Woke up this morning, and as I was writing this mornings blog post, I heard of a couple of train faults and emergency track repairs in not one, but two completely different locations on the Greater Anglia network, one near Broxbourne, the other at Wivenhoe. "How can this happen?" One asks... The answer, is simply because there has been far, far less investment on the Great Eastern Mainline (GEML) and West Anglia Great Northern (WAGN) network, which Abellio Greater Anglia (GA) have the franchise to run the trains on.
Even though GA passengers pay more per mile for their journey than any where else in the UK, we get the least spent on the network per mile than any other network in the country. That's because the money the DfT get from your, mine, our train travel is put into one put and it then gets allocated to different parts of the rail network. A lot more gets allocated elsewhere.
Once the morning issues got cleared up (hooray), just as the evening rush hour hits (which seems to be a common theme) there was yet another train fault. A Class 321 train, a train that is 25 years old and as I pointed out to Jamie Burles (MD of GA), isn't maintained properly, had it's brakes seize on near Ilford. Now, Mr Burles promised us that GA would get broken down trains moved more quickly, three hours later and it was still causing havoc.
Thankfully for me, my 21:16 Chelmsford to Shenfield train was running on time. However things got rather more grim when I stepped onto the train. Threadbare seats, amongst the worst I've seen, and stains on a few from where they've not been cleaned properly. The carriage in question was 68567 on train 360117, it was in a truly disgusting state, you sometimes wonder why you pay for travel.
Here's just a few of the examples of what I'm referring to:
These are just a few examples, but would you sit on these seats Mr Burles? I don't think you would, so why expect your paying passengers to?
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