A young friend of mine has been regaling friends online with her attempted train journey from Chichester through Bristol and back down home to beyond Truro this afternoon, this evening and now tonight. ....
I'm watching (from afar, though here in LA they had their first rains for six months last night and it tipped it down) and able to look a little detached.
On one hand, for every cancelled or seriously delayed train there are dozens of individual stories being written and people having very real disruption, and the very real upset of now knowing what's going on and / or being told something which turns out to be not exactly right (ranging from the over-optimistic to the downright wrong).
On a second hand you have the very real issues of the operational staff doing there best to keep the systems running and to make decisions in a changing situation based on what may be incomplete information, possibilities and probabilities that may sometimes mean hindsight would have been wonderful and lead them another way
And on the third had you have the customer facing staff with minimal true operational elements in their work who are doing their best in many cases to inform but, frankly in some cases, really hate the job when they've got to deal with angry and demanding (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) passengers.
I've just written that to help clarify my thoughts and see all the sides of the picture. The "solution" doesn't come on the day / evening that this is happening - it comes in the planning and the systems.
* In getting the network databases right so passengers don't get told to catch a bus that's a three mile walk away
* In getting the engineering and warning systems right so that closures and semi-closures are minimised, and problems alerted before trains get sent out and stuck. The 13:55 Cardiff to Paddington left Bristol Parkway 15 minutes late, and Swindon 264 minutes late (due 14:59, actual 19:23) and I really wonder at such a delay
* In having customer facing staff being ever more customer aware. It may not be as simple as it sounds but - really - station loos should be open if there are multiple staff around, and staff should take far more the "my job's really important to help today and I'm proud of what I do" rather than "I'm dreading my shift"
It WAS exceptionally bad ... Blockage on the
B&H▸ at Urchfont, near-blockage at Melksham (I presume that was the culvert that we were told had been fixed?), at Corsham, and at Sodden Chipbury left only one single track thread connecting Paddington to Bristol and the West Country - and that in danger of being closed. Then other pieced of the Jigsaw - west of Westbury and west of Bristol - knocked out too.
I suspect that information system corrections, an ethos that makes team members proud to help as best they can, and an honesty that says "we don't know at the moment, but will get back to you within half an hour, even if that's to tell you we still don't know" would go down wonders. Looking across at the world of flying, there's one particular airline I use. They get delayed like others - but the difference is that they give a slightly longer, more technical explanation of what's going on and make their passengers feel like "we're all in this together".
Talking the "we're all in this together" ... I wonder if there's a case on community rail lines / services to have one or two key volunteers who'll go down to more major unstaffed stations at times of disruption and explain what's going on, who to call, perhaps co-ordinate taxis and generally say keep people informed. Away from forum messages, I've had - again - feedback today that tells me that outright wrong information's been dished out from call centres remote from the issues - probably resulting in extra expense for
GWR▸ and certainly in some very, very bad customer stories that are totally unnecessary.
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