The Department for Transport has invited companies to bid for the East Coast rail franchise, which is expected to be privatised in less than two years.
Virgin is expected to be among the parties interested in taking over the key line, which runs between London and Scotland, according to Sky sources.
The route has been run in the public sector since 2009 when the recession caused National Express to pull out.
Now Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin has unveiled plans to put it back in private hands by February 2015.
Mr McLoughlin announced a new approach to rail franchising following last year's botched West Coast deal - which was scrapped after flaws were found in the process.
The 13-year franchise was initially awarded to FirstGroup, which won a bidding war with the incumbent company Virgin Trains.
Sir Richard Branson's Virgin will run the West Coast line until April 2017 But a string of mistakes by Department for Transport staff saw the deal cancelled and led to two independent reviews into the rail franchising process.
Virgin will continue to run the West Coast service - which it has controlled since 1997 - until the new franchise date, which has been pushed back from November next year to April 2017.
Mr McLoughlin said the new franchise process will deliver improvements to services and bring long-term certainty to the market.
"Above all, in future franchise competitions we are placing passengers in the driving seat by ensuring that their views and satisfaction levels are taken into account when deciding which companies run our railway services," he said.
"Franchising has been a force for good in the story of Britain's railways, transforming an industry that was in decline into one that today carries record numbers of passengers."
But rail unions - angry at plans to privatise the East Coast line again - stressed that the private sector had twice given up the franchise.
RMT's general secretary Bob Crow said hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money had been wasted on the "franchising circus".
"Instead of learning the lessons of the privatisation disasters on the East and West Coast main lines and across the rest of the network, the Government has this morning given the green light to a whole new wave of profiteering that will have the train companies laughing all the way to the bank," he said.
"The proposed reprivatisation of the East Coast, after the public sector rescued the service following two private failures, proves conclusively that the political class have learnt absolutely nothing when it comes to our railways."
Manuel Cortes, leader of the TSSA rail union, added: "The £50m West Coast line fiasco revealed that private franchises are a shambles.
"So they go and privatise the only successful publicly-owned franchise, the East Coast line."
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