A trip to Northampton should be plain sailing: to Ashford, then by High Speed to St Pancras, walk to Euston and London Midland from there. The 0641 from Chilham should get me there by 0915 – ideal time for a 1000 meeting. And, at the outset, plain sailing is what it seemed.
It was a chilly morning and that, combined with a late night return, encouraged me to take the car to the station rather than walk. The 0641 was on time for a change (and not 4 or 5 minutes late) and the transfer at Ashford smooth enough. The platform at Ashford, waiting for the High Speed was surprisingly packed, especially as once on the train, it didn’t seem that full. There were seats available, for example. The train itself was on time both leaving Ashford and arriving at St Pancras. The rough riding in the tunnel section, though, was awful. I thought Hitachi had said they had sorted all that out, but the judder was so pronounced it was barely possibly to read, let alone write.
A chilly walk through the Phoenix Road estate and I had plenty of time to get the 0813 from Euston. This was where the plain sailing stopped. As I got into Euston I noticed that the 0747 had yet to leave and was just marked ‘departure delayed’ as were all the other London Midland departures. The information desk had no information – just ‘delayed’ they didn’t know how long for. There was an announcement after about 5 minutes but apart from telling us that this was due to overhead power supply problems near Northampton, this added nothing new.
0813 came and went and the departure board changed the 0813’s status from ‘departure delayed’ to ‘cancelled’ but nothing else changed. The bland announcement was repeated every 10 minutes but nobody was the wiser. I looked at the National Rail website which reported that the line would re-open at 0900 and a rumour went around that the 0846 would run, but 0846 came and went with still no change and no news.
I decided to go to Milton Keynes on the 0900 Virgin train (Virgin was apparently not affected by the delays) and take a taxi from there and, as I boarded, both the 0747 and 0846 were still marked as ‘departure delayed’. Not surprisingly the 0900 was heaving and I was lucky to find a seat. We left on time and arrived at Milton Keynes about 5 minutes late at 0936. Here I found that the Northampton line had indeed re-opened and the 0925 (the 0846 from Euston) was expected at 0952 – it must have left Euston at about 0910 with little or no notice to passengers.
Over the next 16 minutes we saw various changes. First, the train which was meant to be 8 cars, with portions for Crewe and Birmingham, moved from 0952 to 0956. I wasn’t that much surprised because once a train is significantly late it almost invariably just gets later. Then, at about 0945 the display changed to say that the train would now terminate at Northampton and, by the way, was only 4 cars. Then, at about 0954, there came an announcement saying that the train had been cancelled This was repeated twice and was confirmed on the website..
All this time there appeared to be no platform staff or any other information.
At 0956, the train arrived (8 cars) with passengers clearly expecting to travel on towards Northampton, so I boarded and, almost immediately, we left for Northampton. Shortly before we arrived, the conductor announced that he ‘had just been informed’ that the train would now terminate at Northampton. Several passengers who had clearly intended to travel further were visibly annoyed by this.
The whole event was a shambles and the clear impression was that London Midland didn’t know what it was doing. I would have a number of questions:
(a) when the decision was made to run the 0846 from Euston, nearly 30 minutes late, why didn’t London Midland know then that they wouldn’t run the train beyond Northampton?
(b) When they did decide this, presumably sometime around 0945, why was the information changed to say it was only 4 cars?
(c) Why was the train announced as cancelled only 2 or 3 minutes before it actually turned up? Why was no announcement made at Milton Keynes to say it wasn’t cancelled?
(d) Why were the passengers on the train kept in blissful ignorance of the early termination at Northampton until after the train had left Milton Keynes when clearly had they known earlier, some of them, at least, could have completed their journey earlier by changing at Milton Keynes?
Like on so many occasions, a difficult set of circumstances, managed probably as best as was possible, was let down badly by atrocious communications at all stages. The operators don’t want to tell people anything until they can say anything definitive. Why can’t they adopt some of the airlines’ approach of saying, for example, departure delayed, next information at 0845, or whatever?
My return in the afternoon was better. Even then there were still knock on delays, to be expected, but, again, communication was not great. The 1450 from Northampton was marked as 1452 when I arrived at 1445, delayed, the tannoy said, awaiting a member of staff. Then this changed to 1456 and we were told that the train would be delayed attaching another portion to the rear. Then the display changed to ‘delayed’ (always a bad sign). The train arrived at about 1453 and left at 1457 with the indicators still saying ‘delayed’.When staff know what’s going to happen it looks as though the first thing is to put things into operation and then start telling passengers. It should be the other way round. The first thing to be done is to tell the passengers, then start to make it happen.⨪
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