PalQ

First of all let me say that I love British trains and have ridden them for years. But weird things happen on UK trains that i've never seen happen on trains elsewhere in Europe. In many ways chaos seems to rule.
1- Leaves on tracks. Though i've heard of this happening in France and Germany on occasion, in Britain during autumn leaves on tracks cause many delays. Some say that UK trains, running often in kind of ditches lined by trees, are more suspect to losing traction when leaves fall! Stations have special brochures telling of the problem.
2- The Train that Didn't Stop at the Station: recently i was on one train that was supposed to stop at a station but didn't, squealing to a stop about 200 yards after the platform. The conductor gets on the PA and says, 'Sorry but the driver forgot to stop and safety regulations dictate that he can't back the train up so passengers for this station should get off the train at the next station and backtrack to this station! (Think of a foreigner who didn't understand English, what would they make of this!) The train driver forgot to stop? How can this happen?
3- Late trains are endemic. A recent example: I got to a suburban London station to be informed by the ticket clerk that 'there were no trains running to London' and that i should take the train in the other direction to another station and then get a train to London from there. OK so me and a few dozen other folks heading to London went to platform 2 to do this round-about route only to hear an announcement from the same clerk who had just told me there would be no trains to London that 'the train approaching platform 1 is the 8:45 to London Victoria! So everybody makes a mad dash to platform one to catch the train station staff had just said wasn't coming! Besides that it was 10:15 when the 8:45 to Victoria limped in.
3- seats that fall off. In second class you should always check the seat you're going to plop down on before sitting down as on several occasions before i got smart i had the seat fall down and I slid to the floor!
4- Doors that only open from the outside. Though being phased out, some intercity trains have doors that can only be opened by sticking your hand out the window and opening the door from the outside. No automatic opening as on newer trains. This can be very perplexing to tourists who can't get the door opened at their stop. check on how the door opens ahead of time!
To be continued. Any stories to add?

Tallulah

Sigh... "..chaos seems to rule.." Oh yes, PalQ, it most certainly does! The state of our trains is as much a part of our conversation as the weather.

With your regard to your first point, when you start getting excuses that trains aren't running because there's the '..wrong type of snow..' (and yes, this has happened) you really realise that the country is falling apart!

AND they cost a FORTUNE too!

PalQ

Train company doesn't even know their own trains are cancelled! Recently whilst riding the train to Edinburgh i overheard what is only typical of the non-sensical bizarre way the private train companies exhibit incompetence. Next to me in my first class car was a reporter for the Sun (UK) newspaper who had been given free first-class tickets with his wife to go to Glasgow via Edinburgh to write a travel article. Just after the train departed Kings Cross in London an announcement came on saying that all trains between Berwick and Edinburgh were cancelled for the next 10 weekends. Well this was news to the Sun reporter as he had a complimentary return reservation for Sunday back to London. He was shocked and got on the phone to the GNE train public relations staff who had booked him and was irate that they had not know about the cancellations when they set up his trip. (The 'replacement' bus service taking much longer didn't appeal to him.)The train PR fellow, according to the overheard conversation, didn't even apologize but told him he'd have to buy a ticket from Edinburgh to Glasgow to hook up with diverted trains running on the longer West Coast route; further angering the reporter. He said he was going to blast the train pr staff in his article. This is only typical of the incompetence of UK trains! He ended up phoning British Midlands airways and weasling a free ticket back to London from them.
Next: Pendolino breakdown.

PalQ

When I was in the UK in Sept they tested the new Pendolino trains that Virgin is putting on the London-Scotland West Coast line, recently rebuilt at an enormous cost to accommodate these high-speed 'tilting' trains. And the demonstration day with press on board was a success, breaking the UK speed record i think. But when the pendalinos went into regular service a few days later, on the first day a service from Glasgow-London broke down and had to be shunted into London being pulled by a relief engine and about three hours late! this was reminescent of the days long ago when the APT (Advanced Passenger Train), a similarly high-speed train, on its demonstration run with press aboard performed terribly, frightening all those on board. UK trains are getting better but getting up to Continental standards is a long way off!

tropo

PalQ, there is a train in Queensland, Australia, called, the "Tilt Train" which travels at some speed. The seats are like those of an airline, with armrests and they recline. In additional there is a tray which drops down for meals, and also there are TV screens like the aircrafts for watching movies, etc.
Are our tilt trains like the tilt trains you spoke on the London to Scotland run?

Mathieu

I was just going to mention the " wrong types of snow " as my cousins in London run into this quit often in the winter ! It was hard for me to understand this given that here in Canada, you can almost certainly count on the trains to get you into work on bad snow days !

And I have been caught by the train doors that only open from the outside. Coming in from Ashford to London, I was the only passenger in the car and missed my stop because I couldn't get out. Very frustrating then but funny now in hindsight.

PalQ

Tropo: no doesn't seem like the same beast to me, at least in the train's bogeys' interiors. The tilting comes from the train's ability to tilt when going around curves, speeding things up; maybe the Aussie train is the same "pendolino" tilting train as Virgin has and which also runs several places in Europe, such as Italy. A Spanish train, the TALGO I think was the first tilting train; in the US a tilting train runs between SF and Vancouver I believe. But the Virgin train interiors are like a conventional train.

PalQ

The Incredible Train from Edinburgh to Preston! We pulled out of Edinburgh on time only to grind to a halt just after Haymarket station, in view of the airport and sat there for about an hour. Finally the train rolls along, and this was in November when the days were getting short. Later the interior lights and heat on the train go out, as do the train's front lights, so we limp into Carlisle in a darkened cold coach. To get into the station the train had to stop about a mile outside it and the driver got out and tied a light to the front of the train, required the announcement said to get into the station. We all had to change trains to continue, arriving in Preston about three hours late.

TopMan

Please clarify the following: the railroad passenger services have been "de-nationalized" is that correct?

If this is true then I assume all these "horror stories" are a result of the trains being run by "private enterprise" firms..is that also true?

IF one and two above are BOTH true then you are saying that THIS is what comes with private enterprise?

PalQ

Not necessarily. The defunct state-owned BritRail system was allowed to detriorate so much during the Thatcher/Dr 'Axman' Beeching regime that who can blame private rail companies if they can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Things like these were also endemic during my travel on British trains dating to 1969 - they are no worse and if statistics can be believed, private trains are more on time. I recently read that British trains have seen a huge increase in ridership lately, the most in Europe, and this further overstretches the infrastructure. Only a massive influx of government funds - re-nationalizing the railroads is probably the only way to fix the mess. I don't blame it on private companies - Sir Richard Branson for one has pumped millions of pounds into Virgin trains, yet they still perform abysmally - so much so that their Cross-Country franchise is not being renewed. I'm all for re-nationalizing UK trains.

flanneruk

TopMan:

You can take the man out of the blundering, ass-protecting bureaucracy. But you can't take the blundering, ass-protecting bureaucracy out of the man.

Dr_DoGood

Top Man - CORRECT! on ALL accounts.

The re-nationalisation of the railways would have overwhelming popular public support. But it would scare the City out of its wits and New Labour would never want to upset their friends in the City!

So we have to make do with the worst railway system (and most expensive in pence/mile terms) of any country in Europe and far worse than many many others.

Alot of this has to do with the manner in which it was privatised and the complete farce that ensued when dogma is allowed to defeat rationality... but hey-ho that's the Tories for you!

Dr D.

Roger

We just returned from a two week stay in England and Scotland. Took the trains almost daily and had no problems at all with the minor exception of crowed trains due to the school holidays. We did arrive back in London from Edinburgh 20 minutes late, but that seems to be the norm for that route. We had great and mostly empty rides from Glasgow to Mallaig and from Kyle of Lochalsh to Inverness.

PalQ

It's not that most UK train rides aren't OK but that if you do enough mind-boggling bizarre things happen i've never seen in very extensive railing on the Continent. To wit: Recently on a train from Waterloo (London) to Greenwich, a very modern train with a teleprompter in each car telling of the next stops in big moving letters - yet the stops that were flashing across the screen were those for another line that the train apparently also traverses, but not for the line I was on. Many people at first thought they were on the wrong train before realizing that the info was wrong! Just incompetence i can't comprehend, nationalized railway or privatized railway. Oh well I still luv British trains - just love em - you not only get transportation but amusement as well.

PalQ

As for state-owned vs private? Southeast trains is state-owned and i've had occasion to ride these trains a lot in the past year and they suck big time! Lots of cancellations, hours late, dirty cars with cans and rubbish strewn about. Thus i don't think it's a matter of returning to the old British Rail national rail concept as a panacea for the abysmal state of UK trains as the new state-run Southeast Trains is no better than the Connex private group that ran it until their franchise was cancelled due to poor organization. Currently Southeast Trains are 103% 'filled' to capacity at rush hours; i believe this much be a low figure as when i've ridden them at peak periods they were more like 200% full.

StevePWales

I don't think re-nationalisation is the answer. The days of the public-run British Rail were not exactly well oiled perfection either.
Having spent some time using the trains in Switzerland I would advocate any system that allows us in time to approach their level of reliability and cleanliness.
I believe their system consists of a publicly owned and run track network and private operators. Not a million miles away from the current British system. So either the Swiss are just better at running the system than us Brits (not impossible), or more likely that they have put in far more investment over the last 50 years.

We could also encourage greater use of the railways by introducing a card offering discounts on tickets. The Swiss can buy a card for around £50 a year which gives them 50% off all tickets (Excepting some of the more esoteric mountain railways).

Can't see any of these improvements happening though because we seem to have two conflicting sets of opinions, ie. Either the whole system should be nationalised as private companies are money-grabbing evil empires, or alternatively the system should be entirely private because governments are useless at running anything. Neither view is completely correct and a sensible synthesis of the two may tield better results.

PalQ

I guess i'd go with a national rail service with huge subsidies to bring the network up to par with other European states who run excellent national rail systems paid for from the government coffers. Any profits taken from the system would be plowed back into the system. France is a classic example of a system that runs modern high-speed trains over a basically all-new track system fanning out from Paris. Some would say the SNCF neglect other rail lines in favor of the TGV lines but the TGVs move millions of people a year around the country at speeds approaching 200mph, saving money that would normally be spent on highways or airports. Yet thet do it at a huge deficit, in part due to mind-boggling over staffing and unproductive workers. When the gov't recently tried to impose a 35-hour work week, it was found that SNCF workers only worked about 30 hours in many cases so they would have actually had to increase their hours to meet the 35-hr standard! A joke in France goes: Three kids were talking about their fathers work - one said my dad owns a boulangerie, he gets up at 4am to bake and is home by noon. next one says my papa works in an office, he gets home at 7pm; the third kid says, my papa works for the SNCF, his working day is from 8am to 6pm; he gets home at 3pm! Anyway it seems national rail is not necessarily bad, in spite of inherent abuses involved with state-run enterprises. It must be something in the British water that causes the UK to never be able to get it together and get a world-class rail system - come to think of it some major UK water systems are French-owned and the SNCF controls some rail franchises i believe!

ron

SNCF interest in UK train operating companies is not controlling. SNCF owns 45% of Keolis. Keolis in turn owns 35% of the Southern and Thameslink franchises and 45% of Transpennine Express franchise.

Perhaps more interesting is that DSB (Danish Rail) is bidding on the Integrated Kent franchise and both DSB and DB (German Rail) are bidding on the InterCity East Coast franchise.

PalQ

Back to UK train snafus... riding a crack new train to London from Edinburgh i happened to sit near the WC. Brand new train but person after person when wanting to use the WC couldm't figure out how to open the sliding door. It seems there was a poorly marked button that said 'open' but it was far from the door opening itself. Don't they test these type of things before designing them? Train staffers had to tell several people who couldn't figure it out how to open the door! Incroyable! Why didn't staff at least tape a big 'press here' sign on the door?