Delay and Repay
On The Way Home/oatsy40/flickr
Until this Christmas I clearly led a charmed life, for to date I had not personally been one of those lost souls you see featured on the news at stations and airports over the holiday period, when yet another part of our privatised and under-invested creaking transport system has been found severely wanting.
This time my number came up. My partner and I, in what in retrospect seems like sheer folly, and not just a mere moment of madness, came up with the idea of visiting Glasgow in between Christmas and New Year. We booked train tickets like responsible, carbon footprint aware citizens for travel on December 27th. And we were totally scuppered because Network Rail engineering work overran. The result? King’s Cross station closed and all the passengers told to head for Finsbury Park station instead.
Now the difference in size and scale between those two stations could be likened to the difference between Victoria coach station and a request bus stop in Croydon. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what would happen if the volume of people intended for the former were all despatched to the latter. Out of curiosity, and not for a moment expecting to get on to a train, but just so we could say we tried, we took ourselves off to Finsbury Park. Oh dear, whose bright idea at East Coast line operators or Network Rail was that? A pitiful sight greeted us. Hundreds of people milling around in the cold outside a railway station with the gates closed as the hapless staff inside shouted the odd inaudible piece of information without even the use of a megaphone. The queues spilled round the block and nothing moved while we watched. On the other side of the station there was a mass of people squeezed up against the station entrance.
Then we spotted a reassuring sight – an officer of the British Transport police in smart uniform. He clearly would be able to tell us what was going on. We strode towards him confidently and asked how the queue was being organised. His reply? ‘There is no organised queue’. And that is all he could tell us; I was brought up to believe that the police were there to maintain public order, so how could this chap calmly inform us that in effect he had no such intentions in that area?
We were lucky in that we were able to get home in 45 minutes and drown our sorrows with a glass of wine and plan how to get our refund. But there were plenty more unfortunate examples, including people in wheelchairs and small children in buggies. Others were clearly in transit and had nowhere to stay that night. And of course there were the immediate practical problems when you are stranded out on the street in temperatures of around 4 degrees without access to any facilities. Yet they stood and waited in hope.
I will not go on. Suffice it to say that I will never again rely on the British public transport system to deliver me from A to B on time and to budget during the Christmas festive period. Delay and Repay is the train operators’ trite response to these issues – bah humbug!
Hmmm, Network Fail.