mr chatable's short short stories

WOULD THE WRONG TYPE OF PASSENGER PLEASE LEAVE THE TRAIN? BRITAIN’S RAIL NETWORK SINKS TO A NEW LOW AND IN TURN GETS ME VERY ANGRY!

Now, on my blog I rarely rant. I tell stories, I list favourite things and I give the occasional political and financial view on what is happening in the world but I rarely vent my rage here. I leave that for other people, but every now and then something happens that means I can’t let something go, that I have to be enraged, that I have to let go of a fury that is tearing apart my insides and today is one of those days, “but why?” I hear you ask. Well let’s find out.

Now as part of my daily commute from Manchester to Preston I have to endure the connecting train from Bolton to Salford Central, a journey that always suffers from overcrowding and you rarely get a seat. In the mornings the services provided NORTHERN RAIL is, shall we say, a tad over-subscribed and on the return journey home yesterday the train at Salford Central was more packed than usual. Of course it doesn’t help when the rush hour trains are only what I would class as 2-carriage catastrophes, some of these trains are so bad that in the past I have struggled to put a sufficient bad description for them. I would call them buses on tracks but this would be unfair to bus travel which can be far comfier, I would label them as cattle cars with seats but of course their are legal limits on the numbers of cattle one can have in cattle cars, not so with human beings on todays rail network.

So with this in mind we go from Central to Crescent to take on the last load of passengers before proceeding to Bolton. It is here when people start to load in that the train gets really packed. It is so full people at the station are struggling to board and it is then that an announcement is made that I have never heard before.

“WOULD CUSTOMERS GOING TO BOTLON LEAVE THE TRAIN AND GET THE NEXT ONE SO THAT PASSENGERS FOR BLACKPOOL CAN GET ON THE TRAIN?”

Yes, we Bolton travellers were the WRONG type of passenger and our journey requirements classed as, what they call in management groups, “Low Priority”. I have little doubt that it is these self-same management groups that when having such meetings come up with such ideas. I imagine the conversation goes something like this.

“Boss, we can’t fit everyone on our trains, what should we do?”

“Take some off so you can fit more on, Stupid. Duh!”

“But then won’t those passengers then be left on the station?”

“Yeah, but they are low-priority, they can get the next train, idiot!”

“But what if that one’s full?”

“Then we’ll take some passengers off that one. Do I have to do all the thinking round here?!”

Now with such fiendish intellects in charge of our rail networks it’s no wonder that the service is going swimmingly but in reality there were a couple of things that prevented this plan being the idea of genius, firstly take a look at these pictures.

HOW THE FUCK WAS ANYONE MEANT TO GET OFF THIS TRAIN? Look at the state of it. JUST LOOK AT IT! In this train which supposedly holds around 103 passengers seated I counted at least 34 standing in this carriage alone and that’s the people in my line of sight, there may have been others I couldn’t see but this meant that if the same story was repeated in the next carriage that the train was over-subscribed by up to 62%.

That’s the first thing the management team may wish to look at, the next being this.

PASSENGERS DO NOT LIVE AT FUCKING TRAIN STATIONS!!! In a board room hundreds of miles away from reality it must seem like if your train is delayed by 5 minutes then you are only delayed by 5 minutes but of course for anyone who commutes we all know that this is not true. Many people who commute have to make a second journey either by another train or by another mode of transport like a bus which is what I endure. If I had elected to get off here I would have missed the bus I should have been on and had to catch the next one and they are every 10 minutes.

“You only had to wait 10 minutes for the next bus? Big deal” I hear you say, BUT WAIT, that night as I managed to catch the bus I should have been on (Just!) I noticed that as I left Bolton 2 busses turned up at once meaning that this “DELAY OF ONLY A FEW MINUTES” would have transformed into a delay of 20 minutes (My bus ten minutes later being delayed by another 10 minutes. 10 + 10 = 20!)

And the worst thing about all of this is that in spite of me having a damn good bitch on here about the terrible state of the network nothing will change. Northern Rail have supposedly hit their targets set and the franchise has been extended. Comfort, customer satisfaction, overcrowding and safety are just the few things I wonder are included in such surveys. Safety no doubt will be included but only in terms of deaths and serious injury (In the large standing areas when the trains are overcrowded there’s often nothing to hold onto except other passengers and when these buckets take a corner. GULP!)

So in honour of our lousy network, that sees the company with the highest customer satisfaction level attempted to be replaced on the Great Western Line by the newtork at the bottom of the same surveys. See below for just how satisfied FIRST rail passengers look!