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It's not ALWAYS South Eastern Trains' Fault

Written on 21 Oct 2013

If you went anywhere near a train in the South East today, you were likely greeted with hoardes of people trying to cram in to a train that would hopefully get them either in or out of London.  Many of them will wish they hadn't bothered.

This was the worst performance the trains have had in a long while.  Even by 1800 (12 hours after the Chaos really began) it was still carnage trying to get out of London, with the majority of the trains back to Tunbridge Wells either cancelled or terminally delayed (same thing?).

My own journey wasn't too bad; a simple termination at Tonbridge after the train managed two stops, and squeezing on to a later train up to London.  I was one of the lucky few, I feel.

Twitter was naturally full of hate for South Eastern Trains, and probably the only thing more frustrating than the train service is the apparent lack of empathy for how badly this affects everyone.  They simply redirect you to a "claim your money back" online form (note: no real use if you're a season ticket holder).

And who can blame them?  They get so much hate that they have to take their thick skin from the coat rack and put it on for the day; there is really nothing they can do against the raging froth of the commuters - certainly nothing that will offer us any reprieve.

But there's more to it...it's not really their fault.  The train crews undoubtedly get a lot of abuse, too - not something I agree with, but I understand people want to vent.  Our conductor passed the blame up to "CONTROL" today; sure it made him feel better, but "CONTROL" is an invisible entity that we'll never see, so the train crews are still going to get the grief.

Whatever "CONTROL" is, chances are it's staffed by Network Rail, who operate much of the rail infrastructure (signals, tracks, etc..).  It was, of course, Network Rail that screwed up their Sunday Night engineering works that threw everything in to disarray.  And what do we see from Network Rail to make up for it?  A single Tweet:

 

 

That's it; nothing more.

There's a very high probability that any refunds from South Eastern are then recouped from Network Rail (rightly so).  All SE Trains do for the day is batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass, and ensure that they keep their paperwork in trail to claim back all lost expenses against Network Rail.

The best outlet for your anger, therefore, would be Network Rail.  A productive outlet for your anger, then, would be finding ways to prevent them doing critical engineering works on a Sunday night.