My sister recently travelled in Italy. It was her first time using the rail service there and she didn’t know about having to pre-validate her tickets before boarding.
She and two friends were asked for tickets by the guard who then spotted they hadn’t pre-validated their tickets.
Despite my sister being polite, the guard became objectionable, threatening them with removal and fine.
Eventually, they negotiated a cash fine in Euros and he validated the tickets on his machine.
They spoke with tourist information persons whom advised they’d been scammed by the guard in a widely known tactic to extort money from unsuspecting tourists.
Although expected of passengers to pre-validate their tickets (activating the ticket I believe), my sister was advised that the guards are able to validate them on their machines.
UK guards don’t pressurise passengers into handing over cash bungs! My sister fully appreciates uk train staff after that.
I work on the railways in the uk.
Complex ticketing pricing, overcrowding on certain services, lack of contingency planning and info made available to staff to pass on to passengers needs addressing.
Better quality rolling stock (Voyager refresh coming soon!) and increased capacity to resolve overcrowding.
Ticket pricing structures declutterred and made simpler for easy access to standard prices.
Full headcount among guard, retail and driver cohorts to alleviate short staffing and cancellations.
Passengers need to have realistic expectations. If you travelled York - Penzance by car and arrived within 15 mins of Google Maps estimate most would consider that an excellent journey. Yet by train, people seem to immediately criticise.
Passenger behaviour has also deteriorated markedly. I think train crew are now constantly apprehensive and wondering which passenger is going to berate them next for matters outside of their control. Not excusing the fact there will always be a minority of staff needing customer relations training.
I wonder if a significant amount of comms difficulties are caused by the dependency on the two-headed hydra of TOC and Network Rail each with their own priorities and chains of command. Would things work better under a vertically integrated regime or even a full scale "alliance" way of working?
I think this is one of the key objectives in setting up GBR. Renationalising of TOCs and aligning planning and operations under one roof.
I agree that there are currently too many organisations on the railways with competing agendas
Let me tell you that would be a terrible idea and would have all sorts of implications on crew and would cause knock-on impact for not just other routes the TOC runs, but potentially around the whole region or even country. And this is not an exaggeration; where there has been a delay on a journey because a service has presented late at a key junction due to an incident which causes another service to depart late which then runs behind a stopping service which couldn’t be held too long etc etc. You’re in the metro London & SE network and you’ve got a delay because of something that happened at Leeds! It doesn’t normally ripple that far but it can and you get the principle. Signallers regulate where they can but they can only do so much.
And of course feeding back into the “public perception” of the railway there are even experienced station staff and crew who don’t appreciate all of this, so what hope does the general public have!
Spot on. There’s a bigger and very complex picture for timetabling.
A late train acts like a punctuality wrecking ball, implicating other services that get caught behind it, can’t be platformed at stations or that then run on cautionary signals causing delays.
If there was a simple solution, one would have been found by now.