Over the last 10 days your services have been blighted with ongoing issues every single day. There has been a whole mixed bag of infrastructure defects and failures causing delays to your passenger trains and causing your passengers a lot of grief and yet neither you or Richard Schofield from Network Rail have apologised, you haven't even attempted to copy and paste an old apology.
We know, as knowledgeable commuters, that every time an infrastructure issue causes significant delays to your services, Abellio Greater Anglia get compensation from Network Rail by way of an apology from them to you. You must be racking it is over the last 10 days, over charging your poor, unfortunate passengers for the privilege of travelling on dirty, overcrowded and late running trains, and getting compensation, hand over fist from Network Rail, especially as you won't pay out Delay Repay until passengers have been delayed by at least 30 minutes.
After than thinking about Pound signs £££££, you should be thinking about attempting to keep your passengers happy. I know you have them over a barrel, seen as most people haven't got any other option than to travel by train and use your sad excuse for a train operating company, but like with any other business, it should be a priority to keep the people lining your pockets happy. To do so, you should be on Network Rail's back saying stuff like, "this isn't good enough, you can't keep delaying our trains like this, we need to run a punctual network and we can't do that if parts of your infrastructure keep breaking down."
A lot of AGA passengers, including myself, rely on AGA to get them to and from work, and most of them rely on AGA to get them to and from London for work from various places such as Ipswich, Norwich, Colchester, Clacton, Chelmsford, Wickford, Cambridge and Southminster, to name but a few. The morning delays often mean that people are late getting to work, which means businesses in London are affected because of staff lateness and the staff in question risk getting disciplined or even worse, fired, because of how often they are late for work. Do you, as a company director, think it's fair to sack a member of staff because of being late for work when it wasn't their fault they are late? Personally, I don't think it's fair, but companies, a lot which are smaller than Abellio, have no choice because of the constant knock on affect staff lateness has on their business and they can't conduct their business as efficiently as they need to when staff are getting to work late a lot of the time. And that is of course, not mentioning the affect evening rush hour delays have on people's personal and family lives. A lot of passengers have wives or girlfriends, husbands or boyfriends and quite a lot have children too, how do you think delays affect family time? Stressed out people waiting for their partners to get home from work, waiting to cook their evening meal, not getting to see their children before they're put to bed, which can lead to arguments, which in turn can lead to previously happy couples splitting up, all thanks to the incompetence of Abellio and Network Rail.
So far, I've not mentioned train faults, the reason for this is because train faults have been hiding behind Network Rail's incompetence. However they have still existed. You need to improve the maintenance programme on your trains and get more units so that train faults are far less frequent. Most of the AGA fleet is ancient and the "new" carriages you're getting from Virgin's Pretendolino, which are just as old as all the other Mark III carriages and DVT's AGA have, since you inherited all of those from Virgin too when they replaced them with their Pendolino fleet. You need new trains and more of them, and you need to maintain them properly, just as Network Rail need to maintain the infrastructure properly.
Do all of this, otherwise you will find yourselves without a franchise by the time this one is over in October 2016 and hopefully we'll find ourselves with a new franchise holder who will care more about it's passengers than lining it's own pockets with silver and gold.
Regards,
Dan Collins and all your other disgruntled passengers.
