To be really funking fed up of the shit train services in this country

[Medschoolmum]

I paid £170 for an advance ticket for a trip into London this morning. Journey of around 1.5 hours. Booked a seat with a table so that I can work on the train. Got up 45 mins earlier than usual to get to the station on time. Parked at the station for an exorbitant sum. Arrive to be told that train is delayed by 22 mins. Annoying, but OK, I have built in additional time. Not a massive issue.

After waiting for 10 mins, they announce that the train is cancelled. Not stopping at my station because they are running late. (This is not some tiny village station with one person on the platform BTW- it is a substantial sized station with loads of people waiting for that train.

We are informed that the next train will depart half an hour after the original scheduled train. This will mean that I'm a bit tight on time but should just about make it to my meeting on time. This is why you build in a buffer zone, right?

So now the next train is delayed as well, who knows when or if it will arrive. When I finally manage to get on the train, it's clearly going to be heaving. No chance I'll get a seat. And in the meantime, I'm still sitting here in a dingy waiting room drinking crap coffee.

The last time I took a train was around 10 days ago. That one was also cancelled for a different reason. I was delayed by around 40 mins.

I know I can claim back the ticket cost etc, but how on earth do they get away with charging such extortionate prices for such ridiculously unreliable services? I used to live overseas in a country where the trains were much cheaper, cleaner and ran like clockwork. Why are we so incapable of doing the same?

I'm not convinced that nationalising them is going to fix the problem either... the days of British Rail weren't exactly much better.

I am so fed up of this shit show.

It’s appalling. I live in a very congested and busy area outside London near to one of the world’s busiest airports and it’s still cheaper and quicker to drive everywhere than rely on public transport.

Agree the faults are with the companies/ management but I feel for them trying to instil any kind of pride or customer service into the staff they have. There always seems to be clumps of people standing around chatting. Rude and unhelpful staff. Go slow maintenance workers. Oblivious barrier staff.

Well given that almost every other EU country has a fast, cheap, reliable train service that runs even on Sundays, this seems highly unlikely. Also lots of their rail services are nationalised.

The thing of not stopping at a station because the train is late is ludicrous. It's showing the effect of the wrong kind of targets. The targets should look at passenger journey times from door to door, not the percentage of trains arriving within 10 minutes of the advertised time.

In other countries they will do things like hold a connecting train if the first one is slightly delayed. Here they don't even plan long distance journeys with connecting trains - it's pot luck whether you wait half an hour or 5 minutes.

We went to Barcelona last year and it was quicker to fly to Barcelona than the train journey home - and we lived in Surrey, literally 45 minutes by road from Gatwick but I thought I’d “save money” and go on the train.
Train was delayed, then we had to take a stopping route, it only went as far as Guildford and then we had to get a taxi the rest of the way which cost more than it would have done to park for the 3 days we were away.

And I actually LIKE the train! But I’d only take it if I really had to in the U.K. because the cost and the chance of it being cancelled/diverted are too high.

The last 3 trains I have taken have either been in over an hour late (so I got my money back) and one just didn't show up. No announcement, nothing. Just people bemused standing on the platform waiting for a ghost train. Utterly rubbish.
My husband goes to London once a fortnight from Newcastle. He can't rely on the local train to Newcastle so has to drive in an ditch the car somewhere. The train is so often late that his annual commuting costs are roughly half what they would have been. While it's frustrating that he's often late, he just factors late trains into his schedule now and the fact he gets so much money back makes commuting more affordable (but it's still very expensive).
On another note - we are an environmental conscious family, both earning good money. But it's just too expensive to take our family of four any long distance on the train in this country. Much more affordable in a car. We'd much rather be on the train. It's madness.

Yes... It's partly that and partly the infrastructure is all Victorian and has had minimal investment. Similar to lots of other areas such as water and sewerage.

The only thing governments in this country don't mind spending on is roads. For some reason they have an unlimited pot for huge subsidising of private car journeys. (Of course there's no money for adding a cycle way at a fraction of the cost though.)

Just look at the hideous amount of money being redirected from HS2 to potholes. It was too much to justify on railways but fine to spend on roads. I mean even if they decided HS2 was a goer (due to inability to complete due to corruption) they could at least have spent it on other urgently needed railway upgrades

I'll raise you - Trans Pennine always cancelled or delayed Express

@RampantIvy Trans Pennine Express? Is that really a suburban train that self identifies as an Express?

Conservatives support SUVs not train travel. They have a userpays philosophy so train tickets prices went up. At least trains still exist unlike NHS dentistry for a lot of places.

Bloody TPE.
They are hourly from my station. Still , you could go to a lot of places across the north without changing. Before COVID there was a brief moment of hope when they were going to make them half hourly as part of levelling up. Then COVID happened and now they are less frequent than hourly much of the time, often two in a row are cancelled, and the timetables are changed so I have to change to get almost anywhere. But honestly I have given up due to the unreliability. A 45 minute bus ride versus 25 minute train is preferable when there’s a 1 in 3 chance of an hour wait and sometimes even more or being stranded. If trains are every 20 minutes then fine, cancel one or two, but if they’re every hour you really need them to turn up.

YANBU it’s absolutely diabolical. I changed jobs six months ago and now go up once a week on the train. There have been many more weeks with issues in those six months than without. Cancellations, strikes and the oh dear we’ve only got 5 coaches instead of 9 nearly every bloody week at peak going home time. It’s outrageously expensive and utterly shit. This week I arrived at the station to find the car park mainly closed and otherwise rammed. Nowhere anywhere close to legally park. The issue with the car park was due to needing space for the replacement bus service from another station. Shit.

British Rail was nowhere near as bad as the nationalised rail companies are now. And ticket prices were nowhere near as expensive.

Best of all, you just rocked up at the station and bought a ticket, secure in the knowledge that they had told you the best price you could have for your journey, with far fewer restrictions.

@IDoNotConsentToAstonResearch or they put on short trains. The last time I took TPE to Manchester it was only a two coach train, and loads of passengers were left standing on the platform at Sheffield.

DD lives in the north east, and the best way for her to get home used to be TPE to Huddersfield then another to our local station. She has given up and now gets the more reliable Cross Country to Wakefield from where I have to pick her up.

British Rail was nowhere near as bad as the nationalised rail companies are now. And ticket prices were nowhere near as expensive.

I agree.

I struggle with this, I don't have the same experience on the Chiltern line. It's really reliable, I can always get a seat and not ridiculous pricing.

However I travel for work a lot and across Europe the trains are good and cheap. The Dutch are particularly good.

You're lucky @jeaux90.
TBH the shocking train service might influence where DD goes for a post grad degree.

That’s not unreasonable of your dd, transport is a necessity not a nice to have.
It’s not just annoying, it is fucking our economy. Every time a service worsens to the point where it becomes impossible to use it to get to work that’s a whole load of job opportunities that are taken away from people and a whole load of potential staff that businesses lose.
The government wants to get people off benefits and back to work- a functioning transport system is one of the necessities for this that they seem to have forgotten about.

@RampantIvy sensible of your DD and honestly I think coach services now offer better coverage and value

Agree, owning and running is car is not cheap or necessarily cheaper overall

They even boasted that the money they nicked from Manchester's railway was to be used to fill London's potholes. The nerve of them to brand it "Network North", they wouldn't be able to name anywhere past Watford Junction, let alone the Watford Gap. Quite apart from the fact that they are using capital funds for what should be routine maintenance, a practice that would land other bodies in trouble.

The main reason why HS2 costs ballooned beyond what would be reasonable when considering the specific challenges of the route (higher population density than comparable European schemes etc.) is that the contracts were let on a "cost plus" basis, which meant that the contractors had no incentive to keep a lid on expenditure. Hopefully the attempt by Andy Burnham and Andy Street (refreshing to see cross-party cooperation) to resurrect it using private finance will be better managed.

I'm currently waiting for a train. Delayed!

I don't blame her. My mother ended up driving down to London one year (she may have been 78/79 at the time) as the trains were so unreliable. Luckily she was a very good and confident driver and has no problem going long distance. She finally gave up driving this week at 85. I doubt she'll be off to London ever again. She's missing her car already. I am now a taxi.

Just curious, but why did you quote the OP? Usually the quote function is to quote other commenters other than the OP

People sometimes do it without thinking as they're used to quoting people they're replying to.

I live in a country with a nationalised rail service. Its not perfect but the trains are clean frequent and largely on time and CHEAP

Vote carefully

I wasn't aware that was a rule?
@JadeSheep

@InTheUpsideDownToday

Yeah not a MN rule but seems to be an etiquette one. I never knew about it until a couple of threads were started asking why some people quoted the OP since we're all replying to the OP anyway, and quoting creates a needlessly long thread.

So when I saw you'd done it I realized that's what everyone is talking about.