And me, a lone, small, insignificant voice is a COMPLETELY different kettle of fish to the media.
I will admit my comment was a generalisation, but the evidence is out there...
Quite, a generalisation - and
the media is not some single entity - it is people - and like people generally, some of them occasionally make mistakes, or like you, use generalisations, or don't know the ins and out of how the railways work intimately. As a result, in the countless stories
the media produce about railways, among other things, every year, some mistakes will get through. TerminalJunkie, did you bother to tell the North Devon Journal about their mistake, so they would have the opportunity to correct it?
And speaking of generalisations, to claim that
FGW▸ 's punctuality has improved only because of padding is a classic. On my journey - on the same route you use, FA - the typical journey time for the section I use has gone up by a couple of minutes, mostly added, as far as I can tell, to allow for people who don't shut
HST▸ doors behind them. And those extra stops in the Vale that upset you all so much are a pretty big factor in the extended journey times.
How often have you actually suffered a really long delay on the train recently? About as often as you could expect to get stuck in a jam on a motorway if you drove everywhere, I would suggest. And let's not forget the saintly airlines - the worst hold-up I've had lately on 'public transport', to use the term loosely, was sitting in a plane at Calgary airport waiting to take off for 30 minutes after the scheduled time. But with the help of their padded schedule, we were 'on time' at Heathrow.
My FGW journeys at the end of 2007 and into the middle of last year were frequently being delayed by 30 minutes or worse on a run of just 35 minutes - I had the sheaf of vouchers to prove it - and padding has nothing to do with sorting out those kinds of delays. The only claims I have made for delays of 30 minutes-plus in the past eight months or so were one at the end of November and one in January. I can even manage to get pretty hacked off these days about a five-minute delay - that's how much they have improved.
It was precisely because FGW weren't delivering that the Government put on the thumbscrews, which coincided with the arrival of new faces at the top determined to turn things round - it should not have got like that, but it's clear from everything that went on from 2004, when First took over from Thames Trains, and then adding Wessex in 2006, that someone, somewhere within First and FGW had seriously underestimated the scale of the job they were taking on - going from running couple of hundred expresses a day to operating what is arguably the most complicated franchise of the lot, with everything from half-hourly frequency intercity routes down to the Looe branch line. They took too long to sort it out, but they have done it, so give them a little credit, for goodness' sake!
