Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

Yesterday evening I switched on Radio 4's PM to be shocked by the first thing I heard. The Indian government has announced plans to build a bullet train , capable of reaching over 200 mph, with help from the Japanese. Operating between Ahmedabad and Mumbai, the project is expected to be completed in just five years' time. It was this shock headline that's forced me to issue this public apology to the Indian government today. Several times in this blog I've referred to Wales as having 'a Third World' public transport system. In the light of the news from India yesterday, it seems that it's nowhere near that good. Sorry to anyone living in the developing industrial nations for any offence I may have caused.  

I received an email this morning from the Office of Rail and Road. They were following up my 'recent'(-ish) complaint against Arriva Trains Wales (see I Don't Like Thursdays and We Apologise For the Late Running of This Refund ). The eight-week time lag between action and reaction seems to be the new industry benchmark, judging from today's date. Anyway, the ORR sent me a little market research survey to fill in, rating my experience of dealing with Arriva following the Replacement Bus Service fuck-up in early  October. You won't be surprised to learn that I rated them pretty poorly overall. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. On 3 January, I went to Aberdare station at the crack of dawn on a bitterly cold morning to single-handedly promote Action for Rail Day. (Two of the lads I'd invited to join me were working that day; the other was laid up with gastric flu.) It was part of an ongoing campaign organised by the TUC, and supported by a couple of dozen...

Arriva Trains Wales conductors have recently been supplied with new handheld ticket machines, as the contract with the previous manufacturers had ended. The old devices used to produce credit card-sized tickets on fairly stiff card. They were the same size as those issued by the platform machines and ticket offices. This size: They fitted the plastic wallet you got from the ticket office when you first obtained your photocard. They went into the slot in the barriers and popped back out again, even if they were slightly creased. They easily lasted the whole month, and when they expired you could either put them in the recycling bag, use them as convenient bookmarks, or stash them in your wallet/purse for months (or years) on end, until your mates took the piss so much you ended up clearing it out. Then came the great leap forward. Sort of … We had to go to Merthyr on Tuesday afternoon. As it's much cheaper to travel by train than by bus (£3.90 vs £7.50), we decided the time differen...

A couple of months ago I told you about the late-night shenanigans I experienced while travelling home from Cardiff (see I Don't Like Thursdays ). Well, you can imagine my surprise when, on 5 December, an email from Arriva Trains Wales pinged into my inbox: Case Reference: ATW-161007-BFD Dear Mr O'Gorman, Thank you for contacting us about your journey on 06 October between Cardiff and Aberdare. I am sorry to learn that your journey was disrupted, and that you were caused a delay as a result. In order for me to fully investigate and resolve your compensation claim I do need some more information from you. Could you therefore please confirm the following? • As you have requested to be paid by bank transfer please confirm the account name, sort code and account number we should pay your compensation to. I look forward to hearing from you in due course. Yours sincerely Neil Curness Customer Relations Advisor Arriva Trains Wales I emailed them back with my details, and congratulated...

For some unexplained reason, Arriva Trains Wales always manages to unleash chaos on Thursdays. I noticed this when I was working in Cardiff, about fifteen years ago. Platform 6 at Cardiff Central on Thursday evenings would be a free-for-all, with trains coming in late, going off late, running out of sequence, or not turning up entirely. After a few months I used to finish work and go for a pint, instead of fighting through the scrum, and catch a later train. Yesterday I was in Cardiff, and decided to stay late in town to check out a couple of new places which have opened. I don't think it had occurred to me that it was Thursday until I arrived at the station, when all Hell broke loose as usual. Here's the text of a compensation claim I've just submitted to ATW via their website. I've learned an important lesson this week: Never go anywhere by train on a Thursday. Or a weekend. Or pretty much any time in the next ten years, until the upgrade is complete and services are ...

There's an interesting article in the current CityMetric blog (part of the New Statesman) , about the so-called 'Northern Powerhouse' so beloved of the current Westminster government. It compares the average speed of trains between major cities in different parts of the country. Have a look at this: London Milton Keynes 1.66 miles/min London Reading 1.44 miles/min London Cambridge 1.16 miles/min Manchester Leeds 0.82 miles/min The Staggers quite reasonably makes an argument for an urgent upgrade of the trans-Pennine route. After all, it points out, between them the two city centres account for some half a million jobs. HS3, the proposed high speed link across the Pennines, would have immediate benefits in terms of job creation, and significant long-term economic returns on investment. Meanwhile, here in the land where the railways began, we're one of only three countries in the whole of continental Europe without a single kilometre of electrified railway. (The other tw...

My regular readers will already be familiar with the rigmarole necessary to book National Express coach tickets online. You have to jump through several hoops simply to travel between the capital of England and the capital of Wales – a process which takes far more time and demands far more patience than the average passenger has to spare. But, gentle reader, that's just the start of it. Booking a coach ticket online is an absolute piece of piss compared to buying an advance ticket via the Arriva Trains Wales website. I'm travelling to Bristol tomorrow, so I decided to see what the fares were. I was surprised to learn that an off-peak day return from Aberdare was £14.90. That puts Bristol – some forty minutes from Cardiff – in more or less the same price band as a day return to London by coach. Anyway … I tried to log in to my account, but (needless to say) I'd forgotten my password. I first registered with Arriva Trains Wales about five years ago, just for their news update...

The South Wales newspapers have run three stories about public transport in as many days. I thought I'd summarise them here. On June 28, Rhodri Clark reported that bus use in Wales has fallen to its lowest since records began in 1982. (The witty headline to the piece alludes to the fact that everyone in Wales – except me, because I know half the drivers by name anyway – will call the man behind the wheel 'Drive' when they get on or off the bus.) In 2013-14, 107 million passenger journeys were made on Welsh buses. This nadir coincided with the Welsh Government's decision to cut subsidies by 25%. Further reductions in services are planned as cash-strapped local authorities struggle to balance the books. I know correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but it's difficult not to draw your own conclusions, isn't it? According to the industry body CPT Cymru, some 800 services have been axed across the country. Passenger numbers fell by a further 3.3% in 201...

Arriva Trains Wales sell a ticket called the Valley Lines Day Explorer and Night Rider. For just £11.00, it which offers 'unlimited travel' by train and Stagecoach bus in the area shown. I decided to buy one of these yesterday, and spend a day filling in some gaps on my copy of Stuart Baker's Rail Atlas: Great Britain and Ireland . Since it's an off-peak ticket, I knew that I could expect a time restriction on it. I got to the ticket office in Aberdare in time for the 0852 train and asked for a Day Explorer ticket. The lady behind the counter told me that she couldn't sell me the ticket until 0930. She suggested that I had a word with the conductor, as he might not be aware of the restrictions. Instead, I headed for Aberdare Library, where a quick search online turned up Arriva's own Terms and Conditions for the offer: I printed this page off (eventually!) and stuck it in my pocket. Armed with this information, I returned to the ticket office. By now I was too l...

I'm fairly relieved that I don't have to travel to Cardiff any more, especially when I see my friends' Facebook updates about the joys of their daily commute. I often allow myself a quiet chuckle as I read their tales of delays, cancellations, and imaginative excuses dreamt up by Arriva Trains Wales. Then, every so often, I hear something which knocks their regular battles with into a cocked hat. I have a mate who occasionally works at an office in Trefforest Industrial Estate. Getting there on a normal weekday is never easy, as the trains from Aberdare don't stop there. Instead, he has to travel to Abercynon or Pontypridd and change onto the train from Merthyr. On the return trip, he has to change from the Merthyr train to the Aberdare train. It must be frustrating at best and extremely annoying at worst. His commute is even worse on a Sunday, with trains from Aberdare running every two hours and not meshing neatly with the services from Merthyr. I don't envy him a...

It's that time of year again, when the claustrophobic nature of Aberdare and the closed-minded nature of many of its denizens really starts to grate on my nerves. It usually happens when the nice weather finally arrives, and my friends start embarking on day trips or short breaks to relieve the monotony of small town life. Yesterday, Rhian and I had a pint in the beer garden of Thereisnospoon, and talked about our various misadventures at the hands of Arriva Trains Wales over the years. It's a pity that I wasn't blogging back in the day, as I could have started a subsidiary blog charting the various events which prevented us from getting to work on time, or getting home at a reasonable hour. British Rail used to have an advertising slogan, Let the train take the strain . I told Rhian that my blog would have been called Let the Train Cause the Strain , and I've decided to adapt that title for this entry instead. I told her about a day trip to the north Devon resort of Ly...

The Wales Online website today has a feature called 7 Ways the Beeching Cuts stitched up the Welsh rail system . It highlights some of the absurd and time-consuming journeys faced by passengers travelling between our country's large towns, since the branch lines connecting them were torn up five decades ago (see Nice Work If You Can Get There .) One of the seven journeys they singled out was this: Unfortunately, as is the wont of local papers (and their websites), the gremlins got involved along the way. In true Private Eye tradition, the pictures have been transposed. The short journey, across the heads of the valleys via Merthyr and Aberdare, hasn't been possible in my lifetime. Instead, passengers have to travel via Newport, Cardiff, Bridgend and Neath in order to reach their destination. With this in mind, I've just sent the following email to the editor: I liked today's online feature about the way Dr Beeching ruined the railways in Wales. It was interesting to se...

Yesterday I finished reading Matthew Engel's book Eleven Minutes Late , (Pan Macmillan, 2009) which I can heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the rail industry, social history, or travelling in the UK. Mr Engel's book cleverly weaves these three strands together, following his journeys along the main lines and branch lines of this small island. He meets a host people who work or travel on the trains, and chronicles the random development of the railway network over two centuries. The book ends with him back on his home turf, travelling to his local station at Newport (Gwent), as the rail companies call it these days. I thought I'd share some of his observations with you. He started his journey at Holyhead – almost – as this extract explains: [T]he 1635 back to Cardiff, now operated by Arriva Trains Wales, did its best to go nowhere near Holyhead either, starting out 300 yards away from the buffers and the ticket halls, as though holding its nose. Holyhead is al...

I've never been a 'city' person as such, in spite of living, studying and/or working within fairly easy reach of Cardiff and London during my life. When I was growing up, getting to Cardiff was a long and very complicated expedition by bus (there were no trains from Aberdare until 1988.) Mother always hated the drive into the city centre, so we used to visit Swansea out of preference. That was where we did our Xmas shopping every year. Cardiff was an occasional necessary evil, best avoided if we had the choice. Now, in 2013, the train to Cardiff takes about an hour. On the other hand, you can get to Swansea from Aberdare, but it takes ages, involves two different companies and at least one change of buses. There's no possibility of getting there by public transport if you're working normal office hours, and you can forget any idea of getting home after the shops close. (See A Letter to the Editor 6 .) So it goes… Even when I was at university only an hour away from...