The Ticket Collector

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.

Notwork Rail York to strike Easter Weekend

Update: We are now currently hearing reports that Notwork Rail have been told to make an 11th hour agreement. Furthermore if the strike does go ahead NXEC do not have an Emergency timetable ready.

Staff in Network Rail’s electrical control room at York are to strike for five days from 18:59 next Wednesday, March 19, over the company’s plan to cut the number of operators there by a third, from 18 to 12.

The union’s ten members in the control room, who voted unanimously to take action, will not book on for shifts that commence between 18:59 on March 19 and 06:59 on Monday March 24.

The electrical control room controls the current from York to Doncaster so services through that area will be effected. It also controls the current from Bedford to Moorgate West (TL). So FCC and EMT services could be affected.

NXEC cockup continues.

So another really bad day for the new owner of GNER, National Express. NXEC seems to have a serious problem at admitting when they are doing rubbish and further more pretend that everything is hunky-dory when it obviously isn’t.
Take today for example. Notwork Rail slapped 50 MPH Emergency Speed Restriction on all lines between Stevenage and Berwick. First Capital Connect knew this around 12hours before it came into effect. So it sent text messages out to all the staff pagers and mobiles. It also sent out text messages to its text alert service. It updated its website admitting a problem and possible delays THE NIGHT BEFORE.

National Express East Coast however did nothing, even though it knew of the speed restriction. It could not even be bothered to update its website. Apparently according to their customer fob-off centre they added a message at 0616 this morning. Well theticketcollector.co.uk never saw it when leaving the house this morning while checking the NXEC website. The fob-off centre goes on to say they updated it at 0900 to state delays. Well done, sod the commuters which had to be into work by 0900. But where is the amended timetable it promised? No where to be found. Good old National Express purveyors of information distribution.
AN HOUR later a major botch up of an ‘amended’ timetable was added on the National Rail website, it took NXEC until 1100 to update its website to state there even was a timetable to be downloaded, but it did not admit they cancelled half the services. At 12:45pm they admitted there was a revised timetable and half the normal services were running.
Archived ‘amended’ timetable.

As at 2000 NXEC updated the website to say they would not be running a through service from London to/from Scotland, there is no reason for this stated on the site. However National Rail states this is due to overhead wire damage at Doncaster. Why the hell can’t NXEC say this on their own site? Maybe because it was one of their trains that took the wires down in the first place?
We are still waiting for the promised amended timetable. Perhaps there is a timetable already but its not going to be made public until half way through the day or maybe NXEC are so incompetent that they cant be bothered about customers?