Lots of backlogged news stories to catch you up on, but this one was funny enough to jump the queue. My friend Michael Tippett pointed out Virgin Trains’ latest advertising campaign, using a giant chicken demolishing a small English town. From the original write-up:

Richard Branson really does own everything. We knew he was airline guy and cell phone guy but we didn’t know he was train guy too. To promote Branson’s Virgin Trains, [ad agency] glue London has created a series of online films (they call them viral but we’ll see if they earn that moniker) which illustrate how much smaller Britain has become because of Virgin Train’s fast service. The first film unleashes a giant cock (no, not that kind you freak) on an unsuspecting British neighborhood to, you know, show how small Britain is compared to, um, a giant cock.

Of course, readers of BransonBlog knew about Virgin trains long ago.   You can also find the commercials online at the Littler Britain site; btw, the link AdRants has is wrong, so use the one here.

The Independent is reporting that Virgin Trains may face an additional hurdle in its bid for the East Coast mainline, "one of the country’s prestige rail routes."

If his Virgin Trains were to be awarded the franchise between London and Edinburgh, it would give Sir Richard control of all three long-distance rail services to Scotland. Virgin Trains, which is 49 per cent owned by Stagecoach, already operates the West Coast mainline from London to Glasgow and Cross Country Trains, which also serves parts of Scotland.

A Virgin spokesperson noted that train travel accounted for less than ten percent of all travel between London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Still interesting to see that Virgin Trains has nearly effected monopoly situations in certain routes. Pretty impressive.

The BBC carried a story about Virgin cutting the speed on their revolutionary Pendolino trains in the UK. The high-speed 125mph service began three months ago, but has experienced a few minor braking problems of late, causing Virgin to cut the train speed to 110mph (not a huge reduction). An earlier story carries more details about the problems. [Read more]