People do get abandoned, and the system does fall apart often. I've seen the latter plenty of times myself, and even cited an example upthread.
Hardly ever, and usually only when something goes wrong with the implementation of the existing arrangements. You are vastly overstating a problem that simply doesn’t exist for the most part - this has been pointed out to you several times by people within the industry, so I’m not sure why you think you’re in a position to know better. It comes across that you’re (as usual) looking for reasons to stick the boot into an entire industry, despite having a poor grasp of the issues.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that the railways need to do more when things go wrong. All to often comms fall apart, customers, erm passengers get mixed and sometimes incorrect messages, and on occasions find the railways just shrug their shoulders and leave them to figure out their own way. Yeah the numbers needing assistance / advice might be large at times, but do you know what, that's for the railways to solve. And I've cited an example of how the industry can try to achieve this above too.
The existing system works well enough the majority of the time, and it’s all anyone is willing to pay for.
At the point of service we usually pay much more, that's the point.
That isn’t relevant to the wider issue I mentioned: namely that we pay less for our railway, in overall terms, than various international comparators, hence there’s a large element of “you get what you pay for”. If you don’t like high fares vote for a party who is willing to reduce them, and fund more subsidy from general taxation, or by reducing other budgets etc. as other European countries have done (and not just in relation to railways).
And again, accommodation exists away from just airports. If I can log onto my works machine and find it almost everywhere in the country through my works booking systems, I'm sure somewhere in the backrooms at TOCs the same can happen.
Who exactly do you think is sitting “somewhere in the back rooms at TOCs” to do this? During major disruption control and resource coordinators can barely keep track of where their own traincrew are, allocating them to trains, and making arrangements for them to get back to base etc., so to imagine there are people sitting about twiddling their thumbs who can start trawling websites and booking hotel rooms for thousands of people is bordering on delusional, I’m afraid.
I might be inclined to accept this point. However some long distance journeys are made by people who need to make that journey there and then, and who may not have funds to cover every scenario.
Nobody sensible undertakes these type of journeys without some means to cover emergencies. If these people drive instead, what happens if their car breaks down, or they run out of petrol? Sometimes in life things go wrong and not having any ability to come up with funds to get yourself out of a situation is pretty irresponsible.
That's a great way to promote the industry, probably even worse than BR's old slogan. Maybe GBR's new one could be "We'll try and get you there, but if we can't, tough
So you’re concerned about people being stranded, yet you also oppose the industry being honest with people and telling them not to travel during disruption. That is a completely unrealistic, absurd and contradictory position to take.
Passenger numbers continue to rise year on year, so I’d suggest there’s no evidence the arrangements during disruption are unacceptable to most passengers.
There’s probably little point discussing this point any further so I’ll leave this thread of the conversation now.
