"Meet the Manager" - tomorrow (18th June 2020)

[whole diary]

[grahame]

Tomorrow afternoon (18th June 2020), we look forward to welcoming Samyutha Bala, Head of Customer Experience at GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway), and Jason Ness, their Head of Customer Relations, to answer members's questions as submitted at the start of this week.  New threads will be started from 17:00 to 18:00 - pre-prepared questions and answers to be posted over the following 50 minutes, but then a chance for members to follow up with corollaries, discussion and comment.  The questions, answers and dialogues will then form a part of our archive, as there are many good questions which will be asked and asked again over coming weeks and months.

A huge "thank you" to Jason, Samyutha and Caroline for setting this up, and to Bob and Tim on our team for their help too. I suspect that some of the answers may not meet members dreams (pretty impossible, as we have members with opposing views on certain matters), but we really appreciate the opportunity to ask, be informed, and to come back with inputs which may help us all towards mutual goals in sustainable (economic as well as climate!) transport.

Campaigning for the improvement of the customer experience is not new.   Lisa (my SO) came across the following press cutting the other day (Leeds Times, 3rd December 1864) looking forward to 1964:

Railway Traveling in 1864 and 1964

In an address at Portobello, a few days ago, the Lord Advocate said

My successor in this hall may say in 1964

Would you believe it, a hundred years ago they treated a traveller like a convict. They locked him in a box, and, ill or well, living or dead, no man could see him, and he could see no man, until he had gone a distance of forty miles. It is a fact. He might be shut up with a murderer, ora madman, with a drunkard or a villain ; he might die of apoplexy; he might have his throat cut; all this was thought of no consequence at that time."

The simple arrangements which we now make were often proposed, but resisted with frantic wrath, as being utterly impracticable. They had built their carriages for people to be imprisoned in them, and therefore imprisoned they must be. The easy expedient of a gangway outside the carriage and a bell inside was assailed with & hundred good and conclusive objections.

People would use it recklessly; and it was a pity to disturb the guard when asleep when he ought to be awake.  It would enable anybody to stop the train, although, as you all know, it does not enable any one to stop the train; it would enable thieves to reach the carriages and to escape, which is about as good a reason for not making a road to your house.

And thus would the lecturer in 1964 keep his audience amused by the preposterous and stolid follies of these times. It is pretended that there is do satisfactory proposal for remedying the evil I answer there are a hundred ways of remedying the evil, and the worst of them is not so bad as the state of things which exists. It is high time that progress travelled by rail

My goodness - thing have changed since that time, but yet we can look forward now to, perhaps, 2024 and 2064 and come up with some things we would really like to see changing for the passenger - a continuation of the progress desired above.   Progress has indeed travelled by rail, and I look forward to learning how that will continue.