the getting there is not too bad.