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!