Greater Anglia Meeting

So, last night, I attended a meeting at parliament with Abellio Greater Anglia, MPs and other passengers. The meeting was predominately for us commuters to address our concerns with the management of Abellio to  seek answers and possible improvements to the service they provide.

In attendance were:

Chloe Smith, MP for Norwich North
Ben Gummer, MP for Ipswich
Sir Bob Russell, MP for Colchester
Jamie Burles, Managing Director, Abellio Greater Anglia
Jonathon Denby, Head of Corporate Affairs, Abellio Greater Anglia
Jackie Gibbs, Head of Service Quality Standards, Abellio Greater Anglia
James Ager, Twitter Team, Abellio Greater Anglia
Hannah Briggs, Public Affairs Manager, Network Rail
Marie Finbow, Strategy Manager, New Anglia LEP

Passengers (Twitter Accounts in brackets)
Ian Edwards (@Delayed_Again)
Grant Lee (@grantkjl)
James Elmer (@jameselmer73trn)
Imogen Dempsey (@ImogenDempsey39)
Sandra Garvey (@Sandie_1783)
Daniel Collins - me (@realdc80)

Mr Burles, admitted short comings of the service, including the cleanliness of trains and their punctuality and told us he wanted to improve these things. But stopped short of saying he'd replace the aged trains, claiming that the company's hands were tied by the Department of Transport (DfT) and the short franchise agreement. He suggested that the next franchise would run for 7 years and if awarded to Abellio, they would look into replacing the trains.

It was mentioned that the Mark 3 carriages would be fitted with new devices so as to not dump toilet waste on the tracks and be given an upgrade after our concerns were raised about the toilets on the trains, but not the other trains (the ones that I use).

Other topics that were mentioned including how money is often diverted from the south east to other areas of the country, we all pointed out that if our money was paid for travel in the south east, that's where it should be spend, as there has been a historic lack of investment in the south east, in the infrastructure as well as the trains.

Fares and the increases to them are also out of Abellio's hands apparently. The DfT are the people who set the policy for the fares and whether or not they're increased and how much by. James pointed out that our fares were increasing year on year, yet the service is getting worse year on year, so the value for money in our transport in taking a sharp turn for the whose. Which is a point we all agreed with.

Better communications too, Greater Anglia's Twitter account (@greateranglia) is only manned by one person at a time and during busy periods, they do get very backed up with people tweeting them trying to get updates about the travel information. It was pointed out that there have been occasions when passengers have had to rely on each other for updates because the people who operate Greater Anglia's account can't keep up. I also pointed out that because the train service doesn't stop until early morning, the Twitter team signing out at 8:30pm isn't really late enough.

A new task force has been set up by Chloe Smith and her colleagues to try to get the DfT to invest more money into the Great Eastern Mainline (GEML) which hopefully would bring a whole raft of improvements to the infrastructure and the trains in the area.

What can I take away from the meeting? The warm fuzzy feeling inside that I had chance to moan directly to Abellio Greater Anglia's MD, rather that relying on their Twitter team, who by the way, do an outstanding job given the resources they are given. Hope that the cleanliness of the trains improves as well as the trains punctuality, but knowing there will be no new trains, at least until after the new franchise starts in 2016, which could be a new company if Abellio's service didn't improve it gets worse.

It might also be worth pointing out that the Greater Anglia train I travelled on from Stratford to Shenfield after the meeting, also had Jackie Gibbs travelling on it. She was sat in First Class in the carriage I was travelling on. After she got on, I noticed her tidying up newspapers that had been dumbed in First Class. Our train was then delayed by ten minutes, the driver made a couple of announcements apologising about the delays, but during the second one, he ever so sarcastically mentioned that he was because we had to wait because a freight train had been given priority. I hope Jackie was listening as freight trains given priority was another point that was mentioned and she too had to deal with the lack of punctuality and the uncleanliness of the trains.