Last night’s railway chaos for battle-scarred homecoming St Albans commuters seems to have plumbed new depths of awfulness. It is difficult to get a complete picture but I have received the following account.
It seems that problems occurred with a train failure just out of St Pancras low-level at about 6 pm. A passenger reports a huge flash and bang from a train she just missed catching.
Now stuff happens. Too often. And there seem to be over-frequent Network Rail failings on the Thameslink route. But it is what happened after last night’s initial train failure which highlights First Capital Connect’s total inadequacy as a rail franchisee.
Once power had failed on the train which became stuck half in and half out of the tunnel between St Pancras and Kentish Town, there was no information for those on board and there seemed to be no procedure for safe evacuation of the passengers. With no power, the air conditioning stopped working. On the new rolling stock the windows don’t open so conditions rapidly became unbearable with people feeling faint and some being sick into the waste bins. It’s not surprising that eventually passengers took to the tracks to walk to safety.
Meanwhile back at St Pancras, crowds were building up on the platforms. Eventually FCC staff prevented more people going downstairs. But then when people downstairs gave up waiting for trains and came up, they were initially stopped from exiting.
No-one seemed to know whether tickets were being accepted on the Great Northern route out of neighbouring Kings Cross. And then when it was finally confirmed that they were and that there would be replacement buses to St Albans from Hatfield, passengers got to Hatfield to find no replacement buses.
Meanwhile other passengers started to be told to go to Kentish Town where northern Thameslink services were to start and terminate. People struggled onto a horribly overcrowded Northern line and got to a Kentish Town which was completely jammed with hundreds of frustrated passengers and no trains. Well there was one, but the driver had left it saying it was the end of his shift.
It turned out that because passengers were on the line from the original failed train, all power had been turned off and trains were now starting and finishing at West Hampstead – just that nobody seemed to have told anyone.
A lot of this information was on Twitter as those affected communicated what they knew. But FCC seems to have been totally out of the loop.
By a strange irony it was the annual meeting between FCC and the Association of Passenger Transport Users at Trinity URC in St Albans last night. I’m told that Neal Lawson, MD of FCC, apologised for the problems but my informant tells me it was clear that he did not have a clue about the scale of the problems.
I have written too often before in this blog how FCC has forfeited its right to keep the franchise – and then it just gets worse. You wonder just how bad it has to get. In the meantime I applaud Cllr Chris White for writing to the Department of Transport demanding a comprehensive inquiry.
Questions need to be answered about infrastructure and rolling stock reliability and fitness for purpose, staff training, passenger information systems, and contingency planning – in short whether they are fit to run a railroad.
That’s only half the picture.
I was on the train immediately behind. We were stuck outside Kings Cross for over an hour, with no information forthcoming. I suspect there were similar scenes on other trains.
When we eventually pulled into Kings Cross we were told we’d be better off to get the East Midlands train to Bedford. It’s not the first time that’s happened, either.
This morning, when I arrived at Elephant and Castle there were at least 10 staff checking tickets. It’s exactly the same as in December. FCC only pull their fingers out when there’s money to be made.
When oh when is something going to be done about these people?
Its just a ghastly nightmare. I missed my Yoga class with Mrs Green due to these fools. I’m still having tension headaches now.
Its about time someone made the difficult decisions in the national interest if you ask me.
Please Sandy continue your campaign to bring to the taxpayers of St Albans the rail service they deserve.
I feel its critical we fight the fight on this. We deserve a rail service that gets us home on time, not this shambles.
Keep up your good work
No one is a bigger fan of the railways than me. Hey, my Father used to lift me over the footplate as a child. But it beggars belief to see the state of the network these days.
Some comments left via Facebook:-
Nick Hollinghurst: Don’t give them the dime!
Chris Kershaw: This seems to relate a lot to infrastructure problems – I went to the APTU commuters meeting on Thursday night and the Network Rail person said the whole core section is being upgraded and failed trains will be able to go into Snow Hill sidings in future (rather than block the track at Farringdon).
Sara Nathan: They are a total shower – tried to prosecute my daughter for fare evasion even though she had tried to pay and been refused – only withdrew abjectly literally days beefore the court date. And they also mislead and extort money out of travellers by opening up gates, making it difficult to touch the oyster and then of course charging the full whack because passengers haven’t checked out. Nasty money-grubbing, passenger-hating company.
Chris Kershaw: They made all sorts of excuses about Brighton commuters wanting first class compartments to explain why they inflict them on our packed trains.
Jacqui Taylor: I also went to the APTU meeting and some of the Network rail stuff was interesting and would deal with recurring Farringdon failures, but this was obviously different being STP-KTN. Having done some digging around on rail web sites etc. there seems to be (unofficial) opinion whilst there may have been power supply issues, it was ultimately a train failure of a 377 8 car unit (one of the new style trains – the 1802 from StP).
Jacqui Taylor: cont’d. Now to FCC. They need to rescue their stuck train but it’s a 377 and other trains near it are 319 types so they would have to have some sort of emergency coupler to make them compatible to link up for rescue. Seems like FCC couldn’t find one and so had to find another 377 train to go as rescue but the one they find is far north of StP and is also 8 car and they can’t work as 16 cars so this has to be decoupled at Cricklewood sidings first and the driver has difficulty doing this (injured hand doing so by passenger account) so it takes silly, unreasonable amount of time to rescue and at a guess FCC don’t have enough staff available trained to do track evacuation of such a busy train. Shambles (without even going into lack of information to passengers), hope RAIB investigate and order improvements.
Nicola Rossi: Twice in the last three weeks my train has been half the usual length resulting in some very undignified and uncomfortable scenes, and with only one train every half hour there is no choice other than to squash on in there.
Chris Kershaw: I filed the compensation claim yesterday and still had to scan my season ticket. Don’t they know I am a season ticket holder. They just want to put whatever barriers they can to paying up. If I hadn’t been an APTU member I probably wouldn’t have worked out how to claim the season ticket rebate for the disruption last year. I think we are too nice to them as they really are not so nice to us when one thinks about it.
Thanks for this Sandy.
I am sick of these people running around like headless chickens but not delivering anything of note.
It’s time for results!!!!
Seems like there’s a lot of people share my frustration. Everytime I take Sharon to the theatre or the kids to one of London’s parks there’s always, always a problem.
Can’t wait until I can retire to Cornwall and leave all this behind.
http://www.raib.gov.uk/publications/current_investigations_register/110526_St_Pancras_International.cfm
Looks like something is being done.