Last night, I was planning to travel on the last Chiltern railways service to get me home. (Exact route withheld for now, to protect the apparently guilty). Got to the station about 10 minutes before the train was due, to discover it had been cancelled. There was one later train, which didn't get us all the way home. Spoke to the very helpful and apologetic member of station staff there, who made us a cup of tea, made some phone calls, and said that either we'd be able to get a bus or otherwise the staff at the terminating station would be able to book us a taxi. After a fair wait for the later train, took that to the final stop.
When we got to the final stop for the train, we went into the station building and asked the Chiltern Railways staff member there how to get to our final destination. He was most unhelpful, initially saying "tough, you missed the last service", then when we reminded him about the cancellation of the earlier service, still basically said "tough, nothing to do with me". He claimed to have no number with which to phone anyone else in Chiltern, claimed to have no taxi vouchers, refused to give his name (he had a Chiltern Railways badge on but with a gap where you might expect a name to be printed), and generally refused to help. Being late on a Saturday night, the Chiltern Railways customer services number just hung up when we pressed the option for them on the menu. The help point on the station only went through to National Rail Enquiries who said they couldn't do anything, had no numbers for Chiltern, and who's sole vaguely helpful contribution was to give us the number of a local taxi firm.
Could it plausibly be the case that a manned and open Chiltern Station, with staff on duty wearing Chiltern name badges, would have members of staff with no way to contact anyone else in the company, no other phone numbers we could use, no taxi vouchers and no ability to help?
And in case it happens again, is there something else we could've done beyond ringing a taxi, paying for it ourselves, and putting in a complaint to Chiltern when they re-open their customer services number tomorrow? (I tried ringing them today, as the NRE help point told me to, but apparently they're not open so it still hangs up when you pick customer services in the phone menu...)
When we got to the final stop for the train, we went into the station building and asked the Chiltern Railways staff member there how to get to our final destination. He was most unhelpful, initially saying "tough, you missed the last service", then when we reminded him about the cancellation of the earlier service, still basically said "tough, nothing to do with me". He claimed to have no number with which to phone anyone else in Chiltern, claimed to have no taxi vouchers, refused to give his name (he had a Chiltern Railways badge on but with a gap where you might expect a name to be printed), and generally refused to help. Being late on a Saturday night, the Chiltern Railways customer services number just hung up when we pressed the option for them on the menu. The help point on the station only went through to National Rail Enquiries who said they couldn't do anything, had no numbers for Chiltern, and who's sole vaguely helpful contribution was to give us the number of a local taxi firm.
Could it plausibly be the case that a manned and open Chiltern Station, with staff on duty wearing Chiltern name badges, would have members of staff with no way to contact anyone else in the company, no other phone numbers we could use, no taxi vouchers and no ability to help?
And in case it happens again, is there something else we could've done beyond ringing a taxi, paying for it ourselves, and putting in a complaint to Chiltern when they re-open their customer services number tomorrow? (I tried ringing them today, as the NRE help point told me to, but apparently they're not open so it still hangs up when you pick customer services in the phone menu...)