Press release -
Virgin Trains celebrates Manchester Pride
This weekend Virgin Trains is celebrating Manchester Pride with an exclusive sweet treat on board its trains.
Rainbow shortbread – a shortbread biscuit, featuring some of the colours from the Pride flag, will be available to buy in the on board shop over the August Bank Holiday, whilst Manchester Pride takes place.
The Rainbow shortbread has been specially made by The Pudding Compartment – a local bakery in Flintshire, who produce shortbread for Virgin Trains First Class lounges on the West Coast and the First Class menu.
This is the fifth exclusive product The Pudding Compartment has created to help Virgin Trains celebrate special occasions on the West Coast. Earlier this year, they created heart-shaped shortbread to recognise St Dwynwen’s Day and baked Victoria Sandwich cake, scones and fruit cake for the Queen’s 90th Birthday.
Rob Taylor, Product Development Manager at Virgin Trains on the West Coast, said: “We’re proud to be working with The Pudding Compartment to celebrate Manchester Pride. At Virgin Trains we love to delight and surprise our customers and we’re sure our Rainbow shortbread will do just that! A perfect match with our coffee or Equali-tea, it’s a great way to celebrate Manchester Pride when travelling with us over the Bank Holiday weekend.”
Steve West, Managing Director of The Pudding Compartment, said: “At The Pudding Compartment, we love a challenge and working with Virgin Trains on the Rainbow shortbread certainly was a challenge! It gave our team the chance to hone their skills and do something a little bit out of the ordinary. The Rainbow shortbread is one of the most bespoke products we’ve ever made, so we’re really proud to be playing our part in celebrating Manchester Pride with this special biscuit.”
ENDS
Topics
- Food, Drink
Categories
- west coast
- fun stuff
The Pudding Compartment
The Pudding Compartment is an artisan bakery that creates hand-crafted desserts and cakes. We’re based on the North Wales Coast – about 20 metres from the North Wales route that Virgin Trains runs services between Holyhead and London Euston, so we the trains speeding along the track every day. Virgin Trains were looking for quality focussed SME suppliers that are close to the West Coast Mainline, so we reckoned we fitted the bill nicely and were delighted to start working with them mid 2014 (it’s our Virgin Trains Birthday too!). We have supplied desserts and biscuits for Virgin Trains First Class lounges and on board and work closely with Virgin Trains’ own development chefs to perfect recipes for their customers.
About Virgin Trains
Stagecoach and Virgin are working in partnership to operate the East Coast and West Coast inter-city routes under the Virgin Trains brand. Together, they are on track to revolutionise rail travel across the UK.
The combined network connects some of the nation’s most iconic destinations including Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, York and London.
Virgin Trains is committed to delivering a high speed, high frequency service, offering shorter journey times, more comfortable travel and excellent customer service. Customers consistently rate Virgin Trains as one of the top long-distance rail franchise operators in the National Rail Passenger Survey (NRPS) commissioned by industry watchdog, Transport Focus.
On the East Coast route, £140m is being invested to create a more personalised travel experience. We have already invested £21m to completely revamp our existing fleet and customers can now benefit from 42 additional services (22,000 extra seats) per week between Edinburgh and London. 2018 will see the introduction of completely new Azuma trains being built in the UK by Hitachi.
The West Coast route has a proud record of challenging the status quo - from introducing tilting Pendolino trains, to a pioneering automated delay repay scheme and becoming the first franchised rail operator to offer m-Tickets for all ticket types.
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Press Office: 0845 000 3333.
