Stagecoach Group
Stagecoach Group plc, the parent company of East Midlands Trains Limited, is an international transport business with its headquarters in Perth, Scotland.
Stagecoach has a long track record in running rail services in the UK. It has run South West Trains since February 1996, where it carries 480,000 passengers daily; and it has run the Island Line on the Isle of Wight since 1997.
The company also has a 49% shareholding in Virgin Rail Group, which it has held since 1999; and it operates the Sheffield Supertram and Manchester Metrolink.
Stagecoach started life as a coach company. It began running coach services between Scotland and London in the early 1980s. Then in the late 80s, it bought a number of bus companies and floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1993. In 2003 it launched the UK's first low-cost coach services under the megabus.com brand. Today it operates 19 bus companies in the UK, covering more than 100 towns and cities.
Over the past 25 years, Stagecoach has had a number of overseas transport businesses – including companies in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Portugal and Africa. Today its only overseas business is Coach USA, which operates bus and coach services in the US and Canada.
The focus is now firmly on growing passenger use of its public transport operations in the UK and North America. Excluding the East Midlands franchise, Stagecoach employs around 30,000 employees, operates 12,000 vehicles and carries around 2.5 million passengers worldwide every day.