I am on a train, like 95% of the trains I take, it is working brilliantly. From time to time things go badly. Sadly railway companies are remembered for the 5% of screwups.
Screw ups happen. Last week a signal failure at Raynes Park left a bunch of guards and drivers the wrong side of Wimbledon to get to Waterloo and trains were delayed out by up to 90 minutes , I bought my ticket at 4.05 and arrived- 25 miles later at 7.05. In the meantime I’d been up and down Waterloo platforms 20 -24 faster than a tart’s knickers.
There is nothing much you can do if you can’t move your staff around other than wait for them, which is what we did. We had no idea how long we had to wait but I suspect that South Western Railways did, many of us could have been re-routed on GWR and got home in a timely way but we stuck it out on the Waterloo concourse or on the trains and relied on our phones to tell us what was going on.
Our phones didn’t know and neither did the drivers who we were surprised to know relied on the same apps that we did. Waterloo is Britain’s busiest station but it hasn’t yet worked out how to talk to its key staff, let alone its passengers.
The inevitable consequence of keeping passengers hanging around for up to 2 hours is over-crowding when three or four train loads of people get on a carriage meant for only one of them. It is not a good idea for a guard in such a situation to announce that anyone needing help find him in the middle of the train. People tend to laugh or shout or just get a little more resentful. And this leads to the kind of resentment that drives people away from trains.
We are taught about being mindful but I don’t think it is very fair on guards to ask them to read out scripts about their whereabouts. I do think it sensible for guards to be able to share information on “delay/repay” so that passengers who are delayed more than 30 minutes can get their statutory refund.
On this occasion, no one in the three hours between ticket purchase and ticket useage, mentioned “Delay/Repay”. This may have been part of the plan because when we got to our final destination (Windsor and Eton Riverside), we had to queue up to put our tickets in machines which ate up our one shred of evidence that we had been delayed.
I tried to point this out to the attendant at the gates who had the discretion to let people through a manually operated gate but the vast majority of passengers were either oblivious of their opportunity or too tired to take it. So South Western trains will have got very few Delay/Repay applications out of us.
SWR have told me , when I turn up for their ask the manager sessions that passenger satisfaction levels are improving. I have a feeling that customers are just too weary to complain. We have had years of rail strikes, years of engineering works, signal failures and of staff shortages and we are very weary.
We really want things to get better which is why we go to meet the managers and write in to explain our experience and why some of us choose to write blogs or do Tic-Tocs or tweet.
When things go wrong, we want to get through the experience with the minimum fuss. What nobody wants is trouble. So please railcos – listen.
- Please do talk to customers when they are delayed
- Please do remind them of the procedures to claim a refund
- Please do not demand passenger’s tickets and deny them the chance of compensation.
Simple things that make for easier travel.
Agree with everything you said. Best thing is to use the phone camera to photograph your tickets as usually you have to upload a file to claim onkine anyway.