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Broken & Late Ltd: Britain's Railways

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    Fuubudget has a better pissed people on the train story this week.

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      Probably should be for the weather thread, but Greater Anglia have announced they are reducing services from 8pm tomorrow and then stopping them altogether from 10pm in advance of heavy snow. A reduced service is already being announced for Tuesday and Wednesday. Mighty glad I am travelling back up to the North East early tomorrow morning and not 24 hours later, but nobody really knows how bad the conditions will be.

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        Further snow showers are expected through Tuesday, these likely to be heavy in places and probably aligned in bands. Where this happens, there is the potential for 5-10 cm of powdery snow accumulating, possibly very locally 15 cm, through the morning, before easing during the afternoon. Meanwhile some nearby locations may see only small accumulations of 1-3 cm.

        Woohoo! Here's hoping for the full 15 cm.

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          Originally posted by sw2bureau View Post
          Fuubudget has a better pissed people on the train story this week.
          Looking forward to it. I moved to the back of the carriage eventually. It was genuinely more down to the aftershave than the noise.

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            Such build-up. I'm not sure it's that great a story really (especially for the poor guard) but here goes: I was on a train last week that was held at Northallerton station for a while as we waited for the police to come and collect a bunch of blind drunk idiots on the platform who were trying to get home from a night out and had started spitting at the guard and punching him. This was at 9am on a weekday.

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              That's awful. Poor bloke. Somehow that time of day seems worse, although it's irrelevant when idiots behave like that.

              The people I had on my train were nowhere in that league (more a pain in the arse) but I do wonder what they might have been like on the return journey. I wouldn't blame train staff for walking away from situations like that (the guard on my train didn't want to know and left it alone).

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                We have booked to travel back south this Friday for Mothers Day on Virgin East Coast. However, my partner had an email earlier saying our train may be cancelled, as several are likely to be pulled that day. We won't even know the outcome of this until Thursday.

                Due to connection issues at the other end, it is literally the last train we can pick up that night. Despite that, we are being told we can't transfer the ticket to the following morning as we either have to (a) get a refund and re-book from scratch, at presumably a more expensive price or (b) transfer our ticket to another train on the same day as our current booking, which means huge difficulties due to our work shifts.

                To make things more complicated, Virgin are still taking bookings for all the days trains, even though some may not run.

                Perhaps they simply don't give a fuck any more now they've got our money, but why the hell won't they transfer the booking to a different day?

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                  Weird letter in Private Eye:

                  I'm sure you can explain why no one has asked Gordon Brown, that keen supporter of PFI, the reasons behind his oh-so-expensive-for-the-taxpayer enthusiasm. John Prescott had an explanation when he arranged a — highly succesful — PFI deal when HS1, on which I was writing a book, needed extra capital. As he told me at the time: "Well, you see, Nick, PFI works if you have cash flow, a revenue stream to repay it."
                  The cashflow for HS1 is track access charges, which the government guarantees, because when the PFI was first launched, they couldn't raise the capital otherwise. The funding for HS1 was explicitly guaranteed by the government. Eventually the owner of the line got reclassified as a government entity because there was clearly no risk transfer whatsoever. There is literally no economic reason whatsoever why the government couldn't have raised the cash itself and, if it wanted to, handed it over in a conventional procurement process.

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                    Arturo, you're not having much luck.

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                      Originally posted by Tubby Isaacs View Post
                      Arturo, you're not having much luck.
                      It was fine in the end, although we were never notified that our train was actually running and if any were cancelled. We just had to keep checking updates and keeping our fingers crossed, so it was all a bit unsettling. It was still late mind and we almost missed the last connection at Peterborough, but we made it thankfully.

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                        https://twitter.com/Soirmag/status/972481963272568832?s=19

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                          Network Rail rightly taking a lot of flak for this. I'd say it's time to consider the bigger picture here and realise that compensation payouts are a price worth paying compared to the environmental damage this would do. Not to mention a likely increase in landslips when they obliterate trees from cuttings all over the country.

                          Network Rail said there were no plans to replace any of the trees

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                            I think they pay out for landslips too, so I expect they considered those.

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                              A bold assumption sir!

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                                It is a bit.

                                It sounds like pretty egregious vandalism.

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                                  I feel I should post a rare compliment on excellent service. On our recent visit La Signora and I took trains a fair bit. When we tried this a few years back she was knocked over by a carriage door in Birmingham. So this time I did a bit of research and got it right. Contacting the accessibility line a couple of days ahead, telling them which trains we were planning to catch worked brilliantly. On six occasions one or two people met our train as it arrived and took us either to our connection or a waiting taxi. It was seamless, every time. Which is more than can be said for our arrival at Heathrow, but that's another story...

                                  So kudos to all at Great Northern and Anglia. Although I have to admit I thought it a bit odd that there's no direct Sunday service between Norwich and London.

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                                    Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                                    Although I have to admit I thought it a bit odd that there's no direct Sunday service between Norwich and London.
                                    There are direct services but you have to take a bus service due to engineering works for Crossrail. This has been ongoing for almost a year.

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                                      Yes we were told that. But, in my view, any service that requires moving from one vehicle to another ceases to be direct.

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                                        Originally posted by Paul S View Post
                                        There are direct services but you have to take a bus service due to engineering works for Crossrail. This has been ongoing for almost a year.
                                        Unfortunately, it's very rare these days that you can actually get to London direct from Norwich at a weekend, or vice versa. Even without the Crossrail project, there was always some issue where you had to take a bus during at least one point of the journey. It's been going on as long as I can remember and I pretty much gave up ever doing that journey on a Saturday or Sunday.

                                        A lot of people divert via Cambridge or Ely when this is happening so to avoid using a bus. Price wise, it doesn't appear to be that much different either.

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                                          Is there any work being done on "Norwich in 90"? That sounded like exactly the sort of thing Network Rail should be doing- even allowing for the fact that campaigners often underprice their schemes, it didn't sound too expensive.

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                                            Good gag by a Green Party councillor here.

                                            http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/norfolk-...ears-1-5309529

                                            I think we may hit Norwich in £90 long before we hit Norwich in 90 minutes

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                                              East Coast back in house again. Those poor billionaires Souter and Branson obviously were losing money...

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                                                Originally posted by Gangster Octopus View Post
                                                East Coast back in house again. Those poor billionaires Souter and Branson obviously were losing money...
                                                Superb news!

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                                                  [Lexiter]Schauble will make us privatise it[/Lexiter]

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                                                    Probably not public or very long. Grayling wants to put trains-track together in some sort of private-public partnership lease.

                                                    It looks like the end of the line (sorry) for this sort of very aggressive franchise bidding, where operators bid very high and raise the unregulated fares to cover it. Falling passenger numbers now.

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