Wednesday 23 May 2012

It's Groundhog Day



So May 22nd was a bit like all the other South West Trains delay-filled days. I shouldn’t overdramatize, it’s only 20% of my journeys that are delayed (by 5mins+ or cancelled). So only every 3 days (!)

Like so many of you, I was standing there in the melee at Waterloo. Wasn’t it horrible? I don’t know what is worse the delay itself or that horribly oppressive feeling of being squished up against a ga zillion people all waiting for that glorious nugget of information about which platform to rush to in one big swirling mass. One tweeter described it as being like 28 Days Later. Probably a little rash, but you get the idea.

The longer these delays persist, the less apathetic people seem to be getting and that’s a good thing. South West Trains don’t deserve a deafening silence, they deserve to spend some of their £50 million profit (in 2011) on sorting out their service. And yes, before you even think it, I do realise they can’t be held responsible for suicidal people (or as @SW_Trains decided to call them “A suicidal female”). But they can be held responsible for sorting the ensuing mess out efficiently and politely. There were mentions of abusive staff, or staff who had no idea what was going on… What’s the point of bigging up in the news sites that you’ve ‘drafted in extra staff to help with the issues of commuters’, if they’re just going to stand there and stare blankly as if caught in a train-induced trance? Give them the correct info, or don’t feed them to the wolves. It’s not entirely fair on them.

What seemed to have got lost yesterday was that approximately 10 minutes before the “Suicidal Female” (their words, not mine) there were announcements about signalling problems at Vauxhall. I’m presuming they magically disappeared?! According to all the news reports, you’d think they had never existed. Why do ITV, The Evening Standard, The local rags bother to report something if they’re not going to report the actual story?

If these delays continue to be every 3 days (my own personal experience) then why the HELL should I pay for the pleasure? Why should you? As you’ll see from my previous blogs, it’s so completely impossible to get a proper refund anyway.

Most maddening of all is the feeling of complete helplessness. Nothing any of us can do seems to change anything in regards their service levels. The only bright spot being their twitter feed reports delays efficiently and (mostly) accurately.

I want to help bring about change to this complete monopoly on my journey, I just don’t know how.

2 comments:

  1. The thing I find most scary is how after an incident they don't manage the flow of passengers onto the trains. I know we all just want to get on with getting home etc but they way passengers are allowed to over crowd onto carriages is frightening. It would only take a small incident, sudden stop etc and all hell would break lose. It's like they just want to get people off the platform with total disregard for safety.

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  2. Well this is it, all it would take is for one packed train to break down for a prolonged period of time and something would go seriously wrong

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