My maiden DART voyage

Furp

In my experience that's one of the differences between Ireland and the UK although in fairness the UK has much larger infrastructure and they went down the whole privatisation route and bought it back to learn how to run a service.

In the UK when there are major issues with the network they display the issues on every available display point they also send out all the CS staff from the lower ranks to station managers to meet the customers and give information and advise alternative routes.

I have watched this thread for a while as I worked I the UK for 3 years 1 up north and 2 in London I got very used to how the efficient rail is in the UK (although not without issues) and was shocked when I came back here to see how inefficient ours is from slowness of trains to lack of information given to customers even when it's running well. I have had hundreds of journeys in the UK and drivers always informed within seconds usually of issues, although they have stricter perfomance targets then here.

Rashers72

Hilly Bill wrote: »

Plenty of staff in Connolly this morning. Which one exit? All the exit barriers would have been available to walk through . Plenty of other ways to exit the station apart from the one escalator.
Arnt you contradicting yourself by saying that they try not to tell passengers what is happening when you had announcements on the train. ?

Exit was from platform 3 in the main station...it was the platform barrier which only really exists for the first 3 platforms in the main station. Just think someone forgot to open it. At 9am there were no staff around.
There were 2 announcements during the entire 1.25 hours I was stuck on the train, neither of which were clear. I think we deserved more then 2 announcements, especially at Malahide, when every platform display and assuming platform announcements were telling passengers no trains running past Malahide. Possibly not the drivers fault, but we seem to have a common theme with poor quality PA's when we most need them.

end of the road

Furp wrote: »

In my experience that's one of the differences between Ireland and the UK although in fairness the UK has much larger infrastructure and they went down the whole privatisation route and bought it back to learn how to run a service.

some correction. the lock stock and barrel was privatized yes. however railtrack the company managing the infrastructure went to the wall (probably only a matter of time and frankly it was a good thing) . a new company was set up called network rail who is now nationalised i believe, before that, well they may as well have been.

devnull

Railtrack was a disaster.

Some of the UK train operators are not great at information as well though as has been said even though the majority are better than Irish Rail - First Capital Connect was much maligned for many years, but it's successor has basically given up on providing proper journey information on the web.

I'd love IR to roll out something like this for the web, along with the journey alert SMS notification model for passengers and also to have better communications at stations, but I doubt it will happen

http://www.journeycheck.com/greateranglia
https://www.journeycheck.com/greateranglia/aboutalerts

LXFlyer

Furp wrote: »

In my experience that's one of the differences between Ireland and the UK although in fairness the UK has much larger infrastructure and they went down the whole privatisation route and bought it back to learn how to run a service.

In the UK when there are major issues with the network they display the issues on every available display point they also send out all the CS staff from the lower ranks to station managers to meet the customers and give information and advise alternative routes.

I have watched this thread for a while as I worked I the UK for 3 years 1 up north and 2 in London I got very used to how the efficient rail is in the UK (although not without issues) and was shocked when I came back here to see how inefficient ours is from slowness of trains to lack of information given to customers even when it's running well. I have had hundreds of journeys in the UK and drivers always informed within seconds usually of issues, although they have stricter perfomance targets then here.

You seem to have been very lucky. There are numerous threads on UK forums about how things go into meltdown over there once something goes wrong, with Southeastern in particular being one of the main targets from people who say that it becomes impossible for anyone to know what's going on.

Furp

end of the road wrote: »

some correction. the lock stock and barrel was privatized yes. however railtrack the company managing the infrastructure went to the wall (probably only a matter of time and frankly it was a good thing) . a new company was set up called network rail who is now nationalised i believe, before that, well they may as well have been.

I know I kept it to a summary of for the sake of brevity, I had also forgotten some of the finer details, of which I did learn a lot about as when I was working in London I was involved with the building of a major Train station, so I got to meet a lot of people from Network Rail, London Underground, First Capital, DFT and others. They have issues in the UK and politics too within their organisations, but the customer always took precedence. It was a fascinating experience learning all of about the differences between overground and underground services, plus a lot of tie was spent on Station Information displays and wayfinding to ensure they were in the most appropriate location.

Back to IE Do the train station staff here not have radios and or internal phones, even if they don't get information from control, all it requires is one person in the station with access to the Twitter Feed at a minimum, and relay this information to the rest of the staff. Or some smart displays showing the twitter feed.

L1011

The worst UK TOC I've found for information / arse-covering is First Transpennine. They've a nasty habit of rearranging train times so that delays are just under the compensation/re-route levels and just point a terms and conditions that tells you to take a train, from memory, two hours earlier than you'd expect you'd need to.

I sincerely hope that Labour get back in with their promise for Directly Operated Railways (the current East Coast) to tender for *everything* and effectively re-nationalise the system.

devnull

Thing is though the information systems that are provided at major stations in the UK are of a far higher quality in general (almost all by Infotec), compared to the Irish Rail ones.

With Irish rail it's not just the staffing and communications that are a problem, the systems need ripping out and replacing with much better ones as well.

It was very disappointing that when they installed new systems in Pearse, it was basically just white LED versions of the same thing with otherwise very minor changes to them, rather than going for something like the solutions in UK stations.

I hope the system is not re-tendered since East Coast staff simply remind me of the old BR staff who simply don't care, I've had nothing but bad experiences with them and the staff on the five occasions I've took them have had the attitude that I see in many public sector companies in both the UK and Ireland.

The problem Transpennine Express has is a lack of rolling stock caused by the government preventing them from ordering the number of carriages they need, so you should make your representation to them, that part of the network badly needs some investment and it's about time something was done about it and done on time, but the amount of political interference in the railways is ridiculous in the UK and is directly to blame for a large number of problems, especially overcrowding.

devnull

Another (although smaller) breakdown in communications this morning.

devnull

Although at least it was fixed within half an hour, but no announcements at stations, nothing on the LED displays (apart from saying DELAY next to each train) and nothing even on the website by way of an alert (unlike last time) but seems they did post on twitter.

devnull

Poor again this morning, again no announcements at stations between 6.25 and 6.55 even though it was obvious something had broken, when information did come it was contradicting and inaccurate.

When it did come it was firstly blamed on a signal failure at Howth Junction, then a tree on the line suspending services until further notice. Imagine my surprise that straight away after it was said that services were suspended, a train ran through the so called blocked line to pick people up, just when people were all heading for the exit doors to get the bus, they ran all the way back.

It's not their fault about the weather, but again communication was lacking.

ThunbergsAreGo

I am back getting the trains afte 2 or so years on the bus, in the last eight weeks i dont think the train I get has EVER arrived on time! and at least once a week there is an issue with the line.

Moving out further next year and will be relying on trains even more so then. Is this normal?

may06

naughtb4 wrote: »

I am back getting the trains afte 2 or so years on the bus, in the last eight weeks i dont think the train I get has EVER arrived on time! and at least once a week there is an issue with the line.

Moving out further next year and will be relying on trains even more so then. Is this normal?

Always delays at this time of year with leaves on the line.
However, the usual signal fault excuse will also be thrown in for good measure regularly!

devnull

naughtb4 wrote: »

I am back getting the trains afte 2 or so years on the bus, in the last eight weeks i dont think the train I get has EVER arrived on time! and at least once a week there is an issue with the line.

Moving out further next year and will be relying on trains even more so then. Is this normal?

It's been a particularly bad last 3-4 weeks where the service has been more unreliable than I can remember, not helped by utterly shambolic levels of passenger information when things go wrong.

I'm hoping they are just having a bad run and it's a not a sign of things to come.

L1011

Twitter: delays caused by a mechanical fault on a train ahead.

Driver: "signal failure"

Is this now the official "I don't know and can't be bothered to check" excuse?

devnull

The amount of times I've heard signal failure used as a blanket excuse for any failure the last 6 weeks or so is incredible, since the vast majority of the time it's been something completely different according to IR own twitter feed.

TheBandicoot

I was in London at the weekend and really the main thing I noticed was the quality and quantity of information is extremely high in comparison to what you get in Ireland. Train from Gatwick was late, but there were constant announcements and the staff knew what was going on and were answering questions. I knew why the train was late and what platform it would arrive on within a minute of arriving at the station. On the Tube, clear signs everywhere saying exactly where to go. Very personable announcements by the driver on the Met line asking people to move down the train and so on. On the train back to Gatwick, announcements at every station by both the conductor and an automated system about how the train would divide and which carriage you should be in. When we were stopped at signals for an overall delays of 15 minutes or so, clear announcements from the conductor about some engineering work at Gatwick that was causing some platforms not to be available.