Staff’s hard work kept passengers safe

The harsh criticism from Barry Doe in RAIL 849’s The Fare

Dealer (‘Atrocious weather, even worse service’) is entirely unjustified, and unfair to the teams of railway people who worked long hours to look after customers during the ‘Beast from the East’ in early March.

While your reader may well have been able to find the means to get from Edinburgh to Newcastle on Friday March 2, through a combination of two separate bus services and a taxi, the highways network was not in a fit state to allow rail replacement coach services to be provided.

The A1 - the main road between Edinburgh and Newcastle - did not reopen until the morning of Saturday March 3, and so on the Friday it would have been irresponsible for any operator to put hundreds of customers (including the young, elderly and disabled) at risk by sending fully-laden coaches down snowbound secondary roads in unproved conditions.

At Virgin Trains East Coast, we were able to monitor local conditions on the ground through reports from our employees in Berwick (as well as Edinburgh and Newcastle), who joined our conference calls and provided us with intelligence to help us decide which services could run.

The attached photographs give an idea of the road conditions around Berwick on the Friday. Clearly the conditions were unsuitable for us to convey customers by road. Our decision was therefore to focus our energy on getting the railway reopened.

After hours of effort by Network Rail, Direct Rail Services and Virgin Trains East Coast teams who worked together to clear snowdrifts, the Edinburgh-Newcastle route was finally reopened on Saturday lunchtime. That afternoon we conveyed over 1,200 customers who had been stranded since Wednesday in either Edinburgh or Newcastle. Many had been put up in hotels arranged by our local station teams.

Teams from across the rail industry worked tirelessly to look after customers during the ‘Beast from the East’ - indeed, many staff spent several days and nights away from home as a result of the extreme weather. Others walked several miles in the middle of the night to report for their rostered duties.

Yes, there are lessons for the industry to learn so we can look to improve in the future (as we must), but talk of looking for whom we can blame is entirely misplaced.

Thank you to our industry colleagues and partners for their efforts, and for taking decisions which above all put safety first. David Horne, Managing Director, Virgin Trains East Coast