Arriva answers
can’t you put on more trains on match days? “We spend at least three months in advance of a fixture planning the train service and crowd management for major events taking place across our network.
“During these event days, the depots are empty, as every train at our disposal is out in service, unless undergoing absolutely essential maintenance work.
“As we have a finite fleet of trains we can’t provide extra capacity on every service conveying fans to and from an event but we will ensure that extra carriages and services are provided on the most popular routes and, where possible, we will also reduce capacity on services not affected by the event to provide as many extra seats as possible.
“As an example, when a 72,500 capacity event takes place in Cardiff the benefits of using the train instead of road can see up to 40,000 customers returning to the station within a four-hour period to get home, far more than on a typical Saturday evening.”
Ado you justify price increases? ON average across the UK, around 97p in every £1 from fares goes back into running and improving services, and this has helped us to invest £30m since the start of the franchise and £2.8m this year.
“Government policy influences all train fares, either through regulated fares such as season tickets or through the payments it receives from train companies. As most people will be aware, fare prices can change three times per year with the bulk of these changes happening in January.
“This year we have gone through and tidied up the pricing structure as there has been a lot of confusion in the past, both from customers and staff.
“The vast majority of revenue from fares covers the costs of services, for example paying for trains, fuel, staff and other day-to-day running costs, and helps to sustain investment in more trains, better stations and faster journeys.
“Everyone in the railway works hard to get more out of every pound it receives and spends, to make passengers’ and taxpayers’ money go further to help to build a better railway.”
aren’t there more carriages on the busiest routes or at peak times? WE regularly monitor, through passenger counts, how busy all of our services are and within the fleet we have, deploy the larger capacity trains or more carriages to the busiest services. However while we try and do this the best we can, with a walk up service, predicting the number of passengers on a train is not an exact science.
“During the weekday morning peaks, particularly coming into Cardiff, all the trains we have are running and we have no further capacity to add.
“Every weekday our full working fleet of trains is out in service, and only those that are undergoing maintenance or repair will not be in use.
“Events can arise that mean more trains need repair or maintenance than planned and in this can lead to a shortage of carriages for a service.
“If this happens we have two choices, split a fourcarriage train to form two two-carriage services or cancel the service.
“Our aim is to always minimise the impact of disruption to all our customers and we will therefore always short form services to avoid cancelling services altogether.
“We are continuing to work hard with our partners in the Welsh Government and Network Rail to explore options around additional rolling stock, but there are no quick or easy solutions to this issue.” you think your service is accepta- ARRIVA Train Wales, along with all of the train operators within the UK, operate to punctuality and performance standards that are set by the government’s Department for Transport (DfT).
“We are proud to say that we are consistently one of the top ‘right time’ performing rail operators in the UK. Right-time performance measures the percentage of trains arriving at their terminating station early or within 59 seconds of schedule, Arriva Trains Wales’ moving annual average is 79.6% which ranks 2nd out of all train operators. The more commonly used measure of train punctuality, the public performance measure