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Title: Oxford station under British Rail - staff comment Post by: grahame on September 02, 2014, 04:57:34 An autobiographical piece from Richard Vines at
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-01/restaurant-critic-goes-time-traveling-on-italy-s-quickest-train.html? Quote My father died when I was 18 and I decided to quit college (where I had just begun to train as a teacher) and return home. I needed a job, cold-called Oxford railway station and joined the staff of British Rail as a clerical officer in 1973. I made 1,080 pounds ($1,790) a year answering travel queries. There were about eight of us covering multiple shifts and we couldn^t cope with the number of calls. People were left waiting on hold and sometimes tried repeatedly for days. We took it in turns to be the train announcer, advising passengers on arrivals and departures we could not see from where we sat. I used to guess, based on the timetable and the sounds I heard, and sometimes guessed wrong. Once, I advised passengers to board a freight train carrying coal that had stopped on a middle track, away from the platform. Another time, I misidentified a holiday special to Wales as a scheduled service to central England. Staff had to run up and down the train telling commuters to get off. Carries on to talk of other railway jobs ... Title: Re: Oxford station under British Rail - staff comment Post by: stebbo on September 02, 2014, 14:42:06 Once remember in the 1970s the platform indicator showing a northbound train as bound for Bradford Exchange when a train to Liverpool Lime Street was due. The announcer was reading off the stations to Bradford when he realised the mistake, stopped, exclaimed audibly over the PA "who the .... put that up" then recovered, amended the display and read out the correct calling pattern as if nothing had happened.
On another occasion a London bound train was late and the platform staff were struggling to get everybody on the train when the station master announced over the PA "will you get these b........s on the train and get it moving". Ah, pure joy. This page is printed from the "Coffee Shop" forum at http://gwr.passenger.chat which is provided by a customer of Great Western Railway. Views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned. Visit www.gwr.com for the official Great Western Railway website. Please contact the administrators of this site if you feel that content provided contravenes our posting rules ( see http://railcustomer.info/1761 ). The forum is hosted by Well House Consultants - http://www.wellho.net |