[8] Virgin sought to introduce new tilting trains upon some of its services; however, their introduction was repeatedly delayed as a consequence of poor project management by the national railway infrastructure owner of the era, Railtrack.

[9] Infrastructure changes were required to make effective use of tilting trains and, while Railtrack had committed itself to performing such upgrades on the West Coast Main Line as to permit 140 mph operation by 2005, the modernisation programme soon suffered from spiralling costs,[10] as well as technical failures such as the moving block signalling apparatus sought being immature for the intended use at that time.

[11] Railtrack would ultimately collapse in 2002 while its successor, Network Rail, would also be unable to fully deliver the promised upgrade, heavily impacting Virgin's operations.

[18] In October 2006, the DfT issued the invitation to tender (ITT) to the four shortlisted bidders: Arriva, FirstGroup, National Express and Virgin Rail Group.

[24][25] Between September 2002 and January 2003, punctuality fell to 54.1%,[26] it was therefore agreed with the Strategic Rail Authority that certain services would be cut to improve reliability and robustness on the core network.

The project also involved extending Virgin's West Coast and CrossCountry franchises by 5 years (both originally planned to end in 2012, so would have been 2017) as well as adding a fifth car to 38 Voyagers.

[31] The Super Voyagers were built with tilting mechanisms to enable higher speeds on curved tracks, including on the West Coast Main Line and between Oxford and Banbury.

[34][full citation needed] In the wake of the collapse of Operation Princess,[35] the project was cancelled with the remaining HSTs withdrawn in September 2003 on the instruction of the Strategic Rail Authority.

In 2004, Virgin hired Class 67 locomotives from EWS and Mark 2 carriages from Riviera Trains to operate summer Saturday services to Paignton.

HSTs were hired from Midland Mainline and GNER on a number of occasions to operate services from Edinburgh Waverley to Plymouth when Voyagers were unavailable.