On 26th July, I decided to e-mail Jamie Burles, who is the managing director of Abellio Greater Anglia (AGA), regarding cleaning, maintenance, service and Chelmsford Railway Station.
This is my e-mail to him:
Dear Mr Burles,
You may remember me from the meeting you attended at Westminster on 7th July. I am one of the disgruntled commuters who attended the meeting, as mentioned in the meeting, I am the commuter who travels between Shenfield and Chelmsford. I would like to address several issues I've had with your service since 7th July.
Carpets and Flooring
More often than not, I travel on your Class 360 trains, also I do on occasions also travel on your Class 321 trains. I'm sure you're aware the Class 360 have carpets throughout the carriages. Given that a lot of people travel on your services, with lord knows what on their shoes, transferring to the carpets when they board, combine that with people spilling drinks or food on the carpets, they're going to get very dirty, very quickly and carpets are difficult to clean. So why have carpets? Why not use a type flooring which is easier to clean? Saying that though, your Class 321 trains have flooring which is easy to clean, yet your cleaners are not cleaning them properly.
Cleaning, regardless of the type of floor covering is something that is considerably lax across Abellio Greater Anglia. One of your Class 360 trains has had a stain on the carpet since February 2014. The train in question is 360116, the carriage number is 74566. I first reported it to your Twitter team on 14th February, Sandie, who was also at the meeting, reported it on 1st July, and I've reported it twice since, once on 16th July and again on 25th July. Each time, your Twitter team has promised to pass the information on and get it cleaned, but so far, after over 5 months, it's still there. I've included the three photos I've taken of it in this e-mail.
Do you think that leaving a stain like this on a train for over 5 months is acceptable? Especially when you take into account that it's been reported at least 4 times, and it's not like you can miss it if you were responsible for cleaning the train. Most other Class 360 trains I get on have filthy carpets which look like they've not been cleaned thoroughly in a long time.
Threadbare Seats
Most of the seats on the trains I get on are threadbare and/or dirty and/or have torn upholstery. This is something else which is unacceptable. I keep taking photos and reporting them to your Twitter team, who again, always promise me that something will done about it, but time after time I get on trains with threadbare seats. I don't think the condition of the seats (or the rest of the train's interior) are deserving of the £110.80 I pay for a monthly season ticket.
Chelmsford Railway Station
Abellio Greater Anglia have started work on refurbishing the station in January. It is now July and roughly half way through, all work seems to have stopped. I managed to speak to the construction manager last week, and he said the work would be finished by Christmas at the earliest. As with all refurbishment work half way through, the station looks like a mess. It's not a very good advert for Abellio Greater Anglia when people have to use it, especially given that it's one of the busiest stations in Essex.
The station is busy at the best of times, but it is even busier during the V Festival weekend. The festival is Friday 15th to Monday 18th August this year and it'll bring thousands of festival goers through the station, which when the station is in the condition it's in, won't be a good thing in any way, there's less space and currently one less exit. You're going to give them something to remember but for the wrong reasons and won't be a good advertisement for Essex or Abellio Greater Anglia. It needs to be finished as quickly as possible.
Your Service - Generally
At the meeting, you, Jonathan and Jackie promised that you would make every effort to improve the service, on the basis and by your own admission, the service isn't good enough. The service since the meeting has got worse, rather than better. You've had daily train faults, including at least 24 Class 315 pantographs on 18th July, amongst your other train faults. In fact I was delayed 26th July on my way to Chelmsford because of a faulty train being returned to the Ilford depot, virtually every mainline and Southend service was delayed and we had no information from the Twitter team, even after I asked, and only found out because the driver on the train I was on, put a PA announcement out. Your service needs to improve, drastically, your Twitter team, while they generally do a good job, need to do a better job and you need more of them.
Regards,
Daniel Collins
The pictures that were included were:
Mr Burles response was:
Dear Mr Collins,
Thank you for your correspondence and it was good to meet with you on the 7th July at Westminster.
In answer to your question regarding cleaning, 360116 will be checked and cleaned as soon as possible and we are in the process of increasing the deep clean of the carpets to every month. I apologise that this issue was not dealt with. We are also increasing our cleaning resource. We have recently employed 20 new staff to supplement our team as we are increasing the amount of cleaning our trains receive. This is a difficult area to manage as trains are in constant use but we have conducted a gap analysis and concluded that additional resource is needed.
We are aware that some of the seat covers on the Class 360 fleet are heavily worn. During the last year we renewed 1200 seat covers and we are working closely with our maintainer to increase momentum on the renewal across the fleet.
With regard to Chelmsford station, following the relocation of the temporary ticket office, a number of technical issues have been identified which has resulted in the redesign of some parts of the station. Clearly, this has an impact on the programme and with the advent of the forthcoming V Festival, we have taken the decision to focus our efforts on the new entrance at Platform 1 (by the cycle point), so it will be open in time for the festival and will provide assistance for crowd control. Millions of pounds is being invested in the station which I am sure you will agree is a positive thing, and naturally we want the work to be completed as soon as possible.
Recently, I have met with Richard Schofield (Managing Director of Network Rail East) and we have agreed a strategy to improve train performance. Therefore we are:
· Putting in place quicker response arrangements for fixing infrastructure faults
· Investing in an enhanced maintenance regime for points, signalling and level crossing equipment
· Accelerating the track-side vegetation removal programme to try and prevent trees and branches falling on overhead lines and tracks
· Investing in a programme to tackle the main causes of train faults (doors, couplers and pantographs)
· Accelerating the fitment of remote train monitoring equipment to more of the train fleet, to help identify and prevent faults
In addition, we are making progress on the five initiatives we outlined in June in the aftermath of some previous disruptive incidents:
1. An enhanced maintenance regime for overhead line equipment is in place, including route monitoring using a train fitted with a special rooftop camera to identify faults or potential problems
2. An enhanced maintenance regime for the track and signalling on the approaches to London Liverpool Street station (including a re-organisation of the maintenance team) is being introduced
3. Improved customer information procedures to provide better information during disruption are being implemented
4. Additional customer information staff are now in place during the morning and evening peak periods
5. A software upgrade programme is underway for the London Liverpool Street departure board to improve the accuracy of information about train departures during service disruption
Please accept our apologies for the recent problems. We believe that this targeted programme of initiatives will restore the more consistent service we all wish to see. You can be assured that everyone in our teams will be working tirelessly to deliver real improvements over the coming weeks.
I do understand that our customers require up to date information and I am personally overseeing process changes which will improve the flow of information in the future. Several work streams are in place to ensure that the accuracy, content and frequency of information is improved. These work streams are starting to bear fruit and more improvements will follow over the next weeks and months.
I'm sorry you remain unhappy with our service. We are working extremely hard and making some progress, but some initiatives take longer to deliver than others. . Nevertheless, performance is still better than for most of the previous franchise and the last four years of Anglia Railways. However, it's still not where we would wish it to be, so there remains much to do to reach higher and more consistent levels, but our alliance with Network Rail is improving partnership working and we are anxious to see better performance going forward.
Thank you for raising the issues with me.
Yours sincerely
Jamie Burles
Managing Director
Abellio Greater Anglia
Will I ever be happy with your service, Mr Burles? That all depends on you and your company, if you up your game, maybe I will, but you'll have to excuse me if I don't hold my breathe waiting for it to happen, as I am not very hopeful.
