Somebody please explain this, because it makes no sense: an off-peak rail ticket from Bristol to London costs more than a one-way flight on a budget airline to half the capitals in Europe. It’s cheaper to go to Prague than Paddington.
And while the air operators take excessive measures to ensure safety, even making forced landings if a boozy passenger gets too rowdy, the train companies are not so much blasé as reckless.
Anyone who has been stuck on a train after a football match knows that the station staff will let pretty much anyone stagger on, however drunk — then serve them alcohol at the buffet.
At busy times, it isn’t unusual for commuters to find themselves, not just standing up but kettled into the gangways like lemmings, while hurtling at 125mph along infrastructure so ancient that parts of it date back to the Victorian era.
We don’t complain, because we’re British. We’ll have a mutter, but there is no outpouring of rage at this national disgrace.
And the most shocking thing is that we must keep paying a fortune to be herded, delayed, made to stand and deprived of information, before we end up at Swindon in a queue for a ‘replacement bus service’ in the pouring rain two hours later.
There’s a ripsnorting documentary to be made about the miserable state of British railways, and The Railway: First Great Western (C5) did everything possible not to be that documentary.
Instead, the film-makers treated the railway staff as national heroes, somewhere between special forces and the fourth emergency service. They were keeping the country moving, against impossible odds, with saintly dedication.
No single Great Western employee is to blame for the misery of countless millions of travellers every year, it’s true — not even the person responsible for the ham sandwiches.
But if it’s heroes you want, look to the lifeboat crews and the mountain rescue teams —not the owner of that indifferent voice on the Tannoy who announces that the train from Swansea will be an hour late because the driver’s on his lunch break.
Last week’s episode was much better, because the crews were battling to cope with appalling weather that was tearing their railway apart. The dogged response of the engineers after a storm washed away part of the track at Dawlish in Devon was admirable. It is astonishing that normal service was resumed so quickly.
But normal rail service isn’t very impressive, especially compared to the outstanding train networks in Japan, France and the U.S. This programme should have been questioning why chaos is commonplace on our railways... and why we put up with it so meekly.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...STEVENS-reviews-night-s-TV.html#ixzz3Lfy7ADa8
