Coaching comeback boosted by £500 fund

Local resident Dave Perry, 53, returned to football coaching at Whitgreave Primary School in Featherstone, Staffordshire and netted a £500 contribution towards the school's sports equipment courtesy of the Arriva Community Action Silver Award.

CrossCountry Traincrew Controller, Dave has worked on the railways for almost four decades and recently returned to coaching the seven-a-side football team and is passing on tips to pupils in years 3-6.

The talk on the touchline is that a big part of his return is his impressive coaching CV - one of his sons is a professional footballer for Altrincham and another is a semi-professional playing for Lichfield City - and he coached them both when they were younger. Dave is now looking forward to the time when he can coach his grandson Mason, who started nursery at Whitgreave Primary School last year.

Dave, who loves teaching said: "My shift pattern with CrossCountry enables me to do the coaching and also help out with day trips to places like the Black Country Museum. There's great satisfaction in helping to bring out the footballing potential in the young pupils. The £500 boost from the Arriva Community Action Silver Award may not be as much as Kenny Jackett is getting for taking over at Wolves but it made a real difference to the kids at Whitgreave School."

The £500 donation was spent on 20 new balls and the rest funded a trip for 30 pupils to visit the famous Old Trafford football ground, where pupils saw JLS perform in front of 70,000 people followed by a Legend's game between Manchester United and Real Madrid. Dave said it was "a dream come true" for him and his grandson and received a letter of thanks from one of the year 6 pupils.

Notes to editors

CrossCountry

CrossCountry started operating on 11 November 2007. The franchise, which is the most extensive in the UK, will run until 31 March 2016. For further information on CrossCountry services and future franchise plans log on to crosscountrytrains.co.uk.

CrossCountry is part of the Arriva group, which is owned by Deutsche Bahn. Arriva is a leading pan-European public transport operators with more than 42,000 employees and operations across 12 European countries. The link to Arriva is www.arriva.co.uk. The link to Deutsche Bahn is deutschebahn.com.

Like CrossCountry on Facebook at facebook.com/crosscountrytrains.

Follow CrossCountry on Twitter via twitter.com/crosscountryuk.

CrossCountry bookings

Passengers can buy tickets for any rail journey in Britain, with any train company and with no booking fee at crosscountrytrains.co.uk or via the free CrossCountry Train Tickets app.Download the app by visiting your app store or by texting TRAVEL to 87080.

CrossCountry facts and figures

STATIONS SERVED: 119
ROUTE MILES: 1,490
WEEKDAY SERVICES: 295
PASSENGERS CARRIED: Over 30 million passenger journeys a year anticipated
ANNUAL TRAIN MILEAGE: Approximately 16 million
EMPLOYEES: Approximately 1,600
LONGEST TRAIN SERVICE: 08.20 Aberdeen to Penzance (774 miles)

Select this link to view the Press Release PDF

If your browser does not recognise the file type PDF a free Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from the Adobe website.