Stand out helpful moments from railway staff

[TheSmiths82]

This forum has a lot of examples of rude and unhelpful railway staff but I thought I would mention a time when they went out their way to help me. I was at Weston Super Mare and quite desperate to escape (I didn't enjoy my trip much). My train back to Manchester was via Newport but the connection from Newport to Manchester only allowed 6 minutes and if I missed that, it would have added an extra couple of hours to my journey. I explained my concerns to the ticket office at WSM. I still had a couple of hours before my train was due to leave to Newport at this point. The manager then spoke to me and said he will try and contact the guard and let them know I will be on an earlier train because he didn't think the connection times were realistic.

I came back 45 minutes later and the station manager gave me a piece of paper that said "oops something has gone badly wrong, please let this passenger travel on this train". I got on an earlier train and the ticket inspector was quite bemused by "ticket" said I thought we had a network failure I didn't know about then". I got to Newport an hour early in the end and arrive into Manchester on time. The staff took a lot of stress out of my journey and also could have prevented a rather costly delay repay claim. If all station managers were like that things would run much more smoothly.

I know it is a rather trivial story, but it is one that came me a lasting impression and I kept the ticket as a souvenir.

 

[Taunton]

Shall I include the Taunton to Minehead dmu drivers, who on winter Sundays in my (very) youthful times, and once off the main line, would slide the door back and, with the approval of my mother, let me sound the horn at crossings

 

[trainJam]

Back in Virgin Trains days. Both good and bad. Cross-London journey back to a local station in Birmingham. First leg was cancelled (started at a later station) which meant that we arrived into Birmingham after the last local service had departed.

The Euston ticket office was not as helpful (said our train was not cancelled and that our NRE was just not good or a lie or something (ok what do you want us to use) we eventually got him to authorise us to get the next train)

However, the train manager on-board was extremely helpful and told us how the railway was contractly obliged to get us home. He recommended that we ask the help desk at Birmingham New Street to arrange a free taxi to our local destination.

The help desk took around half an hour to phone the right people and got us safely home.