Rail travel remains a good experience, but…
Over the past month or so, I have almost lived on the railways with journeys from my home in London to (among others) Newmarket, Pewsey, Taunton, Bristol (twice), Reading (twice), Leeds, Sheffield (twice) and numerous suburban trips. All but a couple of these trains have been on time, or at least within the official ten minutes for a long journey allowed by the official performance measure.
The worst trip, and it was one we went on deliberately because I was advising on a film for ITV (due to be screened on January 24), was a trip into Manchester in the rush hour. It was both crowded to the rafters and late.
The other bizarre crowding was on the last train back to London from Taunton on a Saturday night - at Bath it was invaded by several hundred largely inebriated (and surprisingly not young) people who had been out for a day in the town and an evening in the bars.
Apparently, this is a regular phenomenon - Bath has become a real honey pot for night revellers, and the not sober woman who briefly perched herself next to me told me that on days when there is a rugby match, twice as many people get on. They all left at Chippenham and Swindon (though only because I woke the pair opposite me, otherwise they would have had an uncomfortable night on a bench in Paddington).
Overall, travelling by train around the country remains a good experience, despite the industry’s recent travails. The worst bugbear is the use of recorded announcements.
On the new Hitachi trains on Great Western Railway, there is a particularly irritating woman’s voice offering far too much information far too frequently.
On East Midlands Trains, it is the repetition of ‘see it, say it, sorted’ at every stop. When I queried this, I was told it was a legal requirement insisted upon by transsec, the railway’s security committee. This is simply not true, as no other trains on which I travelled make such frequent security announcements - LNER is particularly good at leaving passengers alone.
As I have written many times before, the train operators need to realise that they are providing a service. People may well have other ways in which they can make their journey if train travel is just so unnecessarily unpleasant.
The problem is that public perception has changed over the past year or so. The timetable change chaos, the strikes, the closures for the investment programme, and the generally passenger-unfriendly ethos that pervades many operators have all combined to lose the public’s confidence in the railway.
This is something that the Rail Delivery Group and the rest of the industry needs to address as a whole.
Yes, passenger numbers went up in the last quarter for which there are figures, but I suspect (as Mystic Wolmar will predict in the next issues) that there is a slight overall trend in the wrong direction.