Can the rail regulator get trains on track?

Has any regulator of anything the proper powers to enforce anything they want doing ? They all say somebody must do all these things but only a few of what should be done ever get done and those take a long time owing to objections usually from some MP or the service involved Give the regulators legal powers to enforce immediately at once if not sooner

The rail companies on suburban lines are a private monopoly with subsidies from the tax-payer. Their is no competition, you travel with Northern Rail or ………. go by bus (also a private monopoly).The company comes first. Customers are a nuisance and treated as such. The carriages are 50 years old, polluting diesel, overcrowded and uncomfortable. It is 12st century Britain where business comes first and the customer is exploited. Cash cow rules OK.

It is meant to be this way – if not then the Government is incompetent. Whatever happened to competition?

Despair of privatised railways. Run to make profit not to serve those of us who bought the trains, paid for their manufacture, paid again for a ticket, and lost the lot when the service ran significantly late or was cancelled incurring costs to recover our journey in time to get there by alternative means. These buccaneer owners are to be despised and the Department of Transport which spent £28 million on consultancy fees designing a train to run on electric and carry diesel fuel and engines as well need to be certified. Pathetic – and people keep voting for the lunatics who created this mess

In Scotland we have a different service . Please get an education

Rail operators and infrastructure companies are simply in existence to make money. Passengers are regarded as the fuel of income generation and how they’re treated is of little interest. Successive governments (of both colours) have paid lip service to issues of service improvement, relying on the toothless regulator system to calm ever more troubled water.
We were promised that rail (and bus for that matter) privatisation and deregulation would improve matters by adding a competitive element to services, keeping fares down and services at high levels. Clearly neither has happened. I wouldn’t have committed my dog to suffer the journey I endured this week.
Privatisation doesn’t work. It simply allows operators to do as they will and impose appalling service levels on a customer base which can’t fight back.
Time, politicians, for a complete rethink; perhaps to consider again that transport is national issue and not simply a means to an end for profit generation.

My local train operator, Merseyrail is neither better nor worse than it was a year ago. In fact it made the top position ( just) in the recent National Rail Passenger Survey, and has usually been in the top three. The only fly in the ointment, is the recent series of one-day strikes by guards in protest about the introduction of ‘driver only operated trains’. The company did however manage to run a less frequent, but acceptable service, using fully trained management staff.

My experience over the last year has been good when using trains into Kings Cross and also to Heathrow from St Neots.
I travel once per month and early trains have been almost spot on with times apart from an occasional issue. Recently a pantograph failed in the station at St Neots and we were told either take the next train in 20 minutes or wait for the defective train to be sorted out. I chose to wait as the next train would be crowded and we got away just after the other but were about 30 minutes late in total at Kings Cross.
However, all passengers were kept fully informed all the time I was on the train with reasons for the delay and at every stop new passengers were also given the reason for the delay. My view is that Great Northern handled the situation very well!

Great Anglia has improved since it got the franchise last year. Delay claims online are normally paid within 3-5 days. I commute everyday from Ipswich to Liverpool Street. The issues they have are old unreliable rolling stock (all being replaced) and poor infrastructure which is Network Rail and the Govt responsibility.

Having voted not improved, I gave up trying to travel on the train four months ago. This was down to the daily failures of the system in and around London which , Chiltern Rail has little to no control. HS2 will not improve things by any stretch of the imagination in fact it will struggle to deliver on the wonderful and fanciful journey times it is boasting.

In reality, I do not think that the service s I use have changed for better or worse in the last year.
The last memorable change was their switch over to new Siemens rolling stock.
We’re still ripped off with chronically high prices (especially to Euston) when compared to continental systems in my experience. Here, we cannot even predict which platform a train is due on much in advance nor manage to get platforms level with carriage doors-etc etc.

My train provider didn’t get off to the best of starts today, cancelling one of my usual trains and then claiming that there was a defective train blocking all his services further up the line.

Why can’t the railway system have a decent means to move stuck trains out of the way? Oh, of course –
– they’ve only had 178 years to think of something!

Something from the Rail Regulator? That makes a change – usually nothing is heard from this person from one year to the next and the rail companies are allowed to run riot. The fares go up, the service gets worse and now the electrification schemes are cancelled to pay for the high speed link to the midlands and Crossrail 2 for London! Cancel these vanity schemes and spend the money getting the rest of the network electrified and up to 21st Century standard, and then talk about special lines to the midlands and the north.

Punctuality, cleanliness hasn’t changed much from being mediocre. Communication – i.e. information about stops, changes at junctions, is abysmal. It’s left up to train drivers/guards to make announcements, and few bother. No good for a line (Hereford – Birmingham, London Midland) with a lot of visitors / airport travellers. Almost no ticket checks en route. I know many passengers to/from intermediate stations no longer bother to buy before travelling even when facilities are available. However, staff at Hereford (which is Arriva Trains Wales) are unfailingly helpful.

Why, on a project as critical as GWEP, did DfT/ORR allow Network Rail to select a design of OLE that was:
– untried in this country
– over engineered (requiring much deeper piled foundations)
– unaffordable within the budget
– uninstallable within the timescale
– unsightly in the extreme?

Why has the DfT announced that new diesel and petrol engined cars will no longer be sold after 2040 days after scrapping crucial electrification schemes and forcing operators to fit diesel engines to electric trains?

My service is Hourly BUT is not a clockface – ie memorisable timetable with services Exeter bound at 0813,0845, 0859, 0943, 1031,1051,1058, 1140,1157 – the service is usually a 2 car Railbus [Pacer] unless a Cardiff/Bristol – Plymouth/Paignton in which it’s 1 carriage with space for 1 bicycle or luggage (not both). The ticket machine – if working only takes OLD round £1 coins and the ticket office though advertised by GWR as open 0715- 1815 Mon- Fri and 0830- 1400 Saturday has to close everytime an 8 or 7 car HST or 4 car voyager leaves for beyond Exeter or Newton Abbot for passenger assistance and safety meaning that if you need a ticket you need to arrive at least 30 minutes before unless you have round pound coins or are prepared to pay a penalty fare and dispute it later. – more people are now driving to Exeter and using the Park & Ride. – yet had holiday time the Rivera Line is still rammed with passengers and can be as cramped as the Northen Line during evening peaks. GWR need to come up with a solution and soon.

I can’t really comment on other peoples’ problems, as I’m retired and have not had to commute into a city for the last 46 years . A friend and I regularly take long day trips and with sourcing advance singles to (sometimes) obscure stations, and knowledge of various day rangers, we rarely spend £60 (with railcard) for our trips from Ludlow or Kidderminster to places as distant as Dundee, Stranraer, Sunderland, Cleethorpes, the Felixstowe – Harwich ferry, Dover and Penzance – not to mention many other closer destinations. We have only twice had serious problems, which were adequately compensated. Arriva Trains Wales fares on the Cardiff – Manchester route are relatively high and the trains often crowded, but their franchise was let 15 years ago on the basis of no growth, during which time passenger numbers have more than doubled. Our main trains (class 175s) are good quality but unique and (one of the many problems of the stupid breakup of the rail system on privatisation), cannot be directly coupled to other types of train, which makes adding extra coaches impossible (even if they were available and the government were prepared to pay!). I agree that fare structures are completely illogical; when I checked the fare for a simple return trip on the Heart of Wales line for tomorrow, I was quoted two day return rates and three period returns, the most expensive being over six times the cheapest! We normally purchase at the privately run Ludlow station ticket office and we have always been offered the cheapest option.

There should be somewhere, with teeth, that we can complain to. I’ve already mentioned GWR’s ploy of turning local trains into express trains to improve their arrival statistics. Complaining to them falls on deaf ears.

With Crossrail repeatedly causing signalling issues GWR needs to out passengers first when issues arise.

Services, generally, year-on-year get gradually worse; dirty trains (especially toilets) and overcrowding (e.g. needing to stand for an hour/hour+ on a journey to Ebsfleet or London) just becomes the norm;and we stop complaining because no action appears to be taken (email apology does not constitute action in my mind) . Compared to travelling in EU, where services are cleaner, usually less crowded and trains run much closer to time/on time, and where the cost is so much less (if we are in the EU how can their Govt subsidise the service where ours doesn’t ?? – Political choice). We should be in a much stronger position to complain and have action taken. An Ombudsman does appear to be one way forward.

arriving for your train to go to liverpool for a hospital appointment with a spinal surgeon then told train is cancelled and will have to wait for next one is not funny then next train is late due to vandalism re electric cables stolen
having to phone hospital to explain and be told if your not here by a certain time then appointment is lost what a waste of money on tickets that you have no claim back on

My husband and I use the Northern Rail service to Liverpool, and sometimes there is litter on the floors, but on the whole, they are reasonably clean, though the windows could do with a clean, although they are supposed to go through the ‘wash’ process each day I always thought. Mostly they are on time, though should there be delays, it is always announced over the tannoy. Also, we have the occasion to use Virgin Trains when visiting my sister who lives down south, and these are clean and comfortable, and have always been able to get the tickets we book in advance for, so, yes, we are quit happy with the services we use on the occasions that we do, otherwise , most holidays are on the coaches.

Many correspondents claim that fares are much lower on the Continent. I am not convinced that is generally the case but it would be good to have the facts. It would very helpful if Which? could do a small amount of useful research and get the fares for typical continental journeys that are roughly the same time of day and distance as a sample of Great Britain standard-class journeys. Articles and comments with no background information don’t get us very far.

This Conversation does not apply to Northern Ireland since the Province has its own separate state-run railway system which is not regulated by the ORR. Once again, in its London-centric way, Which? neglects to inform readers of this.

If you leave the railways to privateers, what do you expect. The journey from London to Manchester is often standing room only, and the prices are gross. Shows the respect the ruling class has for working people: zilch. Come on Jeremy, no respect for the class enemy!

HS2 seems to be in the news frequently. Projected cost (2017) £34b. Just a drop in the ocean! And what will be the hoped for outcome , 125mph trains. In other words last century technology. Clearly whoever is in charge is unfit to manage a project like this. Get the Japanese or Chinese in to sort out the network and let’s see 300mph (at least) trains running. This not an impossibility, check maglev trains on You Tube. Then let’s see engine drivers that look interested in the job, dressed suitably, and capable of keeping to timetables. Cleaners who are properly supervised. Lastly externally clean trains, every day. It’s the norm in the far east why not here? As this is a part of their job (cleaners and drivers) why not tie punctuality to pay! Seems to me a good place to start.

Train from Taunton to London is often so full, many people have to stand (or sit on the floor) for the whole journey. Why can’t GWR simply add a carriage to the train. Surely those who have to stand should get their money back.