The Ticket Collector

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RMT and TSSA station staff strike, June 26th.

We have received information that Notwork Rail station staff will be striking for 24hours from noon on Thursday June 26th at 19 mainline stations in London and across the country next week in a dispute over compulsory redundancies.
Furthermore Notwork Rail staff will as of 1am Thursday 26th refuse to train, supervise or familiarise non-stations staff with station roles until further notice.

The TSSA and RMT unions said the action by around 330 managers, supervisors and other staff would cause “widespread disruption”.

A senior Notwork Rail spokesperson claimed that “it is prepared for the dispute and that passengers would not be affected”, just as a flying pig flew past their office window. “We’ve got contingency plans in place,” the spokesperson continued to whine. “We’ve got fully trained people who will be able to operate the stations so that the passengers won’t notice any disruption.”.
The spokesperson refused to confirm or deny if the fully trained people were agency staff.

The 24-hour strike will run from noon on June 26 and will hit stations including:
Birmingham New Street, Cannon Street, Charing Cross, Edinburgh Waverley, London Euston, Fenchurch Street, Gatwick Airport, Glasgow Central, London King’s Cross, Leeds, Liverpool Lime Street, London Liverpool Street, London Bridge, Manchester Piccadilly, London Paddington, London St Pancras, London Victoria and London Waterloo.

The unions said members were taking the action after Network Rail refused to guarantee there would be no compulsory redundancies in a reorganisation of station management.

TOC Survey - The Results.

In our recent customer services survey the results have been very surprising in most senses.

Grand Central has come bottom of the list for failing to reply to any of our Emails, and for failing to even bother to send out an automated Email, but then that is not surprising considering they have yet to reply to any of our Emails. Grand Central have continued to ignore our repeated requests for comment.

First Great Western and newcomer Wrexham and Shropshire Railway came top. Each took around a day to reply in full to our Email and FGW even had JPG attachments of the relevant documents.

The full results are listed below in alphabetical order in each section, each section is listed in rank, the best section at the top and the worst section at the bottom of the page.

The Full list of companies that replied in full to our Emails and either attached or gave links to the relevant information are listed below:

• C2C
• First Capital Connect
• First Great Western
• Heathrow Connect
• Heathrow Express
• Wrexham and Shropshire

The Companies that have only part answered our Email are listed below:

• CrossCountry
• Chiltern
• East Midlands Trains
• First ScotRail
• London Midland
• Northern Rail
• NXEA
• NXEC
• Southeastern
• Southern

The Companies that have not answered our Email but have sent out an automated acknowledgement:

• South West Trains
• Virgin Trains

The Companies that have totally ignored our Email and have not even sent out an automated acknowledgement:

• Arriva Trains Wales
• First TransPennine Express
• First Hull Trains
• Grand Central
• London Overground

Readers are invited to comment and welcome to, as with all of our entries, simply click here and add your comment.

Overhead problems at Liverpool Street Continue

UPDATED: We have received information that Notwork Rail hope to have fixed most of the overhead wires by the start of service on Thursday Morning. Based on Notwork Rails past guidelines we expect that to overrun into the morning peak.

Overhead wire problems on routes via Chelmsford are continuing to cause major delays on all NXEA services in and out of London Liverpool Street, and as seems to be corporate policy for National Express LIMITED OR NO INFORMATION has been distributed to its customers.

The latest problems began at 6pm last night. One train bound for Ipswich was left stranded on the track at Ingatestone, in Essex, after power lines came crashing down, leaving hundreds of passengers trapped in the blazing heat for nearly three hours.

Network Rail was forced to send staff loaded with litre bottles of water to the stranded train after the air conditioning failed.

Services are expected to be severely delayed until the end of service on Wednesday 11 June 2008 (and that’s if Notwork Rail’s estimates are on time). If you are able to, theticketcollector.co.uk suggests you don’t even attempt to travel into London tomorrow.

As of 12:00 Tuesday, First Capital Connect are accepting NXEA tickets on reasonable routes between Peterborough and London.

National Express East Anglia are operating the following reduced levels of service until further notice:

• An hourly train service will operate from Norwich to London Liverpool Street, departing from Norwich on the hour (00 minutes past each hour). Services from Lowestoft and Peterborough will continue to terminate at Ipswich for connections to alternative services to London Liverpool Street. Alternatively, customers from Peterborough can use First Capital Connect services to London Kings Cross.
• An hourly train service will operate to Norwich from London Liverpool Street, departing from London Liverpool Street at 30 minutes past each hour. Customers for Lowestoft & Peterborough should use the Norwich-bound services and change at Ipswich for onward connections. Alternatively, customers for Peterborough can use First Capital Connect services from London Kings Cross.
• An hourly train service will operate between Clacton-on-Sea and London Liverpool Street, departing from Clacton-on-Sea at 50 minutes past each hour, and from London Liverpool Street at 08 minutes past each hour.
• An hourly train service will operate between Braintree and Witham, departing from Braintree at 45 minutes past each hour, and from Witham at 15 minutes past each hour.
• An hourly train service will operate between Harwich Town and Colchester, departing from Harwich Town on the hour, and from Colchester at 15 minutes past each hour

A normal service will operate between Colchester and Colchester Town and between Colchester and Walton-On-The-Naze. A normal service will also operate on the Southend and Southminster routes.

Grand Central - The Response your STILL waiting for.

Further to our last entries we thought it would be time to tell you about the worst Train Operating Company ‘TOC’ (so far) for response times to customer queries, E-mails and Telephone calls.

TheTicketCollector.co.uk has silently been sending random queries to all of the UK TOCs over the past 4 weeks. We have been using our personal E-mails, and other free web E-mail accounts specifically set up for this purpose. We also sent one using the general TheTicketCollector.co.uk E-mail.

We also started a publicly announced survey earlier last week (survey-toc-customer-services) just to see if the results were any different if the TOCs knew they were being monitored.

There is one TOC which us by far the worst for responding to any of our E-mails. This TOC has a wonderful 0% response rate to our E-mails. No other TOC has even reached that low, not even close.

This TOC is of course Grand Central. We have sent 9 E-mails (7 on silent survey and 2 publicly announced survey) so far and none of them have been responded to. We sent a follow up E-mail to their press office and again no response. We then went even further and phoned them up and was promised a call back by the relevant person. Surprise surprise still no response.

Grand Central seem to be far too busy trying to improve their woeful punctuality rate of around 51% in order to respond to customer queries.

Grand Central have been invited to comment regarding the above, but have continued to ignore our repeated requests for comment. Readers are invited to comment and welcome to, as with all of our entries, simply click here and add your comment.