>>1246744Slight alteration to something.
Turns out that the "Flying Scotsman" is the older service, while the "Enterprise" is the second oldest. I mixed the two up.
That said, it's still worth pointing out that the Enterprise is an old service and has experienced all the eras, from its start in the 19th Century with steam when it was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, through to partition in 1921 and the separation of the Great Northern Railway into two separate jurisdictions through to border controls and customs checks at each end, to later the Troubles, when security on board became tight, and then through to the start of the European Communities and the Common Travel Area when the Enterprise once again became border free right to the 1990s when the Enterprise got the same spec of interior as the new Eurostar service.
It's hard to say what the future of the Enterprise would be.
With the absolute mess that is Brexit negotiations, we could be left with a no-deal situation, mandating customs and border checks once again, something neither NIR nor IÉ has any contingency for. And if things were to go that badly that Ireland unifies to fix this problem? Well, there's no guarantee that NIR would continue to run the way it has or that the Enterprise remains as named service. Right now, the other named services stopped existing in Ireland as there was no use for it. IÉ removed a lot of the British operating principles as they wanted to distance themselves, and part of that came with the purchase of American locomotives from EMD and the purchase of multiple units from Spain, France, Japan and Korea. NIR on the other hand became a place where BREL multiple units dominated everything and Mk.3 coaches from BREL were around. Sure, there were EMD locomotives hauling the rakes of coaches, but for an Irish Gauge railway, NIR kept very close to British railway standards, and they still do, even if NIR's DMUs are now all Spanish.
