cactustwirly
Established Member
Correct, however ToCs who do not outsource to RG, have a much better availabilty of staff
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East Midlands franchise won by Abellio
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Correct, however ToCs who do not outsource to RG, have a much better availabilty of staff
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mallard
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If all you want is the absolute definition of "a basic train service" then Stagecoach is probably as good as any company.
If you want a company that's going to put actual effort into attracting customers to the railway, keep their train interiors in a reasonable state (the seats on Merdians are beyond a joke now; many are not just threadbare, but actively worn through), offer a competitively priced service (I personally don't think it's a co-incidence that EMT prices shot up when Stagecoach took on the ECML; I strongly suspect, but of course cannot prove, that this was a decision taken by Stagecoach to prevent them undercutting their more prestigious sister franchise. It's a shame that quality did not increase with price.) and will actively engage with NR and the DfT and fight to offer a better service for their customers (the way that Virgin WC and Chiltern do) rather than simply laying back and pretending that the latest round of timetable slowdowns are an "improvement", Stagecoach certainly aren't a company worth defending.
cactustwirly
Established Member
Couldn't agree more, as a user of EMT, that's Stagecoach down to a T
Qwerty133
Established Member
This actually sums EMT pretty well. Unfortunately, stagecoach back down to any requests from other interested parties without argument to the detriment of the levels of service on EMT. Whether this is NR and Thameslink proposing slowing down mainline services, permitting members of staffs inflexible working requests that are not compatible with keeping stations sufficiently staffed throughout the advertised opening hours (including being consistently overstaffed at some times), or allowing rail gourmet to only turn up on days that don't end with Y. They also lack the slightest in terms of innovation and rely on others to provide even the most basic of ideas and are generally happy to do the bare minimum.
I think you overestimate the ability of a direct award operating TOC to object to the Department for Transport's baby Thameslink Programme timetable. It's been leaked that it was EMT being bolshy that got them the funding for the ex Grand Central HST sets and that they certainly were objecting.
I'm intrigued as to what anyone really expects from EMT. It's not an exciting headline franchise. It has a Northern Lite mix of rural and urban local trains and a mainline where by the DfT's own direction it is now the secondary concern to Thameslink.
Considering it's been 4 years of direct awards I don't think they do too badly. They're just somewhat stuck in a time warp as a result of a lack of forward direction that is someone else's doing.
mallard
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Virgin WC has been in "direct award" for, what, 7 years now? Doesn't seem to have stopped them delivering significant improvements in that period, keeping their train interiors in good condition and keeping fares competitive.
We can debate how much EMT "fought" the timetable downgrade, but they certainly didn't do anything public. Beardy Branson would have been talking to the media from the first.
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DanDaDriver
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Went to London yesterday from Loughborough. Train was on time, clean and arrived on time. Same coming back. Did what it said on the bottle. I do wonder what we expect at times. Will a different operator do better? Who knows, but if yesterday was an example, I'd be pretty happy if it it came on time, was clean and got me there on time.
With direct awards you get what is specified.
The EMT fleet is 10 years from it's last interior overhaul. It's tired. It's also due to be gone shortly and should have been gone by now originally.
People forget what went before.
The mainline fleet had the benefit of being new or recently refurbished by Midland Mainline.
The local fleet was absolutely destroyed - the best of the bunch were the ex TPE 158s (even they were tired having been thrashed over the Pennines for nearly 20 years) but the rest had had no attention for years. The ex Wales and Borders/Central 158s were in a disastrous condition as were many of the 153s.
It's been nothing exciting but then what can you do with it? It's a secondary mainline with a Northern Lite local side attached.
The service is a world apart from Central Trains in particular.
More stock would do me nicely as a service user and a worker.
londonmidland
Established Member
Talking of 'Northern Lite', would it be disastrous if Northern took over the entire regional/local side of things from East Midlands Trains or would we see improvements such as more direct services to other destinations and a high quality refurbishment and/or new trains?*
*I know this will most likely never happen, especially after the announcement of Abellio winning the franchise. However I'd just like to hear people's opinions on this.
*I know this will most likely never happen, especially after the announcement of Abellio winning the franchise. However I'd just like to hear people's opinions on this.
Glenn1969
Established Member
The Barton Line is switching from Northern to EMR so I'm not sure I can see anything moving the other way any time soon
Qwerty133
Established Member
The thing is they could quite easily have made some improvements at low cost and little effort with a bit of thought. The highly excessive first class capacity on the 7 coach meridians should have been reduced during the refurbs, negotiations with the DfT about reducing the service levels at East Midlands Parkway when it became apparent that an airport station with no link to the airport it serves was not very useful, rearranging the shift patterns of ticket office and gate line staff to better match demand, timely repairs of broken station infrastructure (lifts, toilets, benches etc), applying pressure on rail gourmet to be at least somewhat reliable, continuing promotions such as the red dot days and extenting them away from the aforementioned East Midlands parkway.
Glenn1969
Established Member
RTT lists an hourly bus link to East Midlands Airport from 0900 to 1700. But how many passengers use it?
Qwerty133
Established Member
For much of its existence there was no bus link between the station and the airport and even now the problem is why would anyone from London fly into East Midlands and Leicester, Loughborough, Long Eaton, Derby, Nottingham and Beeston all have more frequent direct buses to the airport (which also all run 24/7).
The 7 car Meridians I agree are a pain in the backside. They were OK on the fast Nottinghams but have insufficient capacity for the Sheffield services, being used primarily because they're faster than a 2+8 HST.
Killing off East Midlands Parkway is never going to be politically acceptable and the car park seems busier now than it was. It also serves as a useful if rather expensive staging point during engineering work.
Rearranging staff rosters is all well and good but funnily enough we don't like it very much so it has to be done sensitively. There is also a budget and you can rob Peter to pay Paul but only so far. Station staffing is one area I feel much more could be done but I can't really go too far into it. Sadly I don't feel your gripes regarding the likes of Hinckley and Narborough are likely to be resolved to your satisfaction, if I was a betting person I would say a closure attempt for the booking offices if not total destaffing is more likely within the next 10 years or so.
Rail Gourmet do have performance penalties, again, can't really go into that. I'd rather all catering was in house.
Promotions are designed to drum up demand or fill up gaps in demand - they're not provided out of the goodness of the promoter's heart. Now EMT are entirely on a service contract with the government holding the revenue risk I doubt there will be any more promotions.
I think the last Red Dot Day was in 2015 which was the year the original franchise ended. EMT don't use the red dot in marketing anymore either having changed their brand slightly.
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Qwerty133
Established Member
My preference would actually be for Narborough and Hinckley to be destaffed with a sensible number (as in at least 2 at each station) of TVMs being installed. That being said it is absolutely bad management that has led to no cover being available for these stations being available when the regular staff are on holiday or sick. The fact is the ticket office at Leicester could quite easily cope with at least one less* member of staff for most of the day (to the extent that for a few hours mid afternoon there are usually more staff than counters) but not during the mornings despite this being the time that staff are by far most likely to be needed to cover at the other stations covered by the Leicester based team.
*for a lot of the time it could probably cope with 2 or 3 less staff.
The travel advisors at Leicester don't just operate the windows - they also do back office accounting duties, manage the car park permits, season tickets etc, service the TVMs and look after the revenue taken by EMT's RPOs and Cross Country's senior conductors. They used to look after the out station TVMs etc as well which meant going off site but I think contractors might do that now. The same applies elsewhere, only Nottingham having dedicated staff for the onboard crew ticket machines.
There's more to their role than you might think.
Qwerty133
Established Member
The only ones of those roles that I would consider to be time sensitive would be the refilling and emptying of TVMs and the accounting of monies taken by the office and other staff. The duties concerning admin relating to season tickets and car park permits could quite easily be left for a day or 2 during a major staff shortage and could be done just as easily at any time of the day making them ideal duties for a standby member of staff to do on the 95% of days that they wouldn't be needed to cover at another ticket office. Furthermore I would expect that the majority of those duties are performed away from the public (and if not the duties would be much more efficiently and safely performed if that was the case) therefore making the staff undertaking these duties to be on top of the number that a passenger would consider to be at work. Quite frankly it is rather hard to believe that any business outside of the railway would consider any point of sale to be anything but overstaffed if it almost never has a queue and more often than not has multiple members of staff awaiting customers.
If I was proposing mass redundancies I could quite easily see your point about not understanding the full scope of what the staff do but the total capacity should not change by slightly reorganising the staffing roster to have an additional member of staff on duty in the early morning rather than during the middle of the day.
Longer trains are needed on the Sheffield - London route. Running some services with just 4 carriages is ridiculous. The 7-car trains are little better because of the excess of first class, as already mentioned.
It doesn't really affect me, but the timetable at East Midlands Parkway is a nonsense - two trains to London within 10 mins for most of the day followed by a 50 min gap; and an even sillier 2 trains within 3 mins northbound followed by a 57 min gap.
cactustwirly
Established Member
Go compare it with GWR, which is a very similar franchise, which is also on a direct award.
The local fleet has just been refurbished with new seat covers, with free WiFi fitted, the 165s have been fitted with USB/Plug sockets.
The intercity fleet (ie HSTs) was also 10 years from it's last overhaul, but it was kept in a very good condition, with no tatty threadbare seats.
Whereas EMT finds it acceptable to send out 222s with ripped seat covers
Kettledrum
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Totally agree - you just could't make it up could you?
East Midlands Parkway has attracted a lot of criticism on here, but EMT have not taken the obvious steps to increase patronage:
1) re-jig the timetable to spread the departures more equally around the clock-face
2) reduce the cost of the car park charges
SemaphoreSlim
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So, the latest news is EMR will be having 13 LNER HST sets, which have the compliant toilets, to replace their existing fleet of HST’s
I thought they only had one compliant one in each class, which admittedly is one more than the EMT ones, but still a lot of shuffling for one loo.
Anyhow, it's a darn sight better than trying to replace them all with three 180's.
tbtc
Veteran Member
Sounds good, but how?
- We want Sheffield/Derby to have a relatively simple relatively well spaced half hourly London service
- We want Nottingham to have a relatively simple relatively well spaced half hourly London service
- We want Leicester to have a relatively simple relatively well spaced London service four times per hour
But presumably we also want Loughborough and East Midlands Parkway to each have an hourly "fast" service to Nottingham and Sheffield?
How do you square the circle? Either accept that Loughborough/ East Midlands Parkway will have awkward 15/45 splits (augmented by a Sprinter from Nottingham to Leicester every hour) or put big gaps in the services from Nottingham/ Sheffield to London for the sake of trying to provide a more balanced timetable for two smaller intermediate stations? Or stop *everything* at both Loughborough and East Midlands Parkway, which could provide a more equal service to them but slow down the long distance services (at a time when people obsess about headline journey times like "Nottingham in ninety" and want to remove stops like Market Harborough from the longer distance stuff where possible).
SemaphoreSlim
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It seems to be a case of needs must, as a short term fix,
to be honest!
Indeed. I wonder if MML passengers will keep the 9 carriages per set ?
SemaphoreSlim
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I suppose that would help with ‘increased capacity’!
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
That's all you need to be compliant on a bog front. It's all most modern stock has.
They also have quite nice interiors.
Plus it would mean no more IC70 seats!
Are they also going to have door stewards from the start of 2020?
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