Trains on the Brain Savour the journey & travel by train

Trains trains trains . . . where do I start?

From commuting for 4hrs a day (total, 2 each way) to Manchester, to 3hr+ journeys all over the UK, I have to say it is very hit & miss.

I have found the better staff to be Virgin and the worst to be those that work for the regional ranchises. The ones with the rubbish trains and crap carriages.

I was once in the toilet, about 10 minutes from my station, I had a ticket and wasn’t dodging any fares. But I gets a knock on the door from the conductor urging me to get out and show her the ticket or she’d open the door and I’d be arrested at the next stop.

There is no sense of having a duty of care. Every customer is a time waster or a pain in the backside to staff. They don’t have the energy, motivation or desire to do a good job.

Sack them all and make them reapply for their jobs, that’d be fun

It is a strangely British habit to knock our own country’s infrastructure, although they do the same about rail in the USA. In actual fact rail does not always run better elsewhere. I have lost count of the number of times that trains have been cancelled in Chamonix or even worse got on them to have them fail before reaching their destination. This train is a French – Swiss venture, two of the rail companies the Brits claim operate better services.

Leaves on the line came about as a direct result of leaving those shrubs on the sides of cuttings to grow, in order to save the expense of cutting them. It worked fine for 2 or 3 years!

The wrong type of snow just means that the snow that fell was not the type the rail companies had prepared for. Last winter for example Eurostar fitted membranes to prevent snow ingress into their locomotives but the snow was too fine. This was because very fine snow usually melts or aggregates in Southern England / Northern France, but the extreme cold kept it fine.

Of course there is room for improvement and even though I have pointed out that the French system is not perfect, at least they have a network that is powered 80% by nuclear power. In the 1980′s the state spent their taxpayers money on a high speed rail system. They let private companies build a toll motorway network.
In the UK the government spent their taxpayers money on the road / motorway network and privatised rail. When the oil starts to get real expensive and then declines, who do you think will will be celebrating their transport system?

As a frequent user of Belgian rail, I have to say that they are efficient. The train stations are grimy and reek of urine in some places, the conductors are surly and the ticket desk people seem biologically incapable of smiling but the trains are reasonably punctual and problems are well advertised.

Having said that I’ve read that the safety procedures tend to be a little lax so perhaps things aren’t that good after all.

When I used to live in Bury St Edmunds, I used to travel to London every so often and the transport company there (I forget the name) was quite good. It was a hassle to have to change at Stowmarket or Cambridge but the service was reliable and efficient – nothing like the stories I used to read about the rest of the country’s service.

Different needs, different experiences I suppose.
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This is very enlightening for me as an American who has viewed the European rail systems (including that in the UK) as being so much better than here. My train experiences have been limited, so maybe I’ve just been lucky. I hope that improvements will be forthcoming for your systems as well as those in the U.S.

As I recall, I loved the train in the UK. Truthfully, I am dying to make the trip from London to Paris one of these days,
Devin the Travel Writer recently posted..Free Trip- Where to Go When- Italy

Thanks for the excellently considered comment Kash.