The fundamental problem is with the railway's appalling lack of communications skills today. The whole arena of written, spoken and displayed information is a disgrace, and no matter how much the TOCs bleat about how much they "know that good information is so important", there is no real commercial incentive (which is what they respond to) to get it right. I made a journey today where I noted that:
1. Two out of the four trains I travelled on had no internal displays working and one had no external destination indicators working (and many more I saw from platforms had the same fault).
2. Two large classes of units (700 and 707) have invisible cab-end destination displays, and that's how they were designed (how were they even approved?!). Why is it allowed to have large numbers of visual indicators not working, when DDA requirements are supposedly vital to train type operation approval?
3. A system-wide early warning message about forthcoming engineering works contained two errors in one line (see attached)! This wasn't even a hurriedly-written live message but had been written well in advance!
4. The conductor on one train insisted on mumbling station approach messages which were then immediately repeated by the recorded messages.
5. Huge inconsistencies between different busy stations regarding information screens.
On top of that there are the awful template replies to e-mails which always apologise for the TOC being so much busier than normal, when the same automatic responses have been used for years (when does a level of 'busy-ness' lasting years become normal!?). Trying to obtain a specific response to a specific complaint or suggestion is well-nigh impossible. Contrast this with, say, supermarkets, which respond quickly and usefully to complaints because they exist in a genuine state of competition.
The whole railway network is beset by amateurish and passenger-unfriendly communications, and is steadily getting worse.
