Tag: Passenger

#365daysofbiking A careless display

November 26th – Just lately, local rail travel in the West Midlands operated by West Midlands Railway has been a shambles. Not enough staff, cancelled services, late running. The service this autumn has been atrocious, and little does more to sum up the careless attitude to customer service than the sage of the passenger information board at Blake Street on the Birmingham bound platform.

It’s been out of action now for about 18 months. Possibly longer, and displays an error message with completely the wrong time.

When asked why it has not been fixed, customer service waffle about overhead lines needing to be off to undertake the repairs and other stuff, blaming Network Rail. It doesn’t wash.

It would be relatively trivial to fit a working, temporary display in the safe zone nearby. That the company cannot do this, or make a proper arrangement with Network Rail within 18 months tells us much about the attitude of the operator to its customers, that pretty much they don’t care.

As long as they can blame someone else, who cares that your punters aren’t getting service information?

It might be amusing, but we’re paying for this crap.

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October 28th – The dire storms predicted and anticipated never reached the Midlands, although they caused fatalities and damage down in London. This led to many trains being cancelled, and knock-on effects being felt across the rail network. Moor Street Station, usually brilliantly run by Chiltern Trains, slipped up. When I turned up to catch my train, the whole passenger information system – including the displays on the platforms – was showing a message of total cancellations, with no local services listed. I was just about to turn tail and head down to Tyseley by bike, when a Stourbridge train rolled in. It turned out, local trains were running fairly normally, and the delays were only on London bound services.

Why on earth you’d choose not to point that out on the main information screens I have no idea – I bet more local passengers pass this way in a week than London ones. 

I guess this is what happens when a London-centric company gets to run faraway stations: only the London view matters.