Long time lurker who got so irked by the railway attitude or probably the internal lack of appreciation as to how it plays out to passengers here.
The problem is that the platform staff run and hide when there’s a problem. They become invisible. Loads around day to day, then problem and poof, they’re gone. Then you have a total lack of information given to passengers, even if that information is “look we just can’t tell you right now”. Then you have benny hill style platform changes as the trains change routes to fit in (I get why but it looks shambolic). Tuesday evening was a joke for passengers. We get that so many problems are network rail, we get that idiot passengers and trespassers do idiot things, but just tell us. Don’t decide we don’t need to know. And if you don’t know, admit it.
This has been an issue at WAT and CLJ especially. I have taken it up with customer service - you get no decipherable response.
As an aside I myself got landed with a penalty fare for getting out of Waterloo (when trains were again a shambles with no information - plan is always to get the first train out and work it out from there yourself) and using a route advertised on the Trainline - then SWR fined me for choosing to go to Woking and changing to a stopper back - who chooses to go to Woking ? No amount of sensible (non aggressive) reasoning would work - they just wanted twenty quid. I like railways, but treating passengers like this just alienated us.
(To be fair the Guildford station staff have always been excellent....)