Train GraphicClick on the map to explore geographics
 
I need help
FAQ
Emergency
About .
Travel & transport from BBC stories as at 08:35 28 Mar 2024
* Easter travel warning as millions set to hit roads
- What contributed to the Baltimore Bridge collapse?
- Man suffers life-threatening injuries after train stabbing
Read about the forum [here].
Register [here] - it's free.
What do I gain from registering? [here]
 02/06/24 - Summer Timetable starts
17/08/24 - Bus to Imber
27/09/25 - 200 years of passenger trains

On this day
28th Mar (1917)
Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore closed (link)

Train RunningCancelled
06:28 London Paddington to Weston-Super-Mare
06:57 Swansea to London Paddington
07:28 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads
07:43 Swansea to London Paddington
08:18 London Paddington to Cardiff Central
08:30 London Paddington to Weston-Super-Mare
09:00 Bristol Temple Meads to London Paddington
09:12 London Paddington to Cardiff Central
09:29 Weston-Super-Mare to London Paddington
09:30 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads
10:15 London Paddington to Cardiff Central
10:30 London Paddington to Weston-Super-Mare
10:41 Cardiff Central to London Paddington
11:00 Bristol Temple Meads to London Paddington
11:16 London Paddington to Cardiff Central
11:23 Weston-Super-Mare to London Paddington
11:30 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads
11:50 Cardiff Central to London Paddington
12:15 London Paddington to Cardiff Central
12:30 London Paddington to Weston-Super-Mare
Short Run
05:40 Bristol Temple Meads to Penzance
06:48 Cheltenham Spa to London Paddington
06:54 Taunton to London Paddington
07:12 London Paddington to Cardiff Central
08:25 Okehampton to Exeter Central
08:34 Exeter Central to Okehampton
09:50 Cardiff Central to London Paddington
10:50 Penzance to Cardiff Central
Delayed
05:03 Penzance to London Paddington
05:23 London Paddington to Swansea
05:33 Plymouth to London Paddington
05:55 Plymouth to London Paddington
06:00 London Paddington to Penzance
06:38 Weymouth to Gloucester
06:50 Westbury to Weymouth
08:03 London Paddington to Penzance
08:30 Liskeard to Looe
09:35 Exeter Central to Okehampton
09:37 London Paddington to Paignton
10:04 London Paddington to Penzance
10:23 London Paddington to Oxford
10:35 London Paddington to Exeter St Davids
PollsOpen and recent polls
Closed 2024-03-25 Easter Escape - to where?
Abbreviation pageAcronymns and abbreviations
Stn ComparatorStation Comparator
Rail newsNews Now - live rail news feed
Site Style 1 2 3 4
Next departures • Bristol Temple MeadsBath SpaChippenhamSwindonDidcot ParkwayReadingLondon PaddingtonMelksham
Exeter St DavidsTauntonWestburyTrowbridgeBristol ParkwayCardiff CentralOxfordCheltenham SpaBirmingham New Street
March 28, 2024, 08:50:49 *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Forgotten your username or password? - get a reminder
Most recently liked subjects
[146] West Wiltshire Bus Changes April 2024
[117] would you like your own LIVE train station departure board?
[80] Return of the BRUTE?
[63] Infrastructure problems in Thames Valley causing disruption el...
[49] Reversing Beeching - bring heritage and freight lines into the...
[27] CrossCountry upgrade will see 25% more rail seats
 
News: the Great Western Coffee Shop ... keeping you up to date with travel around the South West
 
   Home   Help Search Calendar Login Register  
Pages: [1]
  Print  
Author Topic: RAIL Article Tells FGW & Network Rail To "End Shambles"  (Read 6022 times)
Lee
Transport Scholar
Hero Member
******
Posts: 7519


GBR - The Emperor's New Rail Network


View Profile WWW
« on: October 05, 2007, 11:10:05 »

Link from the Save The Train Forum.
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=4327.msg8035#msg8035

Quote from the RAIL article :

"It's not all FGW (First Great Western)'s fault, of course. Yes, it needs to make sure that the farcical shenanigans over fares, overcrowding, rolling stock shortages and the appalling neglect and jaw-droppingly crass management of the west country branch lines (which previous operator National express "Wessex" had re-juvinated) are never repeated."
Logged

Vous devez être impitoyable, parce que ces gens sont des salauds - https://looka.com/s/78722877
Lee
Transport Scholar
Hero Member
******
Posts: 7519


GBR - The Emperor's New Rail Network


View Profile WWW
« Reply #1 on: October 08, 2007, 10:45:54 »

A view from a Network Rail employee :

Hi all,

Yes, I read that article. How typical of FGW (First Great Western) to blame everybody else except themselves for the mess that they themselves have largly created. Network Rail is not perfect, but at least we admit to our mistakes and work positively and very hard to rectify them. It's not going to happen overnight (or at all in FGW's case!) but things are a whole world better than they were five years ago, and continue to impove. We put our money into improving the infrastructue, not employing poets for railway stations!

Thames Trains was another TOC (Train Operating Company) taken over by FGW. Thames Trains run a good efficient service. Fast forward to today. Same trains on the same lines serving the same stations. The only factor that has changed is that FGW took them over - now look at the appaling service they provide (or don't in some cases!) It seems everything they touch becomes worse.

A Mail On Sunday article several weeks ago, by a First Group employee gives a good example about how they blame anything and everybody else. The employee had carried out a survey on suicides in the area and how they extensively delayed their services and caused widespread disruption. How crass is it to blame mentally unblalanced, and now dead people? And how easy, as their targets cannot answer back! A well run and efficient service would not suffer too greatly as a result of this unfortunate type of incident.
The blame gets passed regularly - almost like they have their own spin doctor in fact!

A school of thought says FGW will take over parts of Network Rail especially the signalling. Given their 'Midas touch' at taking over other areas, is this a wise thing? All the hard work that Network Rail have put in and the improvements we have made, will simply stop, and probably start to go in decline. If anything, it should be the other way round - Network Rail take over FGW. We have well trainned professional people, who like my colleagues and I, just want to run a timely efficient service - and we don't have share-holders to satisfy and pay a premium to. Profits ploughed back into the business will vastly improve it and quickly.

My colleagues and I find it incredulous that FGW still holds a franchise to run trains.
Logged

Vous devez être impitoyable, parce que ces gens sont des salauds - https://looka.com/s/78722877
Lee
Transport Scholar
Hero Member
******
Posts: 7519


GBR - The Emperor's New Rail Network


View Profile WWW
« Reply #2 on: October 20, 2007, 10:29:06 »

An interesting response from CJ Harrison :

Frankly, Sumila, your post is little more than gross hypocrisy, scattered liberally with inaccuracies, evasions and general factual errors.

First, First Great Western do not blame everyone else for their mistakes. Alison Forster consistently maintained that FGW (First Great Western) made errors of judgement and she apologised for those and the inconvenience they caused. She did so via letters put out on the trains, messages on the website, publicly at meetings and on local television. Such apologies may not help passengers who have experienced poor levels of service, but it runs counter to your claim. It also stands in direct contrast to Network Rail who hide behind the scenes rather than engage directly with customers.

Second, you say you put ^your^ money into improving infrastructure rather than ^employing poets^. The use of the word ^your^ is misleading. Unlike First Great Western, Network Rail is massively subsidised by the taxpayer: in other words, you do not really have any money of your own because you are not a proper commercial organisation. First Great Western, on the other hand, are not subsidised and ^ in addition to paying track access charges to Network Rail ^ they are paying over ^1bn in premium payments. As such, it really isn^t any of Network Rail^s ^ or anyone else^s ^ business what a private company decides to spend its own money on. In any case, the cost of employing the poet, if indeed there was a financial cost, would be miniscule in comparison to the ^200m of investment FGW is putting into the franchise.

Third, blaming suicides for delays is not crass ^ it is a matter of objective fact. For obvious reasons suicides and accidental fatalities do cause major delays and it just so happens that last year one out of every three fatalities on the rail network occurred on routes into and out of Paddington. Moreover, there was one week in July of this year when there were four fatalities in four days between Paddington and Slough. Stating this is not disrespectful to those who died or to their families ^ for whom everyone has the utmost sympathy ^ it^s just stating what happens to be true. You claim that a well run and efficient service would not suffer too greatly from suicides. What utter tripe. Suicides can close lines for hours, take rolling stock and staff out of service and have a terrible knock on effect to all other services on the network. They wreak havoc with even the most efficient and effective of operations.

Fourth, Network Rail^s performance is nowhere near as good as you try to paint it. For May of this year Network Rail caused a UK (United Kingdom) total of around 58,000 delay minutes: just over 29,000 of those were on the Great Western route. Let^s be clear: these are delays that are caused by the failure of your infrastructure and are nothing whatsoever to do with First Great Western. That is a terrible record and one underlined by the Office of the Rail Regulator^s statement that: ^performance for First Great Western services continues to suffer from very high levels of delays attributed to Network Rail^. On a national basis you will find that in Q1 of this year (the most recent period for which full data are available) your delays were 2.1% WORSE than the previous year. That is a DETEROIRATION in performance which hardly supports your claim that things are getting better. Just to underline this whole point, perhaps you will recall when, in April of this year, Network Rail grossly underestimated the amount of engineering work required in Wales and as a result overran by a whole week meaning there were no services to or from Swansea. No, I am sorry to say that Network Rail is hardly a paragon of efficiency.

Finally, your point about profits only demonstrates your economic ignorance. I have written about this extensively elsewhere if you care to improve your understanding.

None of what I have written here is to try and claim that FGW is blame free, nor should it be interpreted as indicating that Network Rail is the cause of all problems on the network. To be very fair, often Network Rail is a victim of the same half-baked system that the government imposed on the rail industry that creates so many issues for FGW.

That said, I do think, Sumila, that people in glass houses should not throw stones and it is disingenuous to the extreme that Network Rail should stand in judgement of First Great Western^s performance when your own is anything but laudable.

Logged

Vous devez être impitoyable, parce que ces gens sont des salauds - https://looka.com/s/78722877
Lee
Transport Scholar
Hero Member
******
Posts: 7519


GBR - The Emperor's New Rail Network


View Profile WWW
« Reply #3 on: October 20, 2007, 12:40:53 »

Save The Train takes it to the extreme.

Listing every single cancellation without bothering to question why and see that it might not be FGWs (First Great Western) fault is simply petty.

As you can see , the views in this topic are taken from the Save The Train Forum , where I can assure Liam (definately his quote this time) that they question issues of performance / cancellations and whose fault they might be in quite some detail. They also strive to make sure that both sides of the story (in this case Network Rail's versus FGW's) are put forward so that forum readers can make up their own mind.
Logged

Vous devez être impitoyable, parce que ces gens sont des salauds - https://looka.com/s/78722877
devon_metro
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 5175



View Profile
« Reply #4 on: October 20, 2007, 18:42:49 »

I must be thinking of the wrong forum, the one i mean is the one that organised the fare strike.
Logged
Jim
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 1186


View Profile WWW
« Reply #5 on: October 20, 2007, 21:47:22 »

I must be thinking of the wrong forum, the one i mean is the one that organised the fare strike.

MTLS (More Train Less Strain)
Logged

Cheers
Jim Smiley
AG's most famous quote "It'll be better next week"
grahame
Administrator
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 40687



View Profile WWW Email
« Reply #6 on: October 21, 2007, 08:06:55 »

I must be thinking of the wrong forum, the one i mean is the one that organised the fare strike.

MTLS (More Train Less Strain)

"Save the Train" (STT (Save the Train)) was established quite a while before "More Train, Less Strain" and indeed MTLS was mentioned on the STT web site early on - with the somewhat embarrasing result that web searches for MTLS took you to the STT website for a while.  At one stage, our office was quite busy re-directing a load of press calls!

I'm glad to report that the MTLS web site is now ranked higher than STT in Google when you search for their name.   Usually I like to get high Google rankings, but I will make the odd exception!

Speaking now very carefully ... as I do NOT speak for MTLS.   But it appears to me that the campaigns differ substantially - MTLS are far more political in their desires, and far more radical in their actions than STT. 

I CAN speak with some authority for STT - the much preferred route to reach our objective of an appropriate service on the TransWilts line is to work with the existing system - the DfT» (Department for Transport - about). FGW (First Great Western), W(C)C, Network Rail and so on, though influencing their decisons in a direction which is, frankly, sensible for all.
Logged

Coffee Shop Admin, Acting Chair of Melksham Rail User Group, Option 24/7 Melksham Rep
Do you have something you would like to add to this thread, or would you like to raise a new question at the Coffee Shop? Please [register] (it is free) if you have not done so before, or login (at the top of this page) if you already have an account - we would love to read what you have to say!

You can find out more about how this forum works [here] - that will link you to a copy of the forum agreement that you can read before you join, and tell you very much more about how we operate. We are an independent forum, provided and run by customers of Great Western Railway, for customers of Great Western Railway and we welcome railway professionals as members too, in either a personal or official capacity. Views expressed in posts are not necessarily the views of the operators of the forum.

As well as posting messages onto existing threads, and starting new subjects, members can communicate with each other through personal messages if they wish. And once members have made a certain number of posts, they will automatically be admitted to the "frequent posters club", where subjects not-for-public-domain are discussed; anything from the occasional rant to meetups we may be having ...

 
Pages: [1]
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.2 | SMF © 2006-2007, Simple Machines LLC Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!
This forum is provided by customers of Great Western Railway (formerly First Great Western), and the 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 the content provided by one of our posters contravenes our posting rules (email link to report). Forum hosted by Well House Consultants

Jump to top of pageJump to Forum Home Page