Tripping down memory lane as we scatter ashes on Exmoor

My late father had spent 18 months or so in a plastic box on the mantelpiece, and it seemed about time that he was liberated.  Exmoor was the obvious place, and that is where we went last week to find a suitable spot to scatter his ashes.

He was at school at West Buckland during the war, and our childhood holidays with him were spent down there, usually at Barnstaple. From there we could easily get to the wide sandy beach at Saunton Sands;  we would take the dogs to the dunes at Braunton Burrows where the sandy track, still called the American Road, showed traces of the metal strips laid by the US military when they trained there for D-Day, not so many years earlier; and we went up on to Exmoor. Thinking back, the Exmoor trips were for rainy days, because if the sun shone we went to the sea, and my recollection that it always rains on Exmoor was probably based on distorted premises.

The early 1960s were  a good time for driving – petrol was cheap, roads were well maintained, cars had reached a stage of technical excellence and comfort, and relatively few people had them. My father had a dark grey Jaguar 3.8 with red leather seats, one of the finest cars of its time and much loved by bank robbers and others with an urgent need to be somewhere else.

Two FGW trains on time in one day proves a one-off

It was (lack of) service as usual on First Great Western on the day after an unprecedented piece of good time-keeping. If FGW paid as much attention to providing a service as they do protecting their revenue, we might be happier to contribute to their profits.

Something quite outside my experience occurred last week. My First Great Western train into London and the one which brought me out both ran to time.

This is like those fabled happenings which one hears of but never quite believes – Gordon Brown is not always unpleasant to everyone he meets; Ed Balls can let a day go by without either launching an “initiative” or filing an expenses claim; there is a highways officer at Oxfordshire County Council with an IQ in double figures; a Phoenix has been seen in Oxford. None of these seems in the least plausible, but if FGW can run two trains on time in one day then anything is possible.

All announcements and no information at FGW

It would be useful (for the passengers at least) if the people who run First Great Western stations were to spend some time standing around on platforms, like the rest of us have to, totting up the ratio between the endless announcements thrown at us and the information actually conveyed by them.

They would find that, like the notices erected by the dumb animals who work in local authorities, and the stream of nannying advice poured over us by government and its many agencies, the value of the messages is in inverse proportion to their quantity.

Alienation in my own land

The state of the nation was neatly summed up between trains at Reading station one day last week.

For the second time that week I had bounded out of a west-bound train and dashed across to Platform 8 in time to see the doors lock on a train heading north to Oxford and beyond. Both trains were running to time so it is deliberate time-tabling which ensures that one cannot do a seamless change. Well, it may be deliberate – some venomous little bureaucrat spotting an opportunity to inflict a little more misery on those who are compelled to suffer the “service” which First Great Western offer to those who pay the wages; it may just be stupidity.

Meet the Managers at First Great Western

My fury at First Great Western’s inability even to be honest (one does not expect competence) as I eventually pulled out of Oxford Station on Tuesday (see Incompetence or Dishonesty at FGW) made me determined to take up their invitation to Meet the Managers on the way back.

Unlike at the ticket office, there was no great queue to meet the drone who had been delegated to field the complaints, and I stood behind a couple who were complaining about the removal of the Travel Centre which, they said, they had often used and much missed (see FGW closes Oxford Travel Centre) .

Incompetence or dishonesty at FGW – both probably

The fare for my occasional journeys to London has risen by nearly 10% since 1 January. The quality of the service seems to have decreased by about the same. Just like last year then.

The ticket windows at Oxford station look just the same as they did before the recent and extremely inconvenient works there. I had hoped that the plan was to add another one to cope with the queues, but why should they bother with that? Once the cash-cow – the passengers, or “customers” as we are mockingly called – are into the station, they are probably committed to travelling by train, so what does it matter if we have to queue?

A journey by train from Oxford to London

An evening trip to London by train illustrates how the “customers” are let down by those who provide their “services”. It affects life more than New Labour corruption.

The extent to which we are serfs to the so-called service providers was illustrated four times before the train pulled out of Oxford station.

First you have to get to the station. Every time I queue down Hythe Bridge Street, I curse the valuable time taken from me by the thickest of all thick public servants, the highways officers of Oxfordshire County Council. What inversion of society’s priorities means that flotsam like that can waste hours out of the lives of so many real people, people with jobs and lives that matter?

Sorry position closed at First Great Western

By mid-evening, most of the ticket windows at Paddington have blinds pulled down with the legend “Sorry Position closed”.

It is good to see that FGW have a “sorry position”, even if it is closed. They do, of course, hold a sorry position at the bottom of the performance table and, as I have noted elsewhere, their late managing director, Alison Forster, was in the sorry position recently of being sacked for incompetence (why pick on her, you might wonder – if they sacked everyone who was incompetent at First Great Western they would be left with the station cats).

One day when I have time on my hands (and people who pass through Paddington often have time on their hands) I must go and find the Sorry Position when it is open. I envisage a corner in which the directors and senior managers take turns to stand with notices on their backs saying “kick me”.

How much of my life has been wasted waiting for trains to arrive, waiting for trains to leave, waiting for trains to stop waiting in the dreary suburbs? What therapy there would be in kicking someone responsible in the Sorry Position, or, indeed, anywhere!

Home

Passenger information at Reading Station

It has been a continuing feature of my journeys through Reading Station over 30 years or so that the information given to passengers is too little, too late and usually wrong. The slightest deviation from the timetable throws the whole system into confusion. Both the station and most of the services are controlled by First Great Western, so deviations from the timetable are the norm.

I am usually resigned to this, having decided long ago that getting worked up over the incompetence of railway employees is a way to an early grave. This resignation, which is now widespread, is of course one of the reasons why the railways never improve (the other is that they have us over a barrel – we have to keep using them at whatever price they charge and however poor the service, so there is no incentive for them to get any better).

Defending Arriva

A correspondent chides me angrily for my piece lamenting the transfer of part of Virgin XC’s franchise to Arriva (Virgin loses the Oxford route). My post was an amalgam of stories from various reputable news sources so I was rather puzzled to be challenged as to the facts.