The great East vs West competition

For my trip to Scotland, Virgin kindly gave me tickets for a trip down on the West Coast and a return via the East Coast, so I could test the offerings in First Class. I wanted to see which is better, now that we are so well into the East Coast franchise that all its trains are Virgin red (which confuses me, as I expected to be walking into a Pendolino at Edinburgh).

I didn’t go for the full English on the way down, partly through trying to eat more healthily (having fried myself an unhealthy lunch the day before), but mostly to test the chef on whether he could make a good eggs Florentine - poached eggs on a bed of spinach. There’s a lot that could go wrong, especially overcooked yolks, but the chef passed with flying colours. The yolk spat out at me when I plunged my fork in, and the spinach was cooked just long enough be soft and tasty. Full marks.

East Coast had something to live up to, but it did. I had the Moroccan lamb on the way back to London and it was really tasty, on a bed of couscous. So, honours even in terms of food, and the service was pretty similar.

I hate to nitpick about staff who definitely earn less and work harder than me, but on both trains there was something, well, ‘plonky’ about how the food and drinks were presented. The butter and jam for my toast were almost thrown at me, and there was a lack of TLC about the service.

I blame the management, here. There should be more mystery shopping, better training, and an attempt to inculcate a sense of dedication. It was noticeable that the best service on East Coast was when the railway was run by Directly Operated Railways, on behalf of the Government. The staff definitely liked being nationalised.

Nevertheless, spending a long day on the train, researching and then writing this piece, was a great experience. The highlight was overtaking miles of cars and trucks at a standstill on the M6.

One bad point, however, which surely Virgin can learn from: the train to Glasgow was running 15 minutes late at Wigan, which means it left the station at the time the next service should have done. The train manager immediately announced that if anyone on the train had tickets for the subsequent one, they would have to pay for a completely new ticket or get off at Preston.

Oh dear… customer service that ain’t! The train was two-thirds empty, and if someone got on a service passing through at the time their ticket indicated, surely a bit of flexibility should have been the order of the day.

I tweeted this out, and Virgin replied saying that only when trains were substantially delayed would people be allowed to use tickets for a different service. This is precisely the sort of thing which used to attract justified criticism of British Rail, and it is amazing that a commercial operator, supposedly famed for customer service, acts like that. Flexibility, folks, flexibility!