Please make yourself known

Quote from: bigdaz on July 28, 2010, 07:58:09

I must say how much I have learnt and how much I have enjoyed being part of this rail forum! Everyone on here seems to be so friendly.

Thanks - and I hope you continue to enjoy it. I've made some very good friends and learned a very great deal, too; only today, I was on a train and bumped into someone who I wouldn't have met had I not got involve in some of this stuff ... and we had a fruitful chinway as the miles roled by. It's not the first time it's happened, either! Yet for the most part, I could pass you on the platform, you could sit next to me in the train and we wouldn't know.

We're a tiny, tiny proportion of FGW^▸ passengers. I feel very humble about that when I think about it and I sometimes ask myself "do we bat above our proportion". Perhaps we do - but the perhaps someone needs to. When I was a student, I commuted by train. I trusted the folks who looked after trains - in "British Rail" as it was in those days - to know what they were about and to do their best for the passenger. That's how many people still think ... that the wide range of organisations from the DfT^» through FGW, SWT^▸ , NR^» , ORR^» , PF^▸ , EWS^▸ , WC^▸ , Angel, Porterbook, TfL^» , know best ... and perhaps they do know best , save for the fact that their goals are likely to be clouded by other objectives that doing their very best for passenger provision. I can tell you how shifting a train here, rejigging a timetable there, will increase passenger miles and overall railway revenue - but at the expense of one company loosing money to its competitor, or getting a reduced subsidy that it can no longer use to bolster its balance sheet. And on this campaigning side it's important that now - of all times - we continue to bat.

* There's a squeeze on funding ... and balance sheet goals will be much more to the fore than passenger performanec goals.

* The passenger watchdog - of whom I've been somewhat critical in the past with regard to its limited role - is being reparented and I don't thing anyone's yet sure whether this will limit its role further.

* Changes in local govenment, sweeping abolition of quangos and new (fewer, smaller, leaner?) replacements mean there's both risks and opportunities. NDAs^▸ out, LEPs^» in, and what does that mean for changing rail services for the future?

* And there's a major revision proposed for franchising - again enormous opportunity, but opportunity on one hand to say "yes - double or tripple the length to give a chance for investment" and on the other hand the opportunity to loose socially supporting services that don't make a direct profit into a hole between "let's pass the responsibility out to the local areas" and a failure to fund the loacl areas so that they cabn take it on.

Goodness - Bigdaz - you probably look at this and you think "yikes - what has hit me". Sorry about that - but I actually care for the people who travel - or want to travel - in my own neck of the woods. I have a full time job in a quite different industry and so do most people and that makes it especially hard to say, at these times "look at the people who want the service". You might be quite shocked about how little is know about the travel habits of - well - I'll use my home town as an example. How do they travel, how would that change if you change the system that's on offer ... or the pricing model ... or if you change the economic and leisure elements that will amend the desire or need to travel? And without those customer projections, it's hard to know what's right for the future.

I would love to bump into you on the train one day. You would have found me, my wife, my father, and the dog out today - the dog has a passion for stations from where whe can get good walks, I have a passion for using my local station or doing a bus transfer rather than having to start with a long car journey, and I have a need to get to specific business destinations. But I can promise you that I'll be far less intense in person, and I'll be out there admiring the smooth current services that I see most of the time, and being thankful for the professional team that all the companies concerned have out there on the ground - they do a great job and we don't thank them enough.