Left stranded by TPE

[RJ]

As I posted my side of the story, it's only fair I share what was actually said in response. I did lodge a formal complaint with TPE the morning following the incident. This is the letter I received from TPE;

Dear [name removed]

Thank you for your patience in waiting for a response from me. The investigation is now fully completed, and so now I can address your complaint.

Firstly please accept my apologies for the way you were treated throughout your journey. While we train our staff to be vigilant when it comes to fare evasion, we also urge them to show discretion and empathy in situations where the customer is clearly not trying to defraud us, and I am sorry this was not the case for you on this occasion.

The Revenue Protection Officer (RPO) you dealt with will have a formal conversation about this, and we will emphasise the need to gather the facts before drawing conclusions.

While the methods of payment you wished to use are valid and accepted by us, they are very infrequently used, so much so that during the investigation we could not find a single instance of a customer paying by postal order since our franchise began. It is for this reason that the RPO did not accept the payments, as he was not aware they were acceptable forms. This is obviously a staff training need and one we will address immediately.

Clearly the RPO could have handled this situation much better. However, I would state that he did not leave you deliberately stranded in Liverpool. As you are no doubt aware, the success of the railway is reliant on punctuality, and the train he was working was due for departure. He felt that as you were left in the care of the police, you now had your wallet and it was early evening (meaning plenty of trains were still running), your safety would not be at risk if he left you so the train could depart on time.

In answer to your more recent query, we shall not be taking this case any further. You were honest and co-operative throughout the incident, and had a perfectly valid reason for being on our service without a ticket. In fact, by way of an apology for the unnecessary complications that were added to your journey home, I would like to offer you [amount removed] in Rail Travel Vouchers to make up for the ticket you had withdrawn. These vouchers are valid for one year, will be sent under separate cover and may take up to 5 working days to arrive with you.

Again, please accept my apologies for this incident. I hope your future interactions with our staff are more positive and enjoyable.

Yours sincerely


[name removed]

 

[Flamingo]

Nice letter, did it address your concerns? It seems fair to me.

 

[GadgetMan]

Thing is that I was travelling on a un reservable service and I had suggested inprovements that would make it less busy. And the service in question had been consistently overcrowded for at least 3 timetables.

What were these suggestions?

 

[RJ]

Nice letter, did it address your concerns? It seems fair to me.

Yes - the root cause of the incident was the misconception over acceptable payment methods. I'm satisfied the investigation identified this and steps are be taken to address the issue.

The ensuing events were just a case of a bad judgement call, which has also been implicitly stated in the letter. It can happen and I don't bear any grudges. I'm quite prepared to put the incident behind me.

 

[Flamingo]

Yes - the root cause of the incident was the misconception over acceptable payment methods. I'm satisfied the investigation identified this and steps are be taken to address the issue.

The ensuing events were just a case of a bad judgement call, which has also been implicitly stated in the letter. It can happen and I don't bear any grudges. I'm quite prepared to put the incident behind me.

Fair doos.

As the man said, "To err is human; to forgive, divine."

 

[RJ]

I received a letter from Northern Rail last week. The back story to this concerns their involvement in this matter - I bought a ticket from Liverpool Lime Street ticket office, left my wallet on the counter as I was in a hurry and they went above and beyond to have me reunited with it with a minimum of fuss.

So I put in a Subject Access Request to Southeastern following a completely unrelated incident on their network. Within that came the revelation that they had been gossiping with Transpennine Express about this particular episode. This reminded me that I was yet to act on my intention to praise the Northern member of staff for his actions. I have been back to Liverpool since (never did get my money back for that little madness ) but it's only in the last month or so that I followed this up.

My wallet contained various important credit card sized articles. Among them included my 16-25 Railcard, driving licence, driver CPC card, tachograph and university student I.D. He called the number on my I.D. card. In turn, I received a call from uni to tell me that it had been reported as found and being held at Liverpool Lime Street station. The member of staff didn't have to do that. He could have just booked it up and forwarded it to lost property. I felt his actions were prompt and decisive and deserved recognition.

I found out that when I complained about the incident to TPE, they actually contacted Northern Rail, specifically the person I told them was looking after my wallet to verify that I was telling the truth! Apparently it was a bit of a surprise when the police turned up at the ticket office instead of me to collect my wallet . I'm surprised TPE went that far in investigating my comments - railway customer service often comprises a "customer is always wrong/confused/lying" mentality. I was pleased to hear that TPE took what I said seriously and investigated the matter properly - in this case, it was not Customer Relations that dealt with the complaint.

Anyway, almost a year on from this event, I wrote a letter of appreciation to the member of Northern Rail staff and wanted to hand deliver it. After a nice day in the office, I took the 1707 from Euston to Liverpool and went to drop the letter off. It transpired that I'd had mis-spelt their surname - although it was only one letter wrong, I scrapped the letter and hand wrote another with the right spelling and handed it in to a fellow ticket office clerk to pass it on. I then got the 1948 service back to Euston, met someone quite remarkable on that train and was home well before midnight. I also wrote into Northern's customer relations - in response they sent an email back and also posted a letter thanking me for the feedback.

I'm a firm believer in feeding back where an excellent job has been done. I learnt a lesson about customer service that day (from Northern that is) and continue to apply it to my own work in the ticket office.

 

[talltim]

So who did you meet?

 

[455driver]

So it took you a year to write a thank you letter!

Why would the Police pick up your wallet?

 

[Deerfold]

So it took you a year to write a thank you letter!

Better than a lot of people who never write any...

 

[RJ]

So who did you meet?

A lady who was the head of communications at a travel/tourism type company. She was waxing lyrical about The Man in Seat 61, then spent a long time saying how amazing my stories about rail travel in the UK were. She also identified transferrable skills from those stories and passed on some very kind words about where I could go with them. Very inspirational indeed.

So it took you a year to write a thank you letter!

Why would the Police pick up your wallet?

Yes . Better late than never!

On the day, the RPO on the TPE service got the police to meet the train at Liverpool. He told the police that he thought I was lying about my wallet being at the ticket office in Liverpool. As I was being detained at the time, one of them went to the ticket office to check and retrieved the wallet for me.