Waterloo rush hour - no announcements, no staff and nothing on boards

[Antman]

How long will this mess go on for?

Passengers are sat there fist-pumping when they find out they have guessed the right platform. And head in hands when they find out it's wrong.

This evening, Waterloo had nothing telling anyone anything.

So what is their excuse tonight?

 

[TEW]

There was a fault with the CIS system, which meant it was down network wide. When I was at Waterloo around 1830, manual announcements were being made non stop and there were all sorts of staff were helping direct passengers. Many of the ticket barriers had been left open allowing gateline staff to concentrate on providing information. Every member of staff, from RPI to cleaner, were also standing around trying to get people on the right trains.

 

[Dougal2345]

Travelling from Portsmouth to Sway tonight, my heart sank when I checked the Live Departure Boards on the NR site while heading to Southampton, which showed my train from Southampton was about 50 minutes late and lots of other severe delays.

Baffled but pleasantly surprised on arrival at Southampton Central to find that in reality everything was running just about on time... Never trust the internet...

 

[wastedlife]

I must have been unlucky then, as half an hour later they absolutely weren't telling people that the 19:02, 19:03, and 19:20 weren't stopping at Surbiton, until five minutes before departure after you'd been stood on the thing for five minutes. By which time, the 19:06 Hampton Court had gone, the 19:23 was canx and we all had to wait for the 19:42. Or indeed recommending to travel to Esher and come back, or go to Kingston and get the bus. Still, better than last time they did that to me on 18 July, when the guard whispered the cancellation of all stops before Weybridge (if he/she did it at all), and we all had to come back from there.

 

[Antman]

There were no announcements and no visible (or audible) staff at 1830ish. Certainly not from the tube access point under the platforms.

Passengers didn’t know what was happening. They were just guessing.

Monday was leaving things on boards but not announcing platforms or delays until after departure time; so people were getting stressed because they thought their train was leaving but they had no idea where from. The boards then showed they were delayed with the correct platforms (boards changing at or after the scheduled departure times). Again, no useful announcements. It isn’t how to endear yourself to your customers.

Just about all it would take it is someone to write on a few of the A1 boards they regularly have out that there are Problems today with the CIS. So please don’t worry. But they don’t do this.

 

[DarloRich]

Always nice to receive feedback that my performance in the department of messing things up is having an effect.

There were no announcements and no visible (or audible) staff at 1830ish. Certainly not from the tube access point under the platforms.

Passengers didn’t know what was happening. They were just guessing.

what you mean is because you didn't see any staff ( or the staff who were there weren't obsequious enough towards you) there weren't any staff or announcements.

Just about all it would take it is someone to write on a few of the A1 boards they regularly have out that there are Problems today with the CIS. So please don’t worry. But they don’t do this.

next time you are at Waterloo why not drop off a letter for the station manager making this suggestion? They might not have thought of it. Try to be politie.

 

[Antman]

Thank you. Several tens of other passengers in my carriage alone were exactly the same.

I don’t want obsequious - it’s awful plastic service. All I want is straightforward “look, we don’t know” or “I think it’s this, but it is fluid”. What we get is different. I know you may have planned it so that everyone was out, but honestly people didn’t hear them (were they using megaphones or any sort of amplification ?) and/or didn’t see them.

I have made suggestions before. The staff response has always been the same “that’s for someone else”; even when you suggest that, maybe if they progressed it they wouldn’t get so much of the human cargo complaining and asking, so it would help them. It tends to feel a bit “not my problem guv”. I have also tried to engage via SWR customer service - terrible and a total waste of time.


To be fair to TFL, they seem to be a lot better in organising in toms of difficulty (often on platform and directing traffic). SWR don’t seem to.

 

[Clip]

There were no announcements and no visible (or audible) staff at 1830ish. Certainly not from the tube access point under the platforms.

This doesnt seem to tally with this

There was a fault with the CIS system, which meant it was down network wide. When I was at Waterloo around 1830, manual announcements were being made non stop and there were all sorts of staff were helping direct passengers. Many of the ticket barriers had been left open allowing gateline staff to concentrate on providing information. Every member of staff, from RPI to cleaner, were also standing around trying to get people on the right trains.

 

[Antman]

And to be fair, to update, platform 4 had a man and megaphone today (announcing ready to leave, mind the doors). It really does just work....

 

[Muzer]

I was there as well. There were very very few announcements. Occasional ones but can't possibly have been enough for them to have been announcing every evening peak service sufficiently. When I was listening it sounded like it was about an announcement every five minutes. Awful show. Simply terrible.

Of course I just looked at the live signalling diagrams as I normally do anyway, but I was by no means certain that normals would have caught the trains they were after here.

 

[jamesst]

Sorry I can't work out what's happening from the thread, is there a fault with the cis system or something?

 

[Muzer]

Sorry I can't work out what's happening from the thread, is there a fault with the cis system or something?

Yeah, evening peak on Tuesday there were no information screens and no automated announcements functioning anywhere on the station. There were some, but nowhere near enough, manual announcements.

Regular commuters like me can use local knowledge (platforms are altered surprisingly little at Waterloo compared to other London termini at least) combined with real-time information websites, but I felt sorry for less regular travellers.

 

[Robert Carroll]

There were some announcements on the low-numbered platforms and staff were helping as best they could. Platform information was still showing on the National Rail Enquiries app. Fortunately, not only did I know the likely platform for my train but it's also one of the few on my line that is 707s (18:39 Waterloo-Guildford via Epsom) so it was easy to find. Must have been difficult for the less well informed but my impression was that staff were doing as much as they could, including train crew.