The Systems Administrator went to the rugby at Twickenham yesterday. The railway was operating a reduced holiday timetable but didn't manage to keep to it, and it took an hour and a half to get to Stratford. That was still better than the experience of one of the group who lives in Hertfordshire and was supposed to come in to Kings Cross. He made it for the 4.30 pm kick-off, just, by dint of leaving home very early, but his local train was extremely crowded because the whole of an Edinburgh train's worth of people had been decanted on to it at Peterborough.
He found himself sitting with a couple from Edinburgh, who were travelling down to London, or attempting to travel down, for a matinee that afternoon. As the minutes ticked painfully by somewhere beyond Finsbury Park it became painfully obvious to them that they were not going to make it in time for the first act.
It is time that the management of Network Rail and the railway operating companies started listening to themselves, with their advice not to travel yesterday but to delay journeys until Monday, and their promises that tickets purchased for use on Saturday would still be valid then. They just don't get it. Rugby matches and matinees can't be delayed like a trip to Ikea. You've got tickets for Saturday 27th December 2014, and Saturday is when it happens. Not Monday. This morning Network Rail were still defending their position on the radio by saying that they had do maintenance over the Christmas period because it was essential work.
OK, here's an idea. Schedule it better. Be less ambitious over how much you try to do in two days. Build in time allowances for the fact that unexpected things happen during construction work, and you don't know how long a job is going to take. Have a better cut-off procedure for starting to bring work to a halt when it becomes clear that you aren't going to finish everything you optimistically thought you were going to do before it's time to hand the track back to the train operators. Or give yourself more than two days to do the work at Kings Cross. Announce back in October that it will be shut over the weekend after Christmas, as well as Boxing Day, and give yourself a four day window. Yes, that will be inconvenient for people wanting to travel over the holiday period, and will provoke grumbles and howls of outrage, but at least the travelling public will have time to make alternative arrangements. Fly. Take a coach. Decide to book the opera for a different weekend.
I am longing for the day when the passenger sitting uselessly outside London in a stationary train that is delayed not by flash flooding, lightning strike, or suicide on the line but by the incompetence of Network Rail or a rail operating company, turns out to be a hot-shot top QC who decides not to leave it at that, and to challenge the legislation that exempts rail carriers from any liability for consequential losses. London theatre tickets do not come cheap, nor hotel rooms. Why should people who have paid up for both be left to carry the can when the whole enterprise turns out to be a waste of time and a colossal let-down and disappointment because thanks to Network Rail's inability to plan or finish a job on time they weren't able to do the thing that was their reason for travelling in the first place? I wouldn't dish out US style multi-million dollar awards for mental distress, though there was probably some of that too, but compensation for immediate out of pocket expenses would be a good start. To be funded out of the Directors' bonus pool or the contractors' profits, not by the taxpayer.
You could say it served the theatre loving pair right for planning to travel on the same morning that they had an important engagement in the afternoon, but that's a damning intictment on Britain's railways.
No comments:
Post a Comment