We’d like to thank all those that voted for their preferred Pendolinos. The majority of our customers did register their votes, so the counting process has taken a little longer than we’d anticipated, but here are the results. However, there are a couple of caveats which are explained below.
9-car:
390001 Virgin Pioneer
390005 City of Wolverhampton
390006 Tate Liverpool
390045 101 Squadron
11-car:
390104 Alstom Pendolino (Alstom livery)
390114 City of Manchester
390122 Penny the Pendolino
390138 City of London
390151 Virgin Ambassador (Business is Great Britain livery)
Plus, of course, 390103 Virgin Hero (Poppy Pendolino)
We had originally expected to offer 5 9-car and 5-11-car, however not only do we have more orders for 11-car trains, but also the 9-car selections are heavily skewed towards 390001 and 390045, while the 11-car voting was more evenly spread out. This means that the 5th choice 9-car set had far far fewer votes than the 6th choice 11-car set. The split is also complicated by the fact that the Poppy Pendolino could almost be considered a separate item on its own, meaning we could argue the split is more like a 5 for 11 and 4 for 9 car.
There were also a couple of almost-ties, in which case we have tried to select variety (eg offering City of London instead of City of Liverpool, as Tate Liverpool had already made the cut).
We are sure that the selections will not please everyone, but hopefully they offer a reasonable spread of interesting colour schemes, geographically diverse cities and notable identities. And, of course, they were selected by our customers, which as far as we are aware is a first for any mass market range of new models.
Over the next few weeks we will update the website to add set choices. If you voted for one of the selected sets and have paid in full then we will update your order. If you voted for one of the selected sets but paid a deposit or if you didn’t vote for one of selected sets then we will ask you to make your order choice via our website.