2 November 2012
The prime MinisterWe decided to take a trip to London yesterday. We like to do a couple of special trips each year and had not managed it this year, partly due to persistent bad weather and partly due to conflicting diaries. London Midland Rail has had a summer offer called The Great Escape which finishes this week so we decided to take advantage of its reasonable prices. We upgraded our tickets to first class for a modest extra sum and caught the 9:48 which departed only 28 minutes late at 10:16.
This is the slow train to London with about six stops but still gets you into Euston before midday. The first class compartment rapidly filled with people who were obviously not first class ticket holders. The inspector came round and made some move on and others paid extra to him. Then at Northampton the Train Manager announced that the train would be cut in half and the northern half would return to Birmingham. Suddenly the southern half of the train was inundated with huge numbers of displaced passengers. They were standing in the aisles and corridors but remained quite good natured, in the main, despite their privations.
The Train Manager announced that he was declassifying first class – he really did not have much option as there was nowhere else for many of the passengers to go. He also told us that those of us who had paid first class prices could reclaim the extra charge but he did not tell us how and where and he never re-appeared in the train and was completely absent when we eventually reached Euston. I suspect he had hidden himself in the toilet which suspicion was reaffirmed when the driver told us that he was stopping the train at Milton Keynes to investigate an emergency alarm in the toilet for the disabled. Milton Keynes is a perfect example of how not to design a New Town and it was, perhaps, appropriate that we should suffer there problems with the smallest room on the train.
When we reached Euston my friend decided he had to go. I took him to the end of the concourse where I knew the toilets to be but I should have known better. When he saw they were charging 30 pence he turned abruptly and walked towards the exit muttering about finding a pub. I told him he would not find a pub within a mile of the station but amazingly we did. It was attached to the station and was filled with railway memorabilia, or junk, according to your taste. He looked around and could not find a toilet so he decided he had better buy us some beer. He bought two pints and beat a hurried retreat down three flights of stairs to the basement and through several doors, one of which was locked with a punch key code.
When he got back to me I was quietly supping my beer and chuckling. He knew exactly what I was going to say. “That pee just cost you £7.10”. He laughed. “So far it’s cost me about £32”. I have never known anyone better able to shoot himself in the foot. But we laughed.
Then we went back into the station to find the underground. He could never remember travelling on the Tube before although he could remember other things about London so how he travelled I cannot guess. I had tried the night before to top up my Oyster Card. The card is an excellent idea and seems to work well but its website is, like many others, a complete pain. After resetting my password twice I gave up. So we queued for 20 minutes and topped it up without problem. Then I bought one for Graham.
He soon got the hang of interpreting the maps at the head and foot of each stairway and then reading the map in the train between the heads of eight other people. We made our first interchange at Leicester Square and soon reached South Kensington. The exit gates were overwhelmed and the staff simply opened them up and hastened us through. It was only after I got home that I found out that you have to use your Oyster card on exit or they charge you the maximum possible fare. So bang went our Oyster credit.
We found Exhibition Road easily enough but only then did it dawn on us that it was half-term. The queue of parents and kids to get into the Natural History Museum was about eight miles long. I had never been there before but I reluctantly went to the Science Museum instead, where I have been numerous times before, as the queue there was only a half mile long. I was disappointed with the science museum. The ground floor exhibits are pretty good and cover everything from the first steam engines, and earlier, though to the latest satellites. But the rest of the rather large building has been turned into a phony experience centre for kids. I suspect there is little in there that they cannot get from the internet but they seemed in the main to enjoy it.
Despite the relative paucity of exhibits to suit us we spent three very enjoyable hours there and then got hungry. We ate at one of the dozens of restaurants. Indeed, I think there is more space devoted to eating than to exhibits. We were too weary to bother searching so we took the first offer and had beefburger and chips, a meal I would normally avoid like the plague. But it filled a void. We left around five o’clock and I suggested we walk through Kensington to find a decent pub for a pint. Suddenly I was struck down with the most acute stomach cramps. I never normally have such problems but the beefburger had done its work. Eventually the cramps wore off and we looked in vain for our pub. There were fast food joints by the dozen and all manner of shops selling all manner of goods and even a few expensive restaurants but not a decent pub in sight.
Then we came to Gloucester Road tube station and headed back to Euston. We spent half an hour tucked very firmly between big men and little men, big ladies and little ladies and even a few unfortunate children underfoot and all determined, through the needs of prudence, to grab a nearby hand-hold so ensuring an interwoven network of arms and bags and glances and smiles and scowls. One young lady asked a man to open the small window at the end of the carriage where we were standing and she looked distinctly green and scurried off when the door opened.
The concourse at Euston was crowded. Several hundred people were avidly reading the huge array of around twelve notice boards which give the details of each train departure for the next hour or so. There were three of four notices for London Midland trains – all of them cancelled except for the one we wanted to catch. That did not have a designated platform but did have the grim information that it would terminate at Northampton, fifty miles short of its designated destination. But this was the only game on the big screen and when the platform number flashed up we joined the mad rush to the train.
The train was surprisingly un-crowded. Eventually we received several recorded messages advising passengers wishing to proceed to Birmingham to move to the front of the train. It is probably normal practice for this operator to split the trains at Northampton and take the separate parts back in opposite directions, or whatever. No doubt they get to join them back together tomorrow or the day after. They don’t seem to know any more than we do. Eventually the driver came on and told us that he was abandoning the train at Northampton and there would be busses to get us to our destinations of Long Buckby, Rugby and Coventry. If I had wanted to travel by bus I could have bought a ticket a damn site cheaper than the cost of the train – and a damn sight faster. Next time I probably shall.
We got chatting with two young ladies sitting opposite us who had to go to Long Buckby and they recited a list of similar adventures they had had in the past. When we got to Northampton Graham insisted on going to find the engine driver to find out from the organ grinder what was happening and he found him locking up the cab. Then he had to have another pee and consequently we were almost last in line for the numerous busses that had been hired.
There were several LM officials there and two of the busses left. Then they allowed us to board the fourth bus but told us that we had to wait for the next train from London. It was quite clear there were to be no more trains north of Northampton that night. The third bus was also loading and when the next train arrived was besieged. Then they told us that the third bus was going directly to Coventry so that passengers could get trains from there to Birmingham. That would have suited us but we decided to stay here we were. A young lady with four tired children in tow stood near us and anguished whether or not to go to the third bus. She had to go to Birmingham and it was clearly going to be midnight before she got home. I advised her to stay where she was. This coach would only be an extra twenty minutes and she had settled the children and herself and she did not know what was happening on the third coach. She said she thought that was good advice. So did I at the time.
We left Northampton at about 8:30 PM and travelled along the country roads of middle England through the dark November night. Both Graham and I enjoy travelling and we can always find much to see and discuss even at night. We had secured the two front seats next to the driver so were quite happy with an excellent view of everything we passed. The coach was a very large vehicle and driving it requires quite different techniques to that of driving a car so it was all of interest to us. We set down passengers at Long Buckby at around 8:45 and every single passenger thanked the driver personally as they left. There was not the slightest rancour displayed to him. Hopefully they were all saving it up for the train operator next day.
We carried on to Rugby on a road which I had never actually been on before. When we arrived there at around 9:00 I was not paying much attention to anything when we stopped. I used to go train-spotting in Rugby sixty five years ago and we were discussing everything about trains and railways and nothing at all. Several people got off and as we pulled away I looked out of the window and saw the young mother and her four children huddled on the sidewalk. It was too late for me to do anything about it.
I suspect she had not the faintest idea what England looks like outside of the railway track, and why would she? How could she? She had taken her family from Birmingham to London safe in the care of a big railway company and they had betrayed her and dumped her god knows how many miles from her home in a place utterly unknowable to her. She probably thought she was in Coventry and was about to get a train home to Birmingham. I am afraid my guilt at advising her to stay on the coach and then letting her get off at the wrong stop will never be assuaged. It is hard to imagine what she did next. Hopefully some kindly person took charge of her and put her on a Virgin train to Birmingham – if , indeed, one were to stop at Rugby. Most do not.
And this brings me to the nub of this essay. While on the journey from Euston to Northampton we stopped at several stations for slightly longer than strictly necessary to let the Virgin express go past us. As soon as the express had gone we followed behind. I don’t mind this. I get cheaper travel and they pay for their privileges. I have travelled Virgin often enough so I really have no axe to grind. But we are entitled to expect the service to get us where we have paid to go even if it takes over twice as long. In this instance several hundred of us were grossly disadvantaged, indeed insulted, by the conditions imposed upon us quite late at night in places far from our homes.
Now we are entitled to ask how this situation has come about. The railways were nationalised and British Railways formed when I was but a child. I Lived for fifty odd years with British Railways and British Rail and I think I can say with some certainty that the young mother and her four children would never have been dumped is such a cavalier manner by British Rail. They ran both the fast and the slow services so that it did not matter which train you caught, you would get home somehow. Now the high speed merchant will not carry the slow travellers and vice-verce. This is a form of discrimination and that young mother was rendered a gross disservice by the present system.So how did we get into this terrible state? One of the passengers told me that London midland had abandoned fifty six services in the preceding week. This is utterly disgusting. Others reported the London Midland has a severe shortage of drivers - a fact to which I can testify by direct experience. So why is this? Is it that their franchise is coming to an end so they cannot be bothered to train drivers? Is it that the terms of their franchise are so onerous that they cannot afford to train or pay drivers? Is it that Virgin is much more successful due to their higher-class passengers who pay higher prices and they can afford to poach the drivers? Or is London Midland simply a crap company? Whatever the cause it is clear that we now have a two-tier rail system with high-paying passengers speeding reliably to their destination and low-paying passengers being bandied from pillar to post and insulted not by second class service but by no service at all. They are literally abandoned late at night in the middle of nowhere. This is, of course a serious breach of contract.
It seems to me the fly in the ointment here is the terms of the franchises. It appears that they are either too onerous or too slack. You cannot take money from people under false pretences; but this is what happened to me and several hundred others last night and it sounds like it is happening to several thousands virtually every day. It is fundamentally wrong and the source of this wrong has to be the franchise – and the franchise is owned by the government.
I really fail to see the difference between a nationalised rail industry and one where the terms of the franchise are set by civil servants in Whitehall except that it allows one franchisee to get very rich and the other to offer grossly sub-standard services. Other recent news on this front leads us to believe that the civil service is highly incompetent in the matter of rail franchises. I suggest it is time to change the whole system. My head tells me that complete laissez faire ought to lead to the best system but my heart can never accept a system that might dump a mother and her children on the wayside in the middle of the night. That is positively Dickensian and utterly wrong.
But then, it’s not my problem. You are the prime Minister. You own the franchises. You fix it. I shall carry the guilt of my inattention.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Walker.