AT STAGECOACH'S spartan head office in frozen Perth, gimlet-eyed money men will any day now be calculating just how much they could make running the Docklands Light Railway in London.
Ten days ago Britain's biggest and most aggressive bus operator won the first passenger rail franchise of the government's privatisation process - South West Trains, a plum with its commuters, Epsom racegoers, Windsor-bound tourists and a subsidy averaging £49m a year over the franchise's seven-year term.
Stagecoach is also in the running for Network South Central and has expressed interest in the Gatwick Express, the Midland line from Sheffield to London and the Edinburgh to London east coast line.
Stagecoach folk are notoriously thick skinned, and lately they have needed to be. In its short life the company has notched up more than 20 competition investigations, with six adverse decisions, and recently saw the activities of its subsidiary Busways in Darlington, Cleveland, described by the Monopolies and Mergers commission, as "predatory, deplorable and against the public interest".
When it became clear that Busways was not the preferred bidder for Darlington's municipal bus company it recruited Darlington company drivers and ran free services on the company's routes.
Journalists' derision at Stagecoach's South West's win ten days ago was rather more muted by the time it got into print and on the airwaves.
Stagecoach emerged not so much as the unacceptable face of capitalism, more the pimply face of privatisation.
The Stagecoach story has all the qualities of an action-packed TV drama, more Hardnoses than Roughnecks.
Brian Souter, now Stagecoach's 41-year-old executive chairman, was the ambitious, freckly-faced, evangelical Christian bus conductor who worked his way through university, became an accountant and set up Stagecoach with his sister and their father's bus conductor's redundancy money.
They started renting out self-drive motor caravans and minibuses, then ran Scotland-to-London express coaches.
Mr Souter's elder sister Ann Gloag, a scriptwriter's gift, ran her ex-husband Robin off the road when he set up in competition with Stagecoach in a company, called - no kidding - Highwayman. "It makes me sound awful," she recalls. "But I can't deny it is the truth."
In a development that would seem corny if it were not true, the former nurse whose 19pc stake is worth about £100m recently bought Beaufort Castle, near Inverness, ancestral home of the Frasers of Lovat.
Deregulation of the bus industry opened up new opportunities for Stagecoach. The National Bus Company was split up and municipal services were ordered to be run like companies without public subsidies.
Some National Bus offshoots were sold for £2m or £3m, a price that could be recovered by the sale to property developers of a single city centre garage.
In 1987 Stagecoach became the first independent bus operator to acquire an NBC subsidiary, Hampshire Bus Company, and established the pattern for future acquisitions - restructuring the business, investing in new buses, improving productivity, reviewing bus networks and cutting overheads.
Stagecoach sold its express coach business to National Express and Mr Souter proceeded to wreak dread among small bus operators while recreating himself as the people's champion, an image he gamely projected as the South West Train win was announced.
"You need a bank loan to get on a train," quipped the man whose 23pc stake in Stagecoach is valued at just over £120m.
The company now has a market capitalisation of £530m, annual turnover of £400m, 13pc of the country's bus market and employs 20,000 staff worldwide. In Britain its operations flow from Inverness to Brighton.
Stagecoach wants people to stop moaning about its record of inciting the watchdogs and concentrate instead on its ability to attract customers in an industry which has become accustomed to declining passenger numbers.
Fares across the Stagecoach network have gone up by only 1.4pc in the past year, says 30-year-old company secretary and group finance controller Keith Cochrane. "We perceive ourselves as having an enterprise style," he adds. The company has stuck to the view that no one ever complained about how it treated customers, only competitors, a notion eerily echoed by passenger franchise director Roger Salmon, defending his decision to commend South West Trains to Stagecoach's care.
"The criticism of Stagecoach is about how they have treated competitors," he said. "They have consistently provided good service to passengers."
The company's critics regard that as irrelevant. "The original rhetoric about rail privatisation was that it would create competition between rail operators," says Labour transport spokesman Brian Wilson. "That has now been completely abandoned. The only private companies involved are bus companies whose involvement will result in monopolies."
He adds: "Stagecoach was transformed from a small, aggressive company almost entirely through the cheap disposal of public assets and deregulation. Souter and Gloag owe everything to the Tories and the Tories owe a lot to Souter and Gloag."
Amid all the clamour about Stagecoach, the voice of rail users in southern England is neutral, even positive.
"We are not bothered who runs it provided the trains turn up on time, they are clean, they get there on time and if something does go wrong they tell you what's happening," says Mike Hewitson, secretary of the rail users' consultative committee for southern England.
He is particularly pleased by Stagecoach's plans to introduce bus services to bring people to stations.
Stagecoach is also good news for shareholders. At flotation in the spring of 1993 Mrs Gloag said: "People thinking of investing in us may take the view that they would not want us to be soft on the competition."
Those who did invest have little to complain about. The shares are worth just over three times their 112p flotation value. House broker UBS says it expects a small profits contribution from South West Trains in 1996-97 but a sharp increase after restructuring treatment.
UBS has just upgraded its 1998 pre-tax profits forecast by £12m to £75m, compared with £31.4m reported in 1995, and says it believes Stagecoach can repeat its bus success in the rail industry, although it does not consider the likely consequences of a change of government on its prospects.
Mrs Gloag's hopes at flotation were echoed in this comment last year from stockbrokers Albert E Sharp: "Any OFT jitters should be viewed as a buying opportunity."
