Caledonian Sleeper

[trebor79]

Still worthy of a partial refund, I'd have thought. If its meant to be a hotel on wheels then being turfed out at Carstairs at half 6 on an October morning is not an experience that would encourage me to book again.

But you have the option of staying on to Edinburgh and travelling to Glasgow from their if you don't need to be there for the original arrival time.
I'd be happy with those options. Don't see what else they could have done.
Bravo I say.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 19 Oct 2022 ==

I completely agree. This is marketed and pitched fares-wise at the premium end of the market and being chucked off at 0635 is not good enough.

Except that isn't what's happening, you can choose to stay on to Edinburgh!

 

[JonathanH]

1M16 showing cancelled from Inverness tonight on RTT.

Yet shows timings between Inverness and Aviemore. I note the Highland Chieftain lost a lot of time north of Blair Atholl.

 

[zwk500]

But you have the option of staying on to Edinburgh and travelling to Glasgow from their if you don't need to be there for the original arrival time.
I'd be happy with those options. Don't see what else they could have done.
Bravo I say.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 19 Oct 2022 ==


Except that isn't what's happening, you can choose to stay on to Edinburgh!

Being offered the option to go to the wrong destination then take a Scotrail service and arrive over an hour later is deserving of a partial refund, to me. You'd be given a full refund on a service train if delayed by that much, I'm suggesting 20% would be a reasonable amount to give back given it's supposedly a 'premium experience'. Or, at the very least, 50% off your next trip.

 

[AlterEgo]

Except that isn't what's happening, you can choose to stay on to Edinburgh!

Oh wow, five star. Ending up in the wrong city is not going to be acceptable for most people!

 

[The_gardener]

Also saw up sleeper from Inverness cancelled on RTT but just seen it leave Newtonmore on time! (Didn't seem well loaded)

 

[trebor79]

Oh wow, five star. Ending up in the wrong city is not going to be acceptable for most people!

Did you not see the bit where they'd arranged for free travel on Scotrail to Glasgow?
Would it have been better if they'd just cancelled the Glasgow portion?

Getting to your original planned destination either a little later but having got up earlier, or a bit more late but having had longer in bed seems like a good choice under the circumstances when the alternative is cancellation and having to find accommodation in London and total loss of your plans for the following day etc.

 

[AlterEgo]

Did you not see the bit where they'd arranged for free travel on Scotrail to Glasgow?
Would it have been better if they'd just cancelled the Glasgow portion?

Getting to your original planned destination either a little later but having got up earlier, or a bit more late but having had longer in bed seems like a good choice under the circumstances when the alternative is cancellation and having to find accommodation in London and total loss of your plans for the following day etc.

But the *circumstances* are the problem.

If I go to a hotel at the top end of the market and I find that when I go to take a bath in the evening, there is no hot water in my room, then the hotel might offer me to change rooms. But nobody wants to have to shift all your stuff you just unpacked, or expect to have to do that, at 9pm. One might imagine the hotel offering some sort of recompense for this inconvenience, which was nothing to do with me, and perhaps comp my meals, or offer money off a future stay, or a partial refund, or something at least.

I don't think saying "oh well, never mind, best that could be done" is the best that one can hope for when their own train failed. "Free travel" to your ticketed destination? Um, that's what I would have paid for in the first place! That's a contractual right in the circumstances, not a customer service action to redeem for the inconvenience.

The Cally is not some utilitarian EuroNight service but actually Britain's premier train. It can regularly cost you £200+ for a room. The top rooms cost upwards of £400. It is not cheap, and is at the very, very top end of all regularly scheduled public trains, not just in the UK, but in Europe. The prices and service pitch come with the attendant expectation that kicking you out at Carstairs and making the rest of the trip on a Voyager - which I repeat, is a contractual requirement - is far from ideal and should come with some customer service recovery.

 

[Techniquest]

It's 16 minutes in Carstairs, it could be worse! Bad things happen, yes it is meant to be a high quality overnight train but I do not see a major issue with the alternatives provided. If it happened last minute, with next to no warning, then yes I could understand the frustration, but this is not the case!

Regarding the seated sleeper, I do actually have a question that I am sure the wise souls on here will know the answer to:

If one has a valid ticket to travel from Scotland to London (I'm trying not to reveal what I'm up to next month, so as not to spoil the trip report ) but not booked with Caledonian Sleeper, is the best way to make a reservation on the seats to call them, or is there a way to do it online?

 

[alistairlees]

If one has a valid ticket to travel from Scotland to London (I'm trying not to reveal what I'm up to next month, so as not to spoil the trip report ) but not booked with Caledonian Sleeper, is the best way to make a reservation on the seats to call them, or is there a way to do it online?

Call please

 

[32475]

But the *circumstances* are the problem.

If I go to a hotel at the top end of the market and I find that when I go to take a bath in the evening, there is no hot water in my room, then the hotel might offer me to change rooms. But nobody wants to have to shift all your stuff you just unpacked, or expect to have to do that, at 9pm. One might imagine the hotel offering some sort of recompense for this inconvenience, which was nothing to do with me, and perhaps comp my meals, or offer money off a future stay, or a partial refund, or something at least.

I don't think saying "oh well, never mind, best that could be done" is the best that one can hope for when their own train failed. "Free travel" to your ticketed destination? Um, that's what I would have paid for in the first place! That's a contractual right in the circumstances, not a customer service action to redeem for the inconvenience.

The Cally is not some utilitarian EuroNight service but actually Britain's premier train. It can regularly cost you £200+ for a room. The top rooms cost upwards of £400. It is not cheap, and is at the very, very top end of all regularly scheduled public trains, not just in the UK, but in Europe. The prices and service pitch come with the attendant expectation that kicking you out at Carstairs and making the rest of the trip on a Voyager - which I repeat, is a contractual requirement - is far from ideal and should come with some customer service recovery.

In essence, it all sounds rather like booking a hotel for a night in one particular city but finding out when you get there that the hotel isn’t there at all but there is one in another city altogether.

 

[ejstubbs]

One program doing a job that is in fact defined differently for two or more other departments.

Been there, done that. I wrote a rather elegant depth-first tree-traversing report generating program that I was rather pleased with for a financial services customer. A week after the new system went live I received a bug report saying that the calculation had been done incorrectly, and actually pointing out where the error lay - the customer having done a sample calculation themselves by hand. I checked the functional spec and confirmed that my code did what was specified. My manager agreed with me, and passed the information back to the customer. They responded, agreeing that the program did as specified, but stating that the specification was wrong. It was actually a trivial change to the code (and didn't affect my nice tree-traversing algorithm) so I went ahead with the change as instructed.

Another week passed and I received a another report, again claiming that the report was wrong, and saying that it had been right the first time, as that was matched the functional spec that they had signed off. Confusion ensued, until it became clear that the report was being used by two different departments, each of which had a slightly different view as how they wanted the information in the report to be calculated.

We ended up calling a meeting with representatives from both departments. It turned out that, although both departments knew that the other used the 'same' report as them, neither was properly aware that their calculation methods were subtly different. So the second department hadn't bothered checking that the functional spec signed off by the first department was actually an accurate refection of their own requirements - they had just assumed that it was. Neither department was willing to back down and adopt the approach of the other, so the simple solution was to add a command line flag to the program which told it which way to do the calculations (as I say, it was a fairly trivial change either way) and have the batch scheduler run the report twice, once with each flag setting.

What we never got to the bottom of was how long they'd been operating, under the old system that ours replaced, with each department apparently getting the other's report on a fairly random basis...

 

[Peter Sarf]

Been there, done that. I wrote a rather elegant depth-first tree-traversing report generating program that I was rather pleased with for a financial services customer. A week after the new system went live I received a bug report saying that the calculation had been done incorrectly, and actually pointing out where the error lay - the customer having done a sample calculation themselves by hand. I checked the functional spec and confirmed that my code did what was specified. My manager agreed with me, and passed the information back to the customer. They responded, agreeing that the program did as specified, but stating that the specification was wrong. It was actually a trivial change to the code (and didn't affect my nice tree-traversing algorithm) so I went ahead with the change as instructed.

Another week passed and I received a another report, again claiming that the report was wrong, and saying that it had been right the first time, as that was matched the functional spec that they had signed off. Confusion ensued, until it became clear that the report was being used by two different departments, each of which had a slightly different view as how they wanted the information in the report to be calculated.

We ended up calling a meeting with representatives from both departments. It turned out that, although both departments knew that the other used the 'same' report as them, neither was properly aware that their calculation methods were subtly different. So the second department hadn't bothered checking that the functional spec signed off by the first department was actually an accurate refection of their own requirements - they had just assumed that it was. Neither department was willing to back down and adopt the approach of the other, so the simple solution was to add a command line flag to the program which told it which way to do the calculations (as I say, it was a fairly trivial change either way) and have the batch scheduler run the report twice, once with each flag setting.

What we never got to the bottom of was how long they'd been operating, under the old system that ours replaced, with each department apparently getting the other's report on a fairly random basis...

My bold - I am amazed how quickly they recognised the conflict in requirements !. My experience is it could go on for years on a roughly three month loop !.

I often found that a new system spec overlooked a lot of what worked well in the old system and only concentrated on what new functionality was wanted. Usually management information was added but the basic business functionality could be poor or unworkable !.

Back to the current issues. It does seem easy to overlook this is a premium product. Normal rules (get outs) should not apply if you are selling a premium product. Caledonian Sleeper is marketed as a top of the range rail service - it is not just the price that suggests that - so it follows compensation should be noticeably better than for standard rail. I suppose a bit of delay repay might be possible for those who know their rights.

 

[Techniquest]

Call please

Thank you, I shall look to do this as soon as my plan is finalised

 

[paul1609]

But the *circumstances* are the problem.

If I go to a hotel at the top end of the market and I find that when I go to take a bath in the evening, there is no hot water in my room, then the hotel might offer me to change rooms. But nobody wants to have to shift all your stuff you just unpacked, or expect to have to do that, at 9pm. One might imagine the hotel offering some sort of recompense for this inconvenience, which was nothing to do with me, and perhaps comp my meals, or offer money off a future stay, or a partial refund, or something at least.

I don't think saying "oh well, never mind, best that could be done" is the best that one can hope for when their own train failed. "Free travel" to your ticketed destination? Um, that's what I would have paid for in the first place! That's a contractual right in the circumstances, not a customer service action to redeem for the inconvenience.

The Cally is not some utilitarian EuroNight service but actually Britain's premier train. It can regularly cost you £200+ for a room. The top rooms cost upwards of £400. It is not cheap, and is at the very, very top end of all regularly scheduled public trains, not just in the UK, but in Europe. The prices and service pitch come with the attendant expectation that kicking you out at Carstairs and making the rest of the trip on a Voyager - which I repeat, is a contractual requirement - is far from ideal and should come with some customer service recovery.

If you look at the berth supplements they are generally £130 for classic and £150 for club. The remainder of theprice is the rail cost. £130 is ball park for an IHG 3 to 4 star hotel booked a week in advance in Glasgow City Centre and undercuts the central London rate. Even a premier Inn will bepushing £100 in Central Glasgow and more than that in Central London.
In the big scheme of things it really isnt the premium pricing you are claiming.

 

[AlterEgo]

If you look at the berth supplements they are generally £130 for classic and £150 for club. The remainder of theprice is the rail cost. £130 is ball park for an IHG 3 to 4 star hotel booked a week in advance in Glasgow City Centre and undercuts the central London rate. Even a premier Inn will bepushing £100 in Central Glasgow and more than that in Central London.
In the big scheme of things it really isnt the premium pricing you are claiming.

Find me a more expensive sleeper train in Europe. Even Nightjet deluxe sleepers are cheaper and never pitch themselves as a super premium service. The dancing on the head of a pin about berth supplements ignores the fact most tickets don’t have the room and travel component separate. Sorry but getting booted out at Carstairs at 0656 means you’re up and about at 0630 latest. Rooms are available until 0800 when arriving in Glasgow, so that’s up to an hour of sleep potentially lost. Remind me again what the sleeper train is for?

When the new sleeper entered service the price absolutely rocketed, and in my experience I’d say it is well over double what it was, on average. It is marketed, quite literally, and I quote from the site, as “a hotel experience”. Act like one then, CS.

That several respondents are defending CS and by extension suggesting zero customer service recovery whatsoever in this scenario is why the service is where it is.

If you demand low standards you’ll get them. I’d be interested to see if people just suck it up if they go to a hotel, get told the afternoon they check in “sorry, we have to kick you out early or, the only other option is to stay in a different city 45 minutes down the road. And no, we aren’t offering anything else”. Would you just accept that? I am the sort of person to float along the path of least resistance in life and even I certainly wouldn’t.

 

[al78]

If you look at the berth supplements they are generally £130 for classic and £150 for club. The remainder of theprice is the rail cost. £130 is ball park for an IHG 3 to 4 star hotel booked a week in advance in Glasgow City Centre and undercuts the central London rate. Even a premier Inn will bepushing £100 in Central Glasgow and more than that in Central London.
In the big scheme of things it really isnt the premium pricing you are claiming.

A 3 to 4 star hotel in a city is almost certainly going to give me a much better night's sleep and be more comfortable than a night on the sleeper. The sleeper is not a hotel on wheels, it is more like a hostel unless you pay for one of the best cabins.

 

[Bill57p9]

Still worthy of a partial refund, I'd have thought. If its meant to be a hotel on wheels then being turfed out at Carstairs at half 6 on an October morning is not an experience that would encourage me to book again.

Out of interest, what was the alternative onward travel from Carstairs? Coach?
The joined up railway would have had 1D99 make an additional stop, but this isn't the joined up railway...
I also can't quite see why the Glasgow portion couldn't have run as far as Motherwell, since the 92 did.
For that matter, 92043 off the down Highlander was in Polmadie by the time the lowlander left Carstairs, so it would have been available to drag the Glasgow portion back out of Central.
Or was a lack of an additional TM the real issue?

Edit: just realised that the real issue was that the down Lowlander only had one seated car (hence brake & TMCS) so couldn't be split. And that was because the previous up Aberdeen portion was cancelled, hence the previous up Highlander was short formed with only one seated car.

 

[zwk500]

Out of interest, what was the alternative onward travel from Carstairs? Coach?

The following XC service.

 

[alistairlees]

Out of interest, what was the alternative onward travel from Carstairs? Coach?
The joined up railway would have had 1D99 make an additional stop, but this isn't the joined up railway...
I also can't quite see why the Glasgow portion couldn't have run as far as Motherwell, since the 92 did.
For that matter, 92043 off the down Highlander was in Polmadie by the time the lowlander left Carstairs, so it would have been available to drag the Glasgow portion back out of Central.
Or was a lack of an additional TM the real issue?

There was only one seated (brake) coach so it couldn't split.
CrossCountry provided the Carstairs - Glasgow C part

 

[Bletchleyite]

There was only one seated (brake) coach so it couldn't split.
CrossCountry provided the Carstairs - Glasgow C part

Are you absolutely sure of that? I thought they were basically multiple units and you couldn't shunt it like that, rather each half set would have to have its seated car/brake.

 

[XAM2175]

There was only one seated (brake) coach so it couldn't split.
CrossCountry provided the Carstairs - Glasgow C part

Are you absolutely sure of that? I thought they were basically multiple units and you couldn't shunt it like that, rather each half set would have to have its seated car/brake.

"CrossCountry provided the Carstairs - Glasgow C part" means "passengers travelled to Glasgow Central on a scheduled CrossCountry service".

 

[Bletchleyite]

"CrossCountry provided the Carstairs - Glasgow C part" means "passengers travelled to Glasgow Central on a scheduled CrossCountry service".

I'm well aware of that. The first line of the quoted post (sorry, cack handed quoting) suggested the Sleeper had run with the Glasgow and Edinburgh sleepers (but all to Edinburgh) but only one brake coach, which I don't think is possible.

 

[XAM2175]

I'm well aware of that. The first line of the quoted post (sorry, cack handed quoting) suggested the Sleeper had run with the Glasgow and Edinburgh sleepers (but all to Edinburgh) but only one brake coach, which I don't think is possible.

Ah, I see, sorry. So in the sense "is it possible to run to combine the two parts worth of sleepers but only have the seats from one?"

 

[Bletchleyite]

Ah, I see, sorry. So in the sense "is it possible to run to combine the two parts worth of sleepers but only have the seats from one?"

Yes, that. I can't see why that would be done if it is even possible.

 

[Bill57p9]

It is possible: I have seen a 12 car in Inverness with only 1 seated coach (Fort William portion cancelled). RTT suggests the 12 car consist to Edinburgh a couple of nights ago had 10 sleeper cars, 1 buffet, 1 seated.

 

[BRX]

The aberdeen/fort William split that happens every night demonstrates that they aren't restricted to operating as if they were 8-car multiple units.

 

[Bletchleyite]

The aberdeen/fort William split that happens every night demonstrates that they aren't restricted to operating as if they were 8-car multiple units.

That of course is a split to something smaller. I did think (wrongly I guess) that a given brake coach could only handle one half set.

That being the case - why was it removed?

 

[Falcon1200]

The joined up railway would have had 1D99 make an additional stop, but this isn't the joined up railway...

From the quote in Post #13129, 1D99 did indeed make a special stop to uplift the passengers off 1S26.

 

[BRX]

That of course is a split to something smaller. I did think (wrongly I guess) that a given brake coach could only handle one half set.

That being the case - why was it removed?

My understanding from previous posts is that one seated coach was missing because the previous night's south bound from aberdeen hadn't made it to Edinburgh. So, the Inverness portion (8 cars including a seated coach) would have joined up with the fort william portion, which only consists of sleeper carriages (4 or 5 of them?) because its seated/lounge coach don't travel beyond edinburgh.

Then that formation was assigned to the following night's northbound lowlander.

 

[Bletchleyite]

My understanding from previous posts is that one seated coach was missing because the previous night's south bound from aberdeen hadn't made it to Edinburgh. So, the Inverness portion (8 cars including a seated coach) would have joined up with the fort william portion, which only consists of sleeper carriages (4 or 5 of them?) because its seated/lounge coach don't travel beyond edinburgh.

Then that formation was assigned to the following night's northbound lowlander.

So it wasn't due to a locomotive failure on that night, but rather due to one the previous day?