(22 Aug 2015, 6:57 pm)South Tyne Lad wrote Because VTEC and Cross-country have  more of what I think are called Traffic Rights than Grand Central and also Hull Trains because VTEC and Crosscountry are government franchises which the governments pours money into, The Tories will not waste money on late running franchises.

If you buy tickets for VTEC and Crosscountry a certain amount of money made from that ticket goes to the government whilst if you buy a ticket with GC or Hull Trains which are Open Access operators, most of the money made goes to Arriva who own GC and the rest to Network Rail for the train paths.
so you may be getting a ticket for quite a bit less than VTEC on a service to Kings Cross but you will never make it there before the VTEC, even if the VTEC is running late.

Politics has absolutely nothing to do with certain operators' services running late.

Bearing in mind that the various signalboxes along the ECML are mostly computer-ran, that makes most of the decisions.
Not sure on exactly how it works. Say if train A is 4 minutes late and B is right time, it'll either hold train A for train B to be right-time still or it'll hold train B for train A to not lose more minutes. My money is on the latter because a train doesn't get counted as 'late' (thus no fines) if, being an express service, it arrives at its destination no more than 10 minutes late.

You're almost correct with the other statement about open access operations. However the money to Network Rail includes much more than pathing. It's track access, maintenance, signallers and also fines (for every minute other TOCs suffer because of your delay you pay the price).