RAILWAY TRANSPORTATION ENGINEERING

Railway transportation engineering

Railway transportation engineering

Introduction

Competition is the regulator of the market that should help getting the goods and services produced better, occurring in more efficient and more responsive to the needs and demands of consumers. Beyond the regulatory duty incumbent on governments and strict compliance with the relevant legislation that should characterize the performance of companies, of loyalty and good faith they expected, ethical behaviour, fair play through, feed a healthy competition that contributes to the continuous improvement of all suppliers of goods and services.

Stepping beyond is also necessary for organizations to join associations and forums of common interest to its competitors, which can be accomplished by adhering to professional or business associations sector and/or participating in territorial or sector cooperation projects.

The goal of any organization is to give consumers more value than they give their competitors. The value is the difference between what consumers pay (time, money, and other resources) for a product, compared to the benefits they receive. It is important to the competitiveness analysis in order to identify generic defensible competitive advantage that a company can implement in a market (Jeffcott et al., 2006, pp. 1105-1121). What the customer wants is not important when there are a lot of companies already satisfying their desires. For this to be successful a company must focus on the competition.

Cross Country Train operator is used in this paper for project management and various analysis related to the business and information provided in the tasks.

Discussion

Every business strives to be best in the market and try to get maximum market share in order to win competition. There are various factors that are involved in train business for their success and major among them is cost. This paper aims on analyzing different cost associated with business and operations related to train operating companies (TOC). The TOC selected for this paper is Cross Country Trains. Cross Country Train is the par of Arriva Group and it has longest direct rail services in UK (Arriva, 2013, n.d.).

This paper aims on various operations related factors with Cross Country Trains.

Market and competitors of Cross Country Trains

It is to mention here that train companies are involved in the business that is used for short distances as well as long distance travelers. It is found that the market of Cross Country Trains is good but they are facing competition with air and road transport too. Road transport is outcompeted by rail business on basis of its speed and safety and people prefer trains for their short and long journey. However, competition with airline business is also considerable with invention of speed trains that takes passengers in short duration to long distances and it become point of consideration for passenger going in airlines (Merket et al., 2010, pp. 35-53).

The first discovery to the uninitiated readers usually just that in the UK rail industry, companies operating in free competition are not even to the level of ...