Transmission switching has been previously shown to offer significant benefits to power system operation, such as cost savings and reliability enhancements. Within the context of co-optimized electricity markets for energy and reserves, this work addresses the co-optimization of post contingency transmission switching in power system operation planning. The proposed models for unit commitment and economic dispatch differ from existing formulations due to the joint consideration of three major complicating factors. First, transmission switching actions are considered both in the preand post-contingency states, thereby requiring binary post-contingency variables. Secondly, generation scheduling and transmission switching actions are co-optimized. In addition, the time coupled operation of generating units is precisely characterized. The proposed models are formulated as challenging mixed-integer programs for which the off-the-shelf software customarily used for simpler models may lead to intractability even for moderatelysized instances. As a solution methodology, we present enhanced versions of an exact nested column-and-constraint generation algorithm featuring the inclusion of valid constraints to improve the overall computational performance. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effective performance of the proposed approach as well as its economic and operational advantages over existing models disregarding post-contingency transmission switching.