This is true. Compare the number of people who travel in motor vehicles each day against the number of people who travel on the train each day, the chances of being involved in a road accident are extremely small. This along with the convenience and above all reliability of the motor vehicle, makes road travel a no-brainer.
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is Selby - Doncaster. [similar to the issue faced upthread by @Donny Dave ].
It does feel like the vast majority of staff I come across can't be bothered when it comes to updating passengers.
It may be their job, but I do have sympathy with staff having to tell passengers that their train will be delayed or cancelled. Not so bad of course if it is a faceless station loudspeaker announcement, but unpleasant for the train manager who will then have to encounter dissatisfied or even angry passengers.
Especially if it's additional and worsening bad news and if the employee who is having to relay the information is not particularly impressed themself with the decision making process which has led to the unfolding scenario.
natcen.ac.uk
I genuinely empathise. But the nature of work is that one sometimes has to do things one dislikes. That's why we have to get paid for doing it...
I think it'd be best for Northern to scrap that approach and threaten exile to places like Blackpool South if their attitudes don't improve.
or Chathill.
Maybe yes. That sounds like a pretty desolate, windswept station.
That basically sums up my view of air travel.
Not forgetting that a large chunk of the hazard that motor vehicles pose is inflicted upon people who weren't in them in the first place. People feel safe in their own metal box, stuff the rest.
Or maybe they know no more than the passengers do. "We're stopped here at a red signal. I've no idea why..."
Which is exactly what SWR guards say in such instances, and then provide a further update once they've heard from the driver. Far preferable to silence.
Well, that another youngster who will be saving up for his first car. When will the railways stop treating customers as the enemy?
Both/and surely. You'd have thought that a sensible government, faced with lack of demand for public transport, would actually make using the latter easier and not more difficult. The Thatcherite spitefulness forbidding co-operation and co-ordination was perverse in the extreme and further disadvantaged those already disadvantaged because they couldn't afford or were otherwise unable to drive.
A national, multi-mode, integrated public transport system is easy to say but many people haven't a clue what it might mean in reality. The same with "fit (or not) for purpose". There has never been a national multi-mode integrated public transport system in Britain either before or after 1945. There were more public transport routes available in the past, by train or bus, but very many of those were infrequent and some operated on only a few days a week. Journeys made by them were slow and took a long time. You had to adapt your travelling plans to fit the limited availability of the services you wanted to use.
Then say that, rather than leaving passengers in silence.
I find it quite amazing that people managed to cope with such events in the days before public address systems were built into trains. Such fortitude and patience.
You only need to look at timetables from the 60s, 70s and 80s to realise that public transport was very inconvenient, even though there were (at least pre-Beeching) rather more routes available. I recall the Fairford branch before closure in 1962 - first train from Fairford at 12 noon! And fares were in relation to average income quite high. People were only too glad to enjoy the freedom of having their own transport. These days, trains and buses are more frequent albeit on fewer routes.
At least you will be fairly confident of the journey operating and of securing a seat.
Government policy enabled those choices. Remember that the man running down the railways had a financial interest in motorway construction. The railway suffered from a lack of investment postwar, and when money was forthcoming in 1955 there was no national strategy for how it should be spent. The BR standard programme was supposed to be a stopgap while a rolling electrification programme got up to speed. The standards should have had 30 years of work, being cascaded from region to region as electric trains displaced them from each route in turn (plus DMUs on rural branchlines). In reality there were several years of dithering, then a lot of the Modernisation Programme funding was blown on diesel locomotives which didn't work, with only a few electrification schemes going ahead. It shouldn't have taken until 1991 for the ECML to be fully electrified, it shouldn't have taken until 2016 before non-Heathrow electric trains started running out of Paddington. We shouldn't still have an unelectrified London termini.
I await the thread on here moaning about pointless announcements. Can't win.
