3141
Established Member
The first part of what follows is what I’ve heard from others, and the second is an account of recent experiences by my wife and myself.
I organise reunion events for people I was at school with. Earlier this year we had a lunch in central London, about five minutes’ walk from Bank Underground Station. One potential participant, who lives in Norwich, said he couldn’t take part because the trains were so unreliable. I know that he would probably have got from Norwich to Liverpool Street and back without difficulty, but he has heard so many stories about train travel problems that he wouldn’t chance it.
The wife of another former school friend died a few months ago. The cremation was at Mill Hill in NW London; the nearest tube station is Mill Hill East. I wasn’t sure if I could get there on that particular day; my friend said “I wouldn’t expect you to,” meaning that the journey was too much of an expedition into the unexpected for me to risk it. Actually it’s straightforward: SWR Whitchurch to Waterloo, just over an hour, the Northern Line to Mill Hill East, and about a fifteen-minute walk.
How many people, I wonder, are put off travelling by train because they’ve heard of strikes, delays and cancellations, and decide that the whole thing is too risky to contemplate.
Now here is our recent experience. My wife and I join a group of friends that I used to work with for a few days away each autumn. This year we went to Chester.
On Tuesday 8th October my wife and I travelled from Whitchurch to Chester via London. 10.14 Whitchurch to Waterloo was on time, and our tickets were checked. Waterloo to Euston went smoothly. 12.35 Euston to Crewe was fine (11-car Pendolino), though there was no ticket check except to get onto the platform at Euston. We should have got the 14.21 TfW service from Crewe to Chester, which would have been a couple of minutes late, but the Class 197 on the service developed a gearbox fault. Eventually the guard announced that they were shutting the train down and would restart it. This operation took nearly fifteen minutes. The fault was sorted out but the guard announced that the 14.21 had now been cancelled, and the train would form the 15.21 instead. As the train shuttles back and forth between Crewe and Chester this was probably the right decision. There should have been an Avanti service, 13.02 from Euston to Chester, to which we could have transferred at Crewe at 14.45, but this had been cancelled. So we sat in the Class 197 for over an hour. I can understand why the guard chose not to check tickets.
On Thursday our group planned to travel from Chester to Llandudno for the day. We boarded the 10.13 Avanti service (2 x Super Voyagers), and sat in it till about 11.30. This was because of a signal fault in the Llandudno area, we were told, and when it was fixed at about 11.10 we had to wait for the congestion ahead to clear. No ticket checks, but perhaps the guard stayed in the other unit. Arrival at Llandudno (change at Llandudno Junction) was at about 13.05.
The plan was to walk to the tramway station and ascend the Great Orme. My wife didn’t feel well and decided to return to Llandudno railway station and wait for me there. At about 16.00 she texted me to say that it had been announced that the 16.12 from Llandudno would be the last train for the next three hours, so she would catch that and return to Chester. But when that train came into Llandudno it was announced that its trip out had been cancelled, and a bus would be provided instead. The nine people waiting for the train went outside to wait for the bus, but some who had previously experienced cancellations said the bus might not come. After some time it hadn’t appeared, so she got a taxi (£11) to Llandudno Junction. There, the 16.40 train to Chester was 25 minutes late. My wife spent the time thinking up several alternative words for the abbreviation TfW, none of them fit to be included here.
Having received the news about the gap in trains from Llandudno, I got the bus to Llandudno Junction (£4, as my English bus pass wasn’t valid). The 17.23 was on time and tickets were checked regularly.
Coming back home on Friday, the 1032 Avanti service from Chester to Euston (2 x 805) was almost fifteen minutes late by the end of the journey. Tickets were checked. The rest of our trip went as planned, though there was no ticket check on SWR.
I’m sure our experiences during the past few days were particularly unlucky. But anyone who is not a regular train traveller and said “Why don’t we go by train this time?” would be unlikely to choose the train again. The norm for train travel ought to be that the train runs and does so on time. Ticket checking should occur on every journey of any length; none of the trains on which we travelled was congested enough to make walking through it difficult. I can work out what to do when things go wrong, and identify alternatives or recognise when there are none. Many passengers won’t easily be able to do that, especially if they are travelling with children. It’s no good talking about modal shift when train travel offers the likelihood of things going wrong, or that’s what everyone else tells you. There’s a lot that those who work on the railway need to do to put these things right, and they won’t just happen as a result of creating GBR.
I organise reunion events for people I was at school with. Earlier this year we had a lunch in central London, about five minutes’ walk from Bank Underground Station. One potential participant, who lives in Norwich, said he couldn’t take part because the trains were so unreliable. I know that he would probably have got from Norwich to Liverpool Street and back without difficulty, but he has heard so many stories about train travel problems that he wouldn’t chance it.
The wife of another former school friend died a few months ago. The cremation was at Mill Hill in NW London; the nearest tube station is Mill Hill East. I wasn’t sure if I could get there on that particular day; my friend said “I wouldn’t expect you to,” meaning that the journey was too much of an expedition into the unexpected for me to risk it. Actually it’s straightforward: SWR Whitchurch to Waterloo, just over an hour, the Northern Line to Mill Hill East, and about a fifteen-minute walk.
How many people, I wonder, are put off travelling by train because they’ve heard of strikes, delays and cancellations, and decide that the whole thing is too risky to contemplate.
Now here is our recent experience. My wife and I join a group of friends that I used to work with for a few days away each autumn. This year we went to Chester.
On Tuesday 8th October my wife and I travelled from Whitchurch to Chester via London. 10.14 Whitchurch to Waterloo was on time, and our tickets were checked. Waterloo to Euston went smoothly. 12.35 Euston to Crewe was fine (11-car Pendolino), though there was no ticket check except to get onto the platform at Euston. We should have got the 14.21 TfW service from Crewe to Chester, which would have been a couple of minutes late, but the Class 197 on the service developed a gearbox fault. Eventually the guard announced that they were shutting the train down and would restart it. This operation took nearly fifteen minutes. The fault was sorted out but the guard announced that the 14.21 had now been cancelled, and the train would form the 15.21 instead. As the train shuttles back and forth between Crewe and Chester this was probably the right decision. There should have been an Avanti service, 13.02 from Euston to Chester, to which we could have transferred at Crewe at 14.45, but this had been cancelled. So we sat in the Class 197 for over an hour. I can understand why the guard chose not to check tickets.
On Thursday our group planned to travel from Chester to Llandudno for the day. We boarded the 10.13 Avanti service (2 x Super Voyagers), and sat in it till about 11.30. This was because of a signal fault in the Llandudno area, we were told, and when it was fixed at about 11.10 we had to wait for the congestion ahead to clear. No ticket checks, but perhaps the guard stayed in the other unit. Arrival at Llandudno (change at Llandudno Junction) was at about 13.05.
The plan was to walk to the tramway station and ascend the Great Orme. My wife didn’t feel well and decided to return to Llandudno railway station and wait for me there. At about 16.00 she texted me to say that it had been announced that the 16.12 from Llandudno would be the last train for the next three hours, so she would catch that and return to Chester. But when that train came into Llandudno it was announced that its trip out had been cancelled, and a bus would be provided instead. The nine people waiting for the train went outside to wait for the bus, but some who had previously experienced cancellations said the bus might not come. After some time it hadn’t appeared, so she got a taxi (£11) to Llandudno Junction. There, the 16.40 train to Chester was 25 minutes late. My wife spent the time thinking up several alternative words for the abbreviation TfW, none of them fit to be included here.
Having received the news about the gap in trains from Llandudno, I got the bus to Llandudno Junction (£4, as my English bus pass wasn’t valid). The 17.23 was on time and tickets were checked regularly.
Coming back home on Friday, the 1032 Avanti service from Chester to Euston (2 x 805) was almost fifteen minutes late by the end of the journey. Tickets were checked. The rest of our trip went as planned, though there was no ticket check on SWR.
I’m sure our experiences during the past few days were particularly unlucky. But anyone who is not a regular train traveller and said “Why don’t we go by train this time?” would be unlikely to choose the train again. The norm for train travel ought to be that the train runs and does so on time. Ticket checking should occur on every journey of any length; none of the trains on which we travelled was congested enough to make walking through it difficult. I can work out what to do when things go wrong, and identify alternatives or recognise when there are none. Many passengers won’t easily be able to do that, especially if they are travelling with children. It’s no good talking about modal shift when train travel offers the likelihood of things going wrong, or that’s what everyone else tells you. There’s a lot that those who work on the railway need to do to put these things right, and they won’t just happen as a result of creating GBR.
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