Hello again to all my disgruntled Greater Anglia commuters.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being quite nice and 10 being absolutely and unbearably horrendous, how was your commute to and from work on Friday, 18th July 2014? I would hazard a guess that for the vast majority of people, it was around the 10 mark.
Friday Morning
Thanks to a little bit of bad weather, the Great Eastern Mainline, upon which Greater Anglia operate a lot of their trains, there was three separate signal failures, at Ingatestone, Romford and Liverpool Street. While the signals are the responsibility of Network Rail, not Greater Anglia, you can but wonder if the fact that there was three signal failures was the result of a drastic under investment of cash put into the GEML. Other areas had them too, so it wasn't a problem unique to the GEML, but other networks has one or two signal faults at the most and they were more quickly fixed than those affected on the GEML. These signal failures caused havoc for commuters well into the morning and lines were still being affected into lunch time and early afternoon. My 12:03 Shenfield to Chelmsford was delays by 11 minutes, quite nice when you consider others were being delayed by an hour or more.
Friday Afternoon
Residual delays from the mornings events were still a bug bar, plus more to come. On Thursday, Greater Anglia announced that they would be altering their Friday service between 1:00pm and 8:30pm, on advice from Network Rail, as speed restrictions were put in place to 'protect the infrastructure'. Over 10 trains were pre-cancelled and other services had additional stops added to them as a result.
Am I the only one who things that putting speed restrictions on a line because of 34 degree heat is a bit excessive? Alas, had the correct investment and work been carried out to the infrastructure, it would be able to cope with trains travelling at normal speeds during a 34 degree heatwave.
But even given the speed restrictions and re-timed services, Greater Anglia still could not run on time. Queue the excuses from Greater Anglia on this one, but we all know the real reason was because of their ageing fleet which has not been maintained properly by either Abellio or their predecessors, National Express.
Friday Evening
Evening rush hour in weather that Poula Fisch would have described as "Sorchio", was never going to be fun, even if the trains were running on time. Given that Greater Anglia only have 21 air conditioned Class 360 units, which when coupled together to make 12 carriages would have made 7 trains, assuming they were all working and in service and their other air conditioned units (Class 379) being on the Stansted Express service and the Mark III carriages being used exclusively for InterCity Liverpool St-Norwich services, this meant that they had to roll out loads of non air conditioned Class 321 units.
Class 321 trains being packed full of commuters with no on board air conditioning and operating in 34 degree heat with only the warm air coming through the open windows to cool people down, to me is a recipe for disaster. I've had an ex-colleague who now commutes from Chelmsford to London for work, coming into me, at M&S Simply Food after returning to Chelmsford on a Class 321 train, looking exhausted and red in the face from being so hot, luckily for him and other commuters that M&S is often quite cold and in this heat, quite refreshing. Now if this isn't a call for more air conditioned trains, I don't know what is. Seems to me that the Class 321 trains are a public health hazard waiting to happen, especially given how warm they are in this heat when they're not packed in like kippers in sardine cans.
Liverpool Street-Shenfield Metro Services
Friday also saw the inevitable happen. Greater Anglia use 34 year old ill maintained Class 315 units for their Metro services, along with other services. On Friday 24 of Greater Anglia's Class 315 units that they were using on the Liverpool Street-Shenfield Metro services suffered pantograph damage and overhead power cables on the Metro lines were also damaged as a result.
It has not been made clear what caused the damage or whether the overhead power cables were to blame or the pantographs, although Greater Anglia are pointing their fingers firmly at the overhead power cables. Although without further explanation, we'll never know for sure what actually happened.
Thanks to the amount of Class 315 units taken out of action and the ensuing investigations from Greater Anglia and Network Rail, all Metro services were suspended on Friday evening, causing havoc for people needing to use railway stations that mainline and Southend services don't normally stop at.
And further to that, Greater Anglia announced on Sunday evening that they would be running a Saturday service on the Metro lines, Monday to Wednesday while they get the pantographs fixed. Then on Monday morning, they deleted that tweet and the web page explaining about it, before releasing another statement saying they'd run a normal service, but to expect delays. Not normal then, is it, Greater Anglia? Well to them, I suppose a delayed service is a normal service.
Alas on Friday, 18th July 2014 was appalling, not a single on time train (not from what I saw anyway), little over a month after the joys of 17th June. Greater Anglia, Network Rail and the Department for Transport need to pull their fingers out, start investing, make things better. We're paying Tesco Finest prices for a Tesco Value service, it's not good enough!
Delay Repay
Don't forget people, if you were delayed by at least 30 minutes, you are entitled to what is known in the industry as "Delay Repay" whereby you get a refund, by means of a travel voucher, for some or all of that journey. It's not a lot, but if you were delayed by 30 to 59 minutes, you get a travel voucher for half the cost of the affected journey, if you were delayed by 60 minutes or more, you get the whole journey cost as a travel voucher. You can pick up a Delay Repay form from railway stations, or you can download and print of a Greater Anglia Delay Repay form here: http://www.abelliogreateranglia.co.uk/files/download/1834
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