Great Western Coffee Shop

The Trouble With Our Trains - BBC 1 - Panorama Programme (30 mins)

Monday 7 November 2016 - 1930hrs (transmitted later same evening in Scotland & Wales)

An investigation into the disconnect between the claims of the government and rail industry - which maintain that Britain's railways are a success - and the experience of many passengers who feel train services are unreliable, overcrowded and cost far too much money. What will it take to close that gap?

With thanks for posting that item, InTheSidings, I've also added it to our Coffee Shop forum calendar.  :)

...........making the Board of Directors of each TOC travel daily in standard class on rush hour trains in and out of London (for those whose companies serve London) should shatter a few of their illusions about their levels of success in respect of the three aspects mentioned and narrow the gap to a width roughly equivalent to Mr Creosote's "waffer thin mint" (not that they'd admit it of course, remember Gerald Ratner?)  ;)

Make a GWR director travel on the BTM  to Malvern train at 16:41 each week day.

The occasional two carriages would never happen, and somehow a four/five carriage unit would be found.

............followed by a trip in standard class on the 1903 from Paddington-Penzance on a Friday!  ;)

Or the 19:15 to Swansea, particularly on Fridays.

Or the 20:15/21:15 (or equiv weekend times) to Swansea - after the Cardiff stop both can be pretty horrendous with drunken louts, especially Fri/Sat nights.

On second thoughts, it might be quicker & easier to make a list of services which are absolutely fine and dandy so they don't need to experience them!

....looks like an interesting programme tonight;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37835087

BBC article on the programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37835087

I think their assumptions on social media are wrong. Its so easy/quick to post a complaint there, pretty much everyone's doing it, many for trivial things one wouldn't waste their time to write in about.

So of course, numbers of negative tweets will always exceed written complaints. Doesn't mean rhings are necessarily any worse than before social media/privatisation

Just watched the show, and not too impressed, too London focused.

The main issue is old stock, infrastructure and too little investment, too late to fix it.

It is about time that we look how Germany managements National, Regional and Local train services and devolves responsible accordingly.

Tomorrow, in Los Angeles they are voting on a transport ballot (as way as the main comedy show) to provide $850m pa via a sales tax to improvement local transport,

mandatory separate cycle lanes
improved roads
improved buses
tram lines
improved and new train lines and services

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-metro-sales-tax-increase-20160623-snap-story.html (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-metro-sales-tax-increase-20160623-snap-story.html)

Why cannot UK cities and county implement similar schemes here?

So depressingly negative all the way round. Where is someone to bang heads together at the RMT. Dft and Southern. A plague on all their houses. >:(

Good plug for the GWR Pullman though.

Not sure about "London centric", there was a fairy long piece about Northern's terrible leaky "buses on rails" aka Pacers.

I watched this programme and wished I hadn't.  It ticked all the anti-rail boxes:
Overcrowded trains  - check
High ticket prices - check
Split ticketing confusion - check
Pacers - check

Consider the first two. What would halving the cost of tickets do to demand during the London commuting peaks?

It would be a brave reporter who would say, on a full-n-standing train: "The number of people on this train proves that the fares are too low.", or, conversely, "If the train companies reduce the ticket prices, how many more people will get on this train?"

So the underlying issue, capacity, wasn't even touched on.  To get more people into London each day, the railways need more tracks, more trains, longer platforms and closer-headway signalling.

Under BR, [rose-tinted misty-eyed nostalgia alert], Rail managers were at liberty to price off demand.  Whereas now, franchises can only raise regulated fares to limits set by DfT. So privatisation has led to more government control/interference, not less.

Missed the show but get the drift.

I was sitting in Flensberg station for two ****ing hours because the (always on time?) German train was 10 minutes late, and the connection on into Denmark only allowed four - which goes to prove that we don't have a monopoly of problems in the UK.

Oh and of course the staffed information and ticket area that had locked the door just at the time the train to Denmark left (still people inside being served, but no help for the new arrivals!) and the station Bistro which did a stonking trade for the first hour of the wait then chucked all its customers out because they (staff) had to go home.

Still on the train ... started from Hoek at 08:26, now into destination at 01:04. Perhaps I should have flown!

I started reading your post and thought to myself 'perhaps easy jet from Bristol to Copenhagen might've been an awful lot easier', especially considering your other thread regarding the mysterious station of 0650!

I'm flying back ... 'twas always the plan.  But different airline and airports to the ones you suggest.  Good reasons for doing it each way ... will follow up during the week but my final train's just making its way into the place I'm staying (not Copenhagen; that's like assuming everyone who comes to England is coming to London!).   Current problem is a dusting of snow on the lines which needs a leaf-fall timetable, I think.  Very gentle starts.  But excellent power and WiFi on this Danish train.

Trains in the Bath area all running late this morning. Kind of ironic with last nights programme!

Completely subjective comment. If people feel strongly enough to express dissatisfaction (via whichever media they choose) it isn't "trivial" to them, and it's the customers feelings that matter. A "negative tweet" can be just as representative of a complaint as a letter, and if the platform is provided by the Business then it's just as legitimate to use it to complain.

Most organisations which practise excellent customer service value instant feedback as it allows them to address issues and spot trends far more quickly - give it a few years and webchat/twitter etc will have largely taken the place of written correspondence for these purposes. Generation Y.

I found it at last reassuring that the BBC have finally discovered who is responsible for the state of our railways, the Department for Transport. 

From a commuter's perspective, when you see images of overcrowding and conditions onboard other train operating companies services, do you not realise that changing the operator of the franchise won't solve any of the issues on that particular route?  The government needs to start increasing line capacity, both infrastructure and seated capacity.  By using the current stock more intensively and trying to cram more services onto the current network will only lead to a deterioration of the quality of the service.

Exactly!

Almost all the problems discussed were down to government policy and interference. The cynic in me suggests that the DfT are very happy that customers focus their anger on the 'fat-cat' franchise operators, and the massive amount of money (3%, isn't it?) they cream off for shareholders (aka your pension fund!).

I only caught the second half of it, but in many ways it seemed fairly balanced - the c2c debacle was in part due to timetable changes unleashing extra demand, new trains were on order for c2c, Crossrail was going to add 10% to London's rail capacity, rail usage had grown dramatically due to demographic changes and immigration and was set to double etc. Not sure if anyone mentioned that the Pacers were being replaced with new trains though. 

If anything, towards the end I started to wonder whether it hadn't been actively encouraged by NR and RDG in order to encourage the Government to be generous with the CP6 funding settlement. 

c2c had in principle an agreement to hire in additional trains.  This agreement fell through, either because the operator withdrew the offer and/or the DfT refused to sign off the additional expenditure.  The trains were rumoured to be the 360's from Heathrow Connect or the GWR 387's.

CrossRail, in my opinion, is a shortsighted project in that it will help with capacity in the short term but going forward 5-10 years, there's next to no room for adding additional capacity to the route.   

Anything to get more money from the government would be welcome!

Myself I thought it was a good typical BBC programme to fill in a 30 minutes time slot,  basically using everyone's complaints, a few shots of overcrowded trains, rail companies are evil, and only care about profits blah blah blah, job done.

Its exactly the same with the god awful Watchdog programme the other week "Watch out your car may catch fire", go to the website and its sends you straight to the manufacturers website which lists the specific models affect, now imagine elderly people who don't have access to the internet, the must have been messing their pants!

Anyway back to the Panorama documentary, I think they should have mentioned the fact that Virgin and GWR have new trains coming into effect from 2017/2018, actually showing a clip of them! I have to say that overall the BBC's journalism has become more of a tabloid style in recent years and it irritates me extensively!