WiFi woes and lack of information are symptoms of operators’ failings

I am writing this column, as I often do, on a train. I started it on a Chiltern service to Birmingham, where the WiFi worked perfectly. Very cleverly, in order to stop people streaming films and TV programmes, you are limited to 20 megabytes, after which you get a much slower service - this prevents people from hogging what will (for the foreseeable future) be limited capacity.

The Great Western Railway service from Cheltenham on which I am completing this column offers free WiFi. But, as often happens on trains, it has proved impossible to connect. The conductor was nowhere to be seen, not having bothered to come through the train, although he has made various fatuous announcements about reading safety cards and taking care of the gap between the train and the platform.

But nothing about the service, which is what privatisation (remember) was supposed to be all about. No mention of “would you like any information on your journey”, or indeed on how the WiFi is provided and whether it is working. There was, though, an announcement saying no seat reservations had been put out.

I was travelling after speaking to the Tewkesbury and District Rail Promotion Group, where the chairman made a similar point about the lack of customer engagement.

Due to works at Worcester in the first week of June, several key services out of Ashchurch for Tewkesbury, including the much-used 0927 to Bristol, were going to be either scrapped or brought forward. Yet no one at GWR had sought to inform local people, by (for example) putting a notice up at the station or (radical idea) informing the local taxi services. Therefore many people would be turning up at the station to find their train already gone.

The local group had done its best to try to get the information out to regular users, as had a conductor on one of the affected services. But the lack of attention to this kind of detail is so at odds with the claims made by train operators about being customerfocused.

All these issues - WiFi, announcements, guards checking passengers’ tickets, warning passengers about timetable changes, seat reservation tickets - are basic facets of the train operating companies’ job, but seemingly beyond many of them. Chiltern, in contrast, did all these things well, as well as having the most comfortable trains.