In Britain we don’t have a transport policy, oh no - we have “chaos”.
At least once a month headlines scream “Road Chaos”, “Chaos on the trains” etc.The CBI (who speak on behalf of industry) recently warned that the economy was being badly damaged because goods and people can’t move around properly.
When Blair came to power he found the biggest, most incompetent buffoon he could lay his hands on, (John Prescott) and put him in charge of transport. This lack of planning or interest in transport has been a feature of all the governments I can remember.
The rail system is a farce (not a very funny one, since a number of accidents have claimed lives), but today I heard something that left me stunned at the depths of human stupidity:-
I turned on the radio to hear some guy saying sadly "well we warned them before they ordered the new trains to make sure there was room for the passenger’s luggage as well as the passengers themselves – and they ignored us.” “They” turned out to be Virgin Rail and some oily spokes-thing for Virgin explained that, yes it was true that there was no room on the trains for luggage, but this was fine – they would just sent it by road!
The interviewer asked “why not just add an extra carriage?” “Ooo no, much too expensive.”
“But… road is much slower than rail, people’s luggage will be late.” “Ha! We will send it a couple of days earlier!”
At this point I checked the date – no, not April 1st, this fuckwit’s being serious!
Well I’m guessing they’re not intending to come to my house to pick up luggage, and even if they did there isn’t a chance in hell I’d trust the Virgin dipsticks to get my things to the right end of the country in one piece.
So it looks like I’ll be flying or driving north for Christmas.
(Oh well, at least I didn’t call this “Virgin on the ridiculous” :rolleyes: )
The problem lies in the fact that they have halved the size of trains on the cross country routes (dunno about the London ones, I haven’t been on the new ones on those routes). When the new “voyager” style was introduced, two were joined together. But they were two separate trains, so passangers couldn’t walk all the way through, necessitating two buffet cars to be open, thus rather more expensive in staff costs.
So at some point the decision was to cram everyone into half the train there used to be. With half the luggage space. There is more luggage space per carriage than the old style trains, but with fewer carriages.
They do insist on pretending that they haven’t done this by not having consequetive labelling of carriages - certain letters tend to be left out …
What has happened to all the other trains that used to be joined on? It’s not as if there’s twice the frequency there used to be. And more of them seem to start/end in Scotland. Anyone who’s travelled on a long distance service to Glasgow probably knows what I’m talking about.
Blame Branson. Blame the little old ladies who travel with 2 giant suitcases plus some mysterious, humongous parcel wrapped up in black bin liners, but I’m not sure we can blame Prescott for this one - Virgin is a private company after all.
Actually, I’ve found recently on long distance journies, Edinburgh to Bournemouth for instance, they’ve started joining two trains together again. Makes things easier I suppose.
Jolly good. I’ve yet to see it, and they don’t seem inclined to advertise this fact - I’d certainly plan my journey accordingly. Pretty stupid design, to be honest - put on a whole extra train or nothing at all.
Strangely, the best long-haul flights I have ever been on (in terms of customer care) have been with Virgin Atlantic. Really plush, great food, good facilities (yay Nintendo!) and really thoughtful things like the cabin crew going through the cabin in the dead of night looking for insomniacs and giving them jelly doughnuts. So maybe it’s actually Branson’s management team. Though it’s his fault for not replacing them.
Branson is a muppet - of that there is no question. “Never trust a man with a beard” That’s what my father told me, and he was right.
However, even though Branson mines new depths of cuntitude, the real fault lies with this no good lying governement. They claim to be a labour governement yet cannot seem to be able to take the railways back into state ownership.
I am a dyed in the (blue) wool tory and even I can see that the railways will only work if they are centrally controlled ina beard-free environment.
They are a national resource and asset.
But Virgin are particularly useless, I’d rather go in one of his balloons.