The independent report on the Eurostar pre xmas breakdown is being released on friday with a press conference – itself a rarity these days in the rail industry – and hopefully a full exposition of what exactly went wrong. Chris Garnett, one of the two independent authors of the report, has promised that all aspects of the fiasco will be examined but one suspects that he is too much of a nice bloke to be hardhitting enough. Garnett is one of life’s gents and he is certainly no one’s poodle but can he bare his teeth like a Rottweiler, which is what is needed in this instance.
Will, he for example, dare to criticise the Eurostar management in general and Richard Brown in particular if, as it appears, they have erred? And will he be prepared to question Eurotunnel’s performance, given their hostile approach to the inquiry as revealed in their Christmas press release. Or will he pull his punches.
It is commendable that the report has been produced so quickly and that it is being done independently. So let’s hope my instinct is wrong and we get the Garnett growl.
Popularity: 38% [?]
9 Responses
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/12/eurostar-no-plan-travel-chaos-report
This sounds reasonably critical (although no doubt much more to be said than here)
Posted on February 12th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
It is interesting that at this very moment (Feb 15), due to the accident in Belgium, Eurostar has gone into its “OFF” mode again: all trains from London to Brussels have been canceled for the day and the following message now appears on their website:
“We advise Brussels travelers booked today to exchange their tickets or have them refunded. This can be done free of charge through your original point of purchase.”
Visibly they have not learned any lessons from the December debacle: if you live in Brussels, or have urgent business there (or are in Brussels and need to get home to the UK), getting your ticket reimbursed is not what you want. You want to be told how to get to the other side. And you want help with the organisation! There must be thousands of people stranded on both sides of the channel at the moment in need of help. Some may not speak the local language well and may not know about available alternatives.
The situation is particularly annoying as the least you would expect is for Eurostar Brussels-bound trains to travel to and from Lille and buses to be arranged between Brussels and Lille.
It would be interesting to know why Eurostar always goes into this ostrich head in the sand mode as soon as something goes remotely wrong. Do they get insurance payments if they suspend all services?
Posted on February 15th, 2010 at 1:14 pm
There is now a post on the Eurostar site referring to a (very limited capacity) shuttle bus between Lille Europe and Brussels as well as the train timetables between Lille Flandres and Brussels. Both the bus and the trains will accept Eurostar tickets.
The site also lists flights available between the two cities but specifies that the costs are not covered by Eurostar.
This is a change in the right direction although I am at a loss to understand why the bus route needs to be “very limited capacity”. Surely it is in Eurostar’s interest to help travelers who need to get to their intended destination to do so. Considering the seriousness of the accident at Halle, everybody will understand the extra hour or two necessary and will remember the quality of service rather than the delay.
As for the fact that Eurostar tickets are not accepted on airplanes, this is understandable. However I can’t help wondering whether it wouldn’t be in the interests of all parties to sort something out here: for example, aircraft accepting Eurostar tickets in an emergency and Eurostar accepting air tickets if bad weather grounds flights.
Posted on February 16th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Well Ian it’s not as if it has been done before – was there not an occasion when Virgin Trains accepted air tickets for people trying to get to Glasgow and Manchester who had originally booked flights and found themselves stranded at Heathrow for whatever reason – think it was when the T5 meltdown happened if my memory serves me correctly, or was it bad weather or something?
Posted on February 16th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Yep rapid – think it was T5 – it was clearly a PR stunt Branson style – a good one I thought at the time (but not a co-ordinated plan by the respective organsiations). Ian’s idea makes sense.
Were not BA at one time part of the consortium somehow – was that the consortium that was building HS1 but had to get bailed out by taxpayer money from Prescott? I can’t recall exactly.
What govt / regulators et al can’t seem to understand is that passengers want quality of service and reliability not always ‘competition’.
The big issue I see at the mo on this is the reveiw by the comp commission about bus services – never gets much press because ‘buses are for losers’ (unless you want to talk about Routemasters!) and not on meeja radar – but I’m told our city is to be investigated becuase we have predominantly 1 major operator, despite it having a very modern quality bus fleet and good value fares. Not good enough for the Competition Commission it would seem!
Posted on February 16th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
The tragedy of competition Dan, as you say is that it destroys quality – look at how much the Ryanair model of low cost flying has completely devalued the once (mildly) pleasurable practice of going on an aeroplane. With British Airways and British Midland now cutting their service levels even more on their domestic/short haul routes, I’m surprised anyone actually can be bothered with all the hassles that have to be endured just to get that cheap fare on planes these days. I last took a ‘low cost’ flight 3 years ago…….and happily paid BA the extra for a bit of customer service on the few occasions that I’ve flown instead of taking the train to travel down south in the intervening period.
And anyway, whilst politicians are keen to demonise those pesky, monopolistic practices of nationalised public transport companies from Hell – are/were they REALLY that bad?
Being in my mid-teens when the whole railway privatisation malarkey was going on , I never really got to experience what long distance British Rail was like, yet when I did go on InterCity West Coast in 1996 (at the tender age of 19 – is it that long ago – and it was £64 return on a Saver from Glasgow-Euston compared to £107 today!), I recall a big, spacious Mark 3 carriage, arriving into Euston 10 minutes early and a restaurant coach that everyone (First and Standard Class) could have a sit down meal in. Today, on Virgin you get a cramped (albeit fast) Pendolino, frequent delays despite £8bn worth of refurbishment on the line, and the first class-only meals are indeed free if you can afford the extortionate upfront fares, or play the Advance ticket lottery on the internet instead.
Has privatisation improved quality – you decide. But hey I am not bitter, am I??
Posted on February 16th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Yep Rapid – you are right.
I was well out of my teens before the end of BR – so I feel well qualified to comment on them. Not all was great, and IC 125s had better seating layouts / space standards before their 1st tranche refurbs (under BR in the late 80s), but I don’t think any BR manager would have come up with the ‘pack em in’ seating standards on some of the stock we now see (even for long distance trips), or the rubbish catering now being offered on say XC.
As for pricing, BR would simply never have got away politically with the sort of fares rises we have seen since privatisation (never mind the stealth increases about off peak times etc).
I’m convinced that the sort of investment seen since privatisation would mostly have happened under BR (it certainly has nothing to do with private capital anyway) and probably at less cost.
The private sector can’t even bring the marketing flair it should be able to do (not consistently anyway) since it’s default position is to treat the passenger badly in an ‘institutional’ way.
Old BR customer service was mixed, but at its worst it came down to rudeness and lack of care (which brings us back to Eurostar and issues with SNCF which my recent travels on reminded me of). But this is not the same as institutional bad service where staff often seem required to treat you like a fare dodger even if they would rather be helpful at a personal level.
Even if you were a no holds barred free market capitalist you would surely be disapointed by the UK’s privatisation ‘experiment’, if you were honest that is.
Posted on February 16th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Dan, Rapid – having lived in Germany for some years now, and experienced the stiil state-owned Deutsche Bahn, I can assure you that things are no better here – and in some respects they are worse. Public ownership is not the panacea it is sometimes presented as.
Cramped trains – try an ICE3 or one of the double-deck ‘regional’ carriages that typify the modern DB. OK the loading gauge here permits a little more space, but you can’t blame that on the ownership. Or the dubious penny-pinching exercises that compromise safety, such as the wheels used on ICE1 sets until the 1996 disaster at Eschede; and who knows whether the axles of the ICE3 sets are really up to the job, following the derailment on the Hohenzollern Bridge in Köln a year or so ago?
As for customer service, you could the smaple the BahnCard subscription system – your Bahncard is automatically renewed unless you explicitly cancel at least six weeks before the current card expires. The new card is sent four weeks before it’s due to start, so by then it’s too late to cancel, even if you’ve no intention of using it. No wonder there are comments on the web suggesting that DB customer services are actually run like the Mafia. Such are the joys of German consumer protection!
Alternatively, not the DB but still publicly-owned, you could consider the Köln Transport Sevice and the currently being built extensions to the U-Bahn. One of the stations is being built about 400m from the Rhine, and needs reinforced walls to protect it from pressure at high water levels – but workers on the site have allegedly stolen a significant proportion of the metal re-inforcements (and presumably sold it to scrap merchants) – so the walls probably aren’t up to the job. Inadequate supervision by the authority seems to have been a factor. The same building contractor is working on the München-Nürnberg high speed line, and the same thing is thought to have happened there as well.
Privatised Britain might not be so bad after all!
Posted on February 20th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
Nigel – Having just returned from a 24 hour return trip between Perth and King’s Cross on the newly nationalised East Coast Main Line franchise, I’m not going to say it was perfect, not by any means. It may be the age old GNER/NXEC gripes – the usual suspects; poor value 1st class upgrades, unfair policies on Advance tickets, “announcement-itis” on the part of guards, timetables being padded out to oblivion to make trains artificially on time. etc etc.
But what DID strike me was that things have improved in some respects – catering for example – restaurant cars have been restored, and NXECs atrocious “TV dinners” in a plastic container that pass as meals have been consigned to the dustbin where they belonged. There is also talk of a major timetable review to eliminate some of the aforementioned “padding out” of schedules (let us not forget that BR InterCity East Coast had at least one sub 4-hour London-Edinburgh timing – something that even the highly commended GNER quietly got rid of).
I don’t make any apologies for being a member of pro-renationlisation lobby. Privatisation was supposed to make the railway self sufficient from government, it was supposed to reduce the RMT’s stranglehold on the industry, it was supposed to improve service levels, it was supposed to introduce private sector flair. It has done none of these things, or at the most, some of them only partially, and in some cases done the complete opposite.
Do TOC’s innovate and take entrepreneurial risks? Read the laughable section in Richard Branson’s book “Business Stripped Bare” that he bet the whole of Virgin on the Pendolino/Voyager contract when we all know the money to buy those trains came from taxpayers.
Privatisation has allowed costs to go through the roof and undermined the affordability of vital future improvements (electrification, Beeching reopenings, a high speed line etc).
However – it is not just privatisation in itself that is the problem. It is the fatal error of separating infrastructure from operations which is at the root of many of the problems. Who is to say if we returned to the 1922-1948 model of a “Big Four”, then that may have worked perfectly well. We will never know. But the rail industry is so over-regulated by Whitehall that there is so little room for the TOCs to innovate that quite frankly, it’s hardly worth their while bothering. Who can blame them for squeezing every last pip out of their rented assets and their customers?? I’d probably do the same if I was in their shoes.
Ergo, there is no point whatsoever in private sector involvement in running a public service unless it can genuinely add value, and I think that has patently failed to happen on the railways. I’m sorry – we are going to be saddled with the consequences of this disastrous privatisation for decades to come.
Posted on February 20th, 2010 at 9:25 pm
Add A Comment