Rail Regulators reap benefit of our misery?!

OK it's been a while since I posted here admittedly - but I've just read something that makes me just a little bit cross so I thought I would share it here.

http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/portsmouth-and-southsea?articleid=2930549

Read this article about how Network rail might get fined by the rail regulator for the months of delays in the South Hampshire region.

Hang on a minute ?

The train service is disrupted and causes hassle to thousands of passengers for months and months, and then the city bods sitting in their plush London offices reap the rewards by sticking a fine in their inbox?

Now this is not what I call a fair fine.

Rail regulator should enforce the rail providers to pay compensation to the people who have actually suffered from all the engineering works early 2007 - for the people who spent their hard earned pennies paying for a service to get to work which didn't always run efficiency?

What will the rail regulator do with this hefty fine? ! I'm sure they won't be paying any of it back to the passengers... I have no idea..

So that makes me cross!!!

No Trouble on the Tracks

Once again the benefits of train travelling presented themselves to me this morning. As normal, this morning I arrived at work fresh-faced and ready to go. However, half of the office weren’t in.

A pedestrian got knocked down on the M3 this morning at 5.30am approximately. Three hours later and the motorway was still completely closed between two junctions, causing a bottleneck effect as everyone tried the country lanes around the motorway instead. Huge queues were the result of this, and everyone was very late to work. But not me! Trains don’t get effected by the knock on effects of one road closing. They just glide past the traffic jams on their own, specially constructed track, all for them. Sweet.

Much Ado About Nothing

Sometimes I moan too much about my travelling to work woes. I admit that. That is indeed the point of this whole blog.

But last week, something made me smile. I actually took the time to listen to the conversation had by the group of early teens sitting around me. They were discussing their homework. Really! They were! They were talking about the character development in Much Ado About Nothing, and what the different characters represent. It was amazing! Now, I am not that old, and it’s only really been 8 years since I left 6th Form. But I have already fallen into the terrible, clichéd view that teenagers are good-for-nothing wasters. But, it would seem, they are not. They actually talk about Shakespeare through choice and appeared to enjoy it, too.

Now, here the moment where I should point out that I work in a particularly well-to-do part of the country, with one of the best public schools in the country, and a handful of other very decent schools too. So perhaps this explains these kids’ general attitude towards learning? Well, it must do. If I was travelling on a train with school kids from somewhere less illustrious (for example, Brixton, where I used to live) I doubt very much the kids would be having these types of conversations.

And I hate this observation. I hate it because I know it is true, even though I realise it sounds inherently snobby to think that kids from rough areas don’t talk about Shakespeare.
Anyway, I should be grateful that I have decent kids on my train. Although they still make far too much noise for my liking.

(And I haven’t read Much Ado About Nothing..)

Deep Sleep

Hehehe, I felt smug yesterday on the way home.

The ticket manager/guard made his way down the train as per normal. ‘Tickets Please!” he called. He reached one girl in her twenties who was having a snooze and listening to her I-Pod (this was not me, I hasten to add, it was another Girl On A Train, and no it wasn’t a Quiet Carriage)

He said to her, ‘tickets please’.

No response. She continued to snooze happily, eyes closed, head up, jaw threatening to drop.

He said again, this time louder, ‘can I see your ticket please, Madam’

Again, no response. By this time everyone was watching – including me.

Train managers have obviously been taught to not touch passengers (and rightly so) for he then proceeded to lean over and knock on the glass by her head. Very loudly.

‘Can I see your ticket please, madam!’

still no answer! I couldn’t believe she hadn’t woken up after all the commotion. She must have been in a very deep sleep.

So the train manager then went around to behind her seat (fortunately nobody was seated behind her) and shook the headrest that her sleep head was resting against backwards and forwards quite frenetically.

Ha, that woke her up! She opened her eyes, registered what was happening and turned around to glare at however was banging her seat.

Then she realised it was the Train Manager and quickly understood the situation. Then she noticed everyone was smirking at her.

Blush.

For once, it wasn’t me!

Please Be Quiet - We're in a Quiet Carriage Don't You Know?

To what extent do South West Trains enforce the ‘Quiet Carriage’ policy?

Not a lot, I think.

It’s not a difficult thing to implement, really. The ticket manager just has to tap someone on the shoulder with a noisy I-Pod or interrupt a mobile phone conversation to tell the offender to shift it.

However, for passengers, the ‘Quiet Carriage’ can be slightly inconvenient. Often, it is only once you have taken a phone call on your mobile before you notice the signs saying ‘quiet carriage’. By then, it’s too late. There are no signs by the door of the train to say ‘you are entering a quiet carriage, sssh.’ It is only once you are sat down comfortably in your seat, reading your book, before you notice the signs. In a busy train, you are unlikely to move carriages just in case you need to take a phone call.

I know all this.

However, when the lad opposite me sat with his Ipod on ridiculously loudly so that all I could hear was the beat of his crap music, I started to feel irritation. Then I noticed we were in a ‘quiet carriage’ and felt justly irritated. I thought to myself, ‘I could just tell him to turn if off and point at the sign.’

I didn’t of course.

But I expected the Train Manager to do so as she came through the carriage checking tickets. She reached the noise Ipod boy and called for tickets. He ignored her because he couldn’t hear her. She had to wave a hand in front of his face to attract his attention. ‘yes! I though, ‘she’s going to tell him to turn it off as we are in a quiet carriage.’

Sadly not, she asked for his ticket, he pointed it at her, and she continued on her merry way. He continued to have poor taste in music.

So, I ask, what is the point of these quiet carriages?

The Quiet Easter Break

Due to the slightly restrictive nature of my blog, I haven’t been able to find anything of interest to write about concerning the trains in the last couple of weeks. Life generally has been busy and full, with many things to look forward to over the summer. Stepping off the train at 6.15pm now fills me with joy and expectation as the summer nights get longer and the promise of a whole evening lies ahead.

The trains have been running to schedule over the past couple of weeks, despite some engineering works in a major area which, despite not affecting my section of line, I feared may have some knock-on effects. These engineering works meant that a lot of people probably took another mode of transport to work, while others took annual leave for the week of disruption. This combined with the Easter holidays meant that my train was blissfully peaceful last week. A double seat all to myself, no screaming teenagers, no businessmen barking down mobiles. Lovely. All in all, last week was top-notch service!

I have now used ONE of my free golden tickets to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Oh, I mean my free train journey of course.

The book I was reading last week kept me well engrossed during this peaceful journey, so I was able to get through in record speeds. And a mighty good read it was too - although the writing technique of using a letter to reveal the rest of the story at the end seemed to be a bit of a cop-out. Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

It's Too Hot and It's Too Cold

Well, there has not been much going on in TrainLand this week. I have been sleeping particularly deeply, and now only need to wait for two to three stops before I put my book down to engage in a snooze.

I have noticed a wide degree of variability of temperature in the trains recently though. Sometimes, it is unbearably warm and stuffy, others it is too chilly. I think I prefer the former temperate climate as it effortlessly allows me to fall into slumber when it is hot inside the carriage. When it is cold, however, I find myself shivering and trying to get myself warm enough to fall asleep.

You see, everything revolves around whether I can get a decent bit of kip or not.

On another note, I am reading John Banville’s The Sea. An interesting read with elegant language and prose. Although, in all honesty, not much has actually happened yet in the plot, which may be why I am sleeping a bit more this week!

Endless Endless Engineering Works

Moving on from the poster competition, it's back to business as normal at the Girl on a Train blog. Thankyou for your contributions, I suppose as Blue is disqualified and I am the host, that makes Daniel the winner. Congratulations, you have won this prestigious competition, your poster shall form the epitome of the South West Trains campaign against Bag Morons, perhaps.

So, back to business.

The trains are making front-page news in the local papers relentlessly at the moment. I would never have thought it would be such a gigantic storyline – trains are something that we all know are there but don’t really talk much about in person (in blogs, well that’s another matter!)

Some people’s lives appear to be being devastated by engineering works happening around our area. It’s a typical engineering works saga actually. They say to the customer from the start, ‘oh don’t worry, it won’t take long and will not cause any disruption, or at least, if it does, the disruption will be minimal.’

5 weeks later and they admit that they aren’t to schedule at all.

Another month later and they confess that, actually, they have no idea when the engineering works will finish.

So it has turned from 5 weeks of minimal work to a mammoth job of god-knows how long.

Well, personally, it doesn’t really bother me much. I can still take my train to work and (normally) get there in reasonable time.

However, some poor sods who live near the train tracks are finding their lives ruined by this mess. A lot of engineering works goes on during the nighttime, when there are no trains running. But this keeps people awake all night long with the sounds of heavy machinery and shouting from the site staff. Poor them. I feel for them, actually.

I just hope they get some sort of fair compensation for the hassle.

Seats are For Bags - Entry Two

An accomplished entry from Bluesoup here. Her Photoshop skills look rather special in this fine poster entry. And again, very convincing - it's as if South West Trains did it themselves. (Even the moron bit.)

Seats Are For Bums - Entry One

Our first entry - a rather official looking number from Daniel. Thanks for sending this to me. Well, it certainly looks very convincing!

"Seats Are For Bums, Not Bags" - Poster Competition

In response to YorksDevil's comment, I have spent hours and hours designing an elaborate poster for Train Companies to use up and down the country. I really do think this will get the message across. This poster shows enormous originality and will make people understand the issue like never before witnessed in this public-transport travelling era.

If you have a better idea, please e-mail your poster to me at ... and I shall post them up here. Truly inspirational.

Seats Are For Bums, Not Bags

Isn’t it exasperating how people put their bags on the seat next to them, and then look at you in annoyance when you ask if you can sit there?

I’m sorry, but resting my weary body after a long day at work takes precedence over allowing your treasured bag to have pride of position on the seat right next to you.

I never have any qualms about walking along the aisle and asking people to remove their bag. Perhaps that is because I have a relatively long journey and cannot bear the thought of standing up for part of it.

Other people, I notice, are less inclined to ask people to remove their bag, and stand in the doorway area instead. I understand their reticence to an extent. It is a little bit of a pain to request a seat. Some people go to great pains to let you know what an inconvenience it is to have to displace their belongings. But so what?

“Seats are for bums, not bags.”

Perhaps South West Trains should have a quirky little poster up in trains to highlight this point. Heck, I’d even design it for them.

On another note, today this is my 50th Post, so 'Happy Fiftieth Post' to me !

South Western Trains - who are they?

The other day on the train, we got to a stop early.

This often happens and we just have to sit and wait until the timetable allows us to continue on our merry way. This is the buffer zone. The extra time added to the timetable to allow for any minor mishaps.

It is all part of managing the expectations of the passenger. Set yourself a generous timetable so that any minor incidents will be covered day-in-day-out. And it works. If you expect the train to arrive at 7.43 and it does (or it even arrives early) then you are happy. It doesn’t really matter that they have added a good 4 minutes or so to the timetable, it is all about expectations. I have noticed that my evening train consistently arrives 5 minutes earlier than the publicised train. Great! I can get on the train and wait in the warmth of the train rather than waiting in the chilly winter air on the platform.

Furthermore, they like to tell you that you have arrived early so that you don’t think we are getting delayed while the train sits there idle. This is all sensible stuff and makes sense. Instead of getting irate and stressed out by the feeling that we might be late, we know that it’s ok because we are even ahead of schedule and that NEVER happens on public transport, right?

Anyway, the point of this entry is a small matter of something on of the announcers said. The tannoy came on, and the man spoke out to the captive audience,

‘I would like to inform you on behalf of South Western Trains, that we are currently ahead of schedule and are not due to depart from C…… until 07.43.’

Hang on a minute, South Western Trains? Am I on a different train? I thought it was called South West Trains, has it been taken over? Is it experiencing a brand overhaul directed by the Marketing and Branding team over at Head Office? Or did it used to be known as South Western Trains back in the day, and this chap has never gotten over the change?

Well, it had me intrigued for a minute of two. And then I returned to my book, ‘Winter in Madrid’ by C.J Sansom. It’s really very good.

Life Without Oyster

I used to reside in London. Since moving out of London, I no longer have my Oyster Card. I left my old job with 2 months of zones 1-2 already paid for, and therefore gave my Oyster Card to a friend to use. She promptly lost it. So I no longer have the blue ticket to freedom and, considering I don’t live in London, I haven’t got around to applying for a new one and stumping up three whole pounds for it.

And then I went to London and saw the non-Oyster-card price for a single in Zone 1. £4! I thought it was a mistake. An error on the machine. It can’t be £4 just for one journey surely! I remember when you could get a Zones 1-6 for £4.50!

Well, I paid up, with a grimace. And then headed straight for the Oyster application form…

The Bus Replacement Service and other gripes

I had a nightmare journey back from Hull yesterday. Firstly, it was a Sunday which always seems to signify cr@p rail service for some reason. South West Trains expanded the network of buses to cover a much wider region than normal. So this meant that on the way home from London, we had to get a bus for the last leg of the journey. And that bus took ages. And we couldn’t even get a bus to our required station – the station printed on our ticket. Well, that’s not technically true. We could have got there if we were prepared to wait a further 45 minutes once we’d got off the bus. But at the end of a long journey back from Hull, the last thing we wanted to do was to wait for 45 minutes in the freezing cold at 9.45pm just to get a bus 2 miles up the road. Ridiculous.

So that was terrible.

And this morning, the BF took the train one stop to get to work (where he’d left the car on Friday night, but we couldn’t go and get it last night). His train just sat on the platform. Nobody told him what was going on. Nobody mentioned that his train wasn’t likely to move. He waited 40 minutes at this station in order to go one stop while other trains came and went. Why were there no announcements?! He paid £1.90 to sit at the station for 40 minutes to take a 4 minute journey. He was very late for work.

He hates the trains with a passion. I am starting to see why.

1,000 New Carriages

The night before last, as I relaxed on the sofa watching BBC 10 ‘o clock news, stretched out enjoying the evening and thinking about going to bed soon, I watched a news article about those 1,000 extra carriages to be added on to a number of routes.

Pictures of sorry commuters squeezing themselves into carriages that are already too packed. One poor chap holding a bunch of flowers returning home after work getting his black rucksack caught in the door as he desperately tried to wedge himself onto the train. People wearily standing in the aisles as their train took them to their place of work.

I sat on the comfy sofa watching these images.

I thought to myself, ‘thank god I don’t work in London anymore.’

Trains in the ‘country’ are less crowded, less stressful and generally a more pleasant place to be. The quality of those trains in the news article were old and shabby. My trains are new and shiny. I always get a seat so that I can fall asleep. I never get crushed (except between those internal doors) trying to get on the train.

Get those trains more carriages! Ah yes, 1,000 more carriages from the government you say? And then, at the end of the section, the news reporter finished off with, ‘the new carriages are expected to be ready by 2014.’ Hmmm, that’s 7 years away! Not soon enough to quell the immediate problems on the trains in some parts of the country then!

Turn that Racket Off!

Trains. A place where people of all shapes and sizes are flung together in a carriage. They travel together day in and day out. Nobody speaks to anyone they don’t know. Everyone (well, most people) is the model of decorum and politeness.

One day, on the journey home, two teenage girls got on the train. The train pulled off and chugged along merrily for a while. We then got near to a station and stopped and everything went quiet. You know how it is when the engines stop all their whirring and crunching. You just get silence, aside from quiet ticks and squeaks from the train as it waits patiently on the track. All is quiet in carriage number 3.

And then the teenage girls turn on some music on their mobile phone. On loudspeaker. The entire carriage is subjected to a tinny version of P.Diddy blaring out into the quiet carriage. People start getting a bit fidgety about this. Yet, nobody says anything. The woman next to me is clearly very irritated by this noise and starts turning around to give the girls ‘commuter evils’ (*this is when you dislike what someone else is doing, yet do not want to break the Commuter Code by actually talking to them. Neither do you want to glare at them so much as to encourage a response from them.)

She then starts muttering under her breath, ‘good god’, ‘for god’s sake’ and the like. As I am sitting next to her, I feel like I need to acknowledge her mutterings. Yet the carriage is so deathly quiet that I don’t want to. I smile bleakly at her. She carries on her mutterings to me. But there is nothing I can do! I am starting to feel uncomfortable now.

And then the train comes back to life with a whir and a groan, and the P.Diddy is partially blocked from our eardrums.

Thank goodness.

The Train: My Second Home

Sometimes I sleep very deeply on the train.

I get involved in dreams that seem to last for eternity, only to wake up with a jolt and realise I am on the train and it is daytime. Sometimes, I twitch and drop my book that I have been holding on the floor. I twitched a lot last night. Normally, I tend to twitch in my train-sleep when I have an aisle seat. My reasoning for this is because I have nothing to lean on, and am therefore engaging in a careful balancing act in my sleep. It’s a bit like sleeping while standing up I imagine (although I am not sure I could manage that), where you have to balance your body. Sometimes, I fall asleep with the seat free next to me. When I wake up I find that there is someone sitting next to me, and I hope to God that I have not been talking in my sleep again or pulling silly faces.

Yesterday, I was so deeply asleep that when my train reached its terminus (fortunately, this is my stop), a lady had to gently, but firmly poke me on the arm to awake me.

Poke poke. ‘urgh?’ said I. ‘Sorry, I thought I ought to wake you there,’ said she.

I don’t think I fancy a night on the train, or a return trip to London, so I am thankful she did wake me.

I also think I need to pay attention to the way I am sleeping. Neck bent to the side, head lolling about, slumped down in my seat. I do notice that I frequently have a sore neck. Is this doing long-term damage I wonder? Will I one day be visiting the chiropractor and blaming my bad back on ‘those commuting days on the trains’?

To all those anonymous commenters

Last week, my blogging experimentation took on a new significance. I realised that some people were in fact reading my musings and taking some points rather earnestly! See some of the comments (some of them a little bit nasty, I do think. By all means comment if you do not agree with me, but try to avoid resorting to nasty insults!) left on this post to see what I mean.

Internal doors. I never knew what trouble they would get me in. Yes, they are there for fire safety reasons and I am sure they will do a stirling job in the (fortunately) unlikely event of a fire. However, day-to-day, they are irritating when they close just as you are walking through them.

Anyway, that is another issue that has already been given quite enough time here.

Something I have learnt is that there are some people who take their job very seriously. This is actually rather cheering. I am not a train person. Well, I take them everyday, but I give no thought to the complexities of running a large train network. However, there are some people who think about it a lot, and indeed, it appears to be quite a passion for them. I am pleased about this and I can understand how people feel. When people have a misconception about my line of work, I will strive to change their attitude, and sometimes I will take it quite personally. I think, ‘hey this person is insulting my industry, they must be insulting me too.’

So. My presumption from all of this is that South West Trains must be a pretty good employer for all of these people to defend them so energetically. This is in itself a success. I suppose happy employees build successful companies.

Now then, those internal doors…..

The Mystery of the Cheap Ticket

Why are singles cheaper than a return?

I have just booked a train to Hull for a meeting. When initially searching for a Return Ticket the price was about £130. I thought this was pretty expensive to be honest, even though Hull is absolutely miles away. Then I noticed a little link saying ‘singles might be cheaper’, click on this, filled in my details and have managed to get a return journey (using singles) for less than half the price. Very strange! Long distance journeys often seem to have the situation where 2 singles is cheaper than one return, yet local services charge almost the same price for a single as for a return!

Well, it confuses me. I am just pleased that I had the sense to trail through all the forms to find the cheapest combination of tickets. Although, saying that, work were paying for the ticket, so it doesn’t really matter to me personally. But still, I like to feel like I have nabbed a bargain!