The Ticket Collector

NXEC tickets are a rip-off.

On the May 18th many of the UK’s Train Companies tickets will increase in price. We have been looking at the new fares and have noticed that many of National Express East Coast’s (NXEC) advance purchase tickets will just disappear and become just “advance”.

NXEC have 8 advance tickets all charged at different prices. 4 First Class singles and 4 Standard Class singles. Each of these are charged at varying levels and of course there are only so many of each available to buy on each train. Now come the 18th May there will be a ticket name change and of course NXEC are using this as an excuse to reduce the availability of each of the above tickets, forcing you to buy a more expensive ticket.

We have many visitors from Peterborough on this site so we have also compared prices with NXEC’s tickets and First Capital Connect (FCC), and came to a shocking discovery.
In one case a Peak Return from Peterborough to London Kings Cross was £80 with NXEC. It is £40 with FCC. That is 50% cheaper and if you catch the FCC express service from Peterborough there is not a lot of difference in time.

Peterborough to Kings Cross Comparison
Peak Single
NXEC £40.00 FCC £23.20

Peak Return
NXEC £80.00 FCC £40.00

Weekly Season
NXEC £139.00 FCC £112.00

Cheap Day Return
NXEC £24.60 FCC £20.00

Peak Travelcard
NXEC £85.90 FCC £46.00

Off Peak Travelcard
NXEC £27.80 FCC £25.00

Weekly Travelcard
NXEC £151.40 FCC £135.00

NXEC have refused to reply to our various Emails, which based on their past incompetent customer service, seems to be the norm.

Fares ‘revision’ 18th May.

On the 18th May the new revised fares will be coming into effect on the National Network. Some companies have withdrawn some tickets and replaced them with more expensive tickets.

In January 2008 the overall allowable average increase for regulated fares Peak day and Season Tickets was 4.8%, with variations by flow and ticket type up to a maximum 9.8% increase.

Some Train Companies did not use the full yearly increase and therefore will be increasing the tickets to the yearly maximum this time around.

National Express East Coast (NXEC) will be increasing their already expensive tickets some more in May. We have also received reports (from an unnamed travel centre clerk) that they will charge everyone without an advance ticket a seat reservation charge of £1 for each seat reserved. Is this to stop the season ticket holders reserving seats, or is it to pay for for a new seat reservation printer so they can finally put out reservations 07:20 at Peterborough and late night services out of Kings Cross?

Buy Train Tickets

New Rail Forum Launched.

A new rail forum for employees and enthusiasts working on and around the East Coast Mainline has recently been launched by our friends at Eastcoastchat.co.uk. Launched only in March the site has seen steady growth with a solid user base.

The forum has something for everyone whether you’re a steam enthusiast or working on a station platform. If your interested in anything to do with the East Coast Mainline we would strongly suggest you pay our friends at at Eastcoastchat.co.uk a visit.

Another NXEC failure

At 1643 today a driver reported seeing water or smoke coming from the rear power car of an NXEC train (1635 Kings Cross to Leeds).

The train was stopped at the next station and safety checks were made, and the result of which was the driver of the 1635 service to Leeds stating he had dragging brakes on the rear.

This is yet another NXEC train failure messing up the East Coast mainline. Trains do fail, but if you had have kept the maintenance budget the same instead of making cut backs these failures wouldn’t keep happening.

So just what is “on time” when it comes to the Railway?

The term ‘on time’ normally means that a train arrives at the correct time publicised in a timetable - correct?
No, not on the railway its not.

When it comes to punctually - the figures which the Railway Companies print huge A1 posters and show off and say “hey look at us we have 98% punctually, blah blah” and which also determines your season ticket discount . You’d expect that when they say they have 98% that 98% of trains arrived at the destination at the timetabled time.
Wrong! The trains only have to arrive within 5 minutes of the timetabled time.

So the train arrives 5 minutes late and it is still on time! Even better is that long distance ‘intercity’ services have an extra 5 minutes allowance. So now the train can be up to 10 minutes and be still on time!

Now what the Railway Companies are getting wise to is that they can add extra minutes into the timetable here and there as ‘recovery time’. So if they are regularly failing the 10 minutes time the can always add extra minutes into the working timetable to compensate. Now what the Train Company would say is this ‘recovery time’ is to compensate for engineering works and speed restrictions.

When it comes to compensation for the trains running late, you have to be delayed by 30 minutes before you even get to start to get compensation. But what with the extra minutes being added here and there just how late is it in real terms?

NXEC - Communication Skills Lacking

As there is not much else to talk about this week, its time for another review of NXEC and their excuse of a Train Company!

It seems that NXEC have finally discovered the seat reservation printer!! Hooray! However they are still failing at putting the seat reservations out on the late night services from Kings Cross and also the last service out of Edinburgh.
The seat reservations which are put out at Peterborough on the 07:20 have been put out for the last two weeks! That’s a record, however what’s the odds that when the printer decides to pack it in again that they wont be put out again for months on end.

Another area which NXEC always fails on is communication. Whenever the trains are late, you never get any information at all, the staff have not got a foggiest and couldn’t give a rats backside about you the customer. They may pretend they care and put out scripted announcements on the public annoyance system, but that’s just it. The announcements are scripts.

Our friends over at NXEC Commuter have also been noticing the lack of communication from National Express to their customer facing staff. To quote them..

“Clearly NXEC HO still have serious problems communicating with customer facing staff. The thing is if they can’t communicate changes and/or the reasons behind them to staff, what chance have customers got of obtaining up to date and accurate information?”.

The “technical problems” with the trolley in standard seems to have been fixed as that excuse has not been used for a while to explain the absence of the trolley with rip off priced sandwiches.

Ticket names to change.

As if you were not already confused by the huge number of different ticket names, the powers that be have decided to change the names yet again.

So say goodbye to the SuperSaver, the Saver, the Cheap Day Return, the Standard Day Return and say hello to Super Off-Peak and Anytime.

The new ticket types are as follows.