samuelmorris
Established Member
Not being updated is rather the point. Professional appearance gives them some credit this current group doesn't have but if they're not active throughout this pretty important time period they're no good to anyone.
I wish people would stop assuming the delayed again twitter account and the passenger voice group are one and the same. They're not. A member of said group owns the twitter feed and it's very active but I would never endorse (and neither have I really heard suggested in the group) that communications on there be part of the ammunition against the existing operator, it's simply a convenient place to gather other passengers' experiences.
Some disillusioned commuter ranting about the TOC as a whole might earn a retweet but it tells us nothing we don't already know - the customer satisfaction surveys have got that already. What is useful, for example, is stuff like first hand accounts of disorganised replacement buses during engineering work. Sure, you can't blame the TOC for the engineering work happening (though the less well informed will obviously take to twitter to do so) but not handling the situation properly makes the TOC fair game. Granted, you can't FORCE them to change but if they demonstrate sufficiently many failures to live up to basic expectations then they are undeserving of the long term franchise. Ensuring only operators willing to put the effort in take on the long term operation is fundamental. We're not shaming Abellio because we have any vested interests in their competitors or have some sort of vendetta against their directors. We do it because if they're not interested now, why should they be next time? You can still do a much better job of running a railway without new trains etc. than AGA are currently doing, I'm sure of it.
I wish people would stop assuming the delayed again twitter account and the passenger voice group are one and the same. They're not. A member of said group owns the twitter feed and it's very active but I would never endorse (and neither have I really heard suggested in the group) that communications on there be part of the ammunition against the existing operator, it's simply a convenient place to gather other passengers' experiences.
Some disillusioned commuter ranting about the TOC as a whole might earn a retweet but it tells us nothing we don't already know - the customer satisfaction surveys have got that already. What is useful, for example, is stuff like first hand accounts of disorganised replacement buses during engineering work. Sure, you can't blame the TOC for the engineering work happening (though the less well informed will obviously take to twitter to do so) but not handling the situation properly makes the TOC fair game. Granted, you can't FORCE them to change but if they demonstrate sufficiently many failures to live up to basic expectations then they are undeserving of the long term franchise. Ensuring only operators willing to put the effort in take on the long term operation is fundamental. We're not shaming Abellio because we have any vested interests in their competitors or have some sort of vendetta against their directors. We do it because if they're not interested now, why should they be next time? You can still do a much better job of running a railway without new trains etc. than AGA are currently doing, I'm sure of it.
- Again as primarily just a core section user it doesn't affect me as badly, but for the past 3 years Thameslink reliability has been consistently worse than AGA by an order of magnitude in my experience. For the such short distances I use it for though, the delays don't tend to affect me too badly.
