RAIL veteran Ian Yeowart is rattling the couplings of Virgin Trains by launching an all-new Great North Western Railways company on Virgin routes into Euston.

Having already launched the Grand Central train company on the East Coast Main Line, Yeowart is also behind the resurrection of the GNER brand to run services to rival the trains into and out of Kings Cross, run for the time being by sacked operator National Express.

Does he have any other plans? “Too many areas are bereft of price competition,” says Yeowart, “and you've only got to look at West Country for that.” Rival services to the oft-criticised First Great Western and South Western Trains franchises? Beleaguered commuters can live in hope.

* MEANWHILE, competition to run trains into London appears to be getting out of hand from, of all places, the Welsh Marches. The Germans of Deutsche Bahn have launched the cosy sounding Wrexham & Shropshire Railway into Marylebone on lines into the capital run by Chiltern Trains. Now Arriva Trains Wales which as it names suggests runs the trains in the principality, wants to break for the border and run direct trains to London from Aberystwyth. Is London ready for this?

Bad hangover as Ball gets shown door

ANDREW Grant is regarded as such a super-hero in the deep spin world of financial public relations that many wonder whether he figuratively wears his underpants outside his trousers of an evening. Last Friday morning, however it may literally have been so. Having been out on his stag night bender on Thursday night, the Tulchan boss was awoken to be told to get his act together and get over to ITV to handle the fall-out from the crisis which has seen the hapless TV firm manage to lose both Tony Ball and Michael Grade. By the time of the lunchtime announcement, Grant was plainly still suffering the effects of the night before...

* AT 12.39pm on Friday, Robert Peston claimed another exclusive on the BBC website. “Tony Ball has walked away from ITV,” he wrote on his blog. “The former Sky boss will not become chief executive of the commercial broadcaster, I have learned.” Problem is Robert, everyone already knew, as ITV announced it at 12.36pm. Not such an exclusive after all.

* IT always pays to keep on the right side of your old boss — especially when you are a BBC financial journalist. BBC1's economics editor Stephanie Flanders, in the United States to cover the G20 summit, landed a big interview with Barack Obama's economics adviser Larry Summers. And what did Flanders do before the BBC? She was a speechwriter and adviser from 1997 to 2001 for... Larry Summers. Meanwhile, the Beeb's business editor Robert Peston was on the Today Programme to discuss the G20's plans to clamp down on bankers' bonuses. And who else joined Peston for this on-air chat? His old friend Terry Smith, head of inter-dealer broker Tullett Prebon, who used to employ Peston during a two-year break from financial journalism.

Another friend deserts Gordon

GORDON Brown's friend and leading light in Hermes Equity, David Pitt-Watson, rejected the job of Labour Party Treasurer — on the grounds that he didn't want to have personal liability for the Party's debts if Labour went bust. Now he has written a report for the Royal Society for the Arts about pensions, saying that the Government's plans for personal pension accounts won't work. Pitt-Watson says people should be able to put in as much money as they like, not just the £3600 annual limit proposed by the Government, which makes the proposal unviable and unsound. With friends like these...

* IT'S the Labour Party conference, everyone thinks the party is doomed at the next election, yet big business is still keen to lobby the powers that be — especially when they might still be contracts to be won from the Brown Government. In the special party conference issue of the Left-wing magazine the New Statesman, advertisers include defence and energy giants BAE Systems, Exxon Mobil and BG Group.

* WHILE the financial world reels, those well-read chaps and chapesses at The Economist spend their days dreaming up jolly names for their
un-bylined columns. Latest is Schumpeter, after the Austrian economist who likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction”. It follows in the wake of Dashwood on the US — after the English rake and Chancellor of the Exchequer who got his sums wrong trying to finance war in America. What larks!