Joined up thinking

Miracle of miracles, there was an announcement this evening at Kew Gardens that was both audible and sensible. The next Silverlink service was being turned around at Gunnersbury so we were advised to get on the District line train – and more to the point the announcement came not just after a tube had left (as usually happens) or while it was in the process of arriving, so that the announcement could actually be heard. Not only that, but the next Silverlink actually did turn around at Gunnersbury. New readers of this blog might be thinking ’so what?’ After all, providing timely and accurate information to your passengers might be thought of as the kind of basic skill all train operating companies would want to master early on in their franchises. Possibly slightly less important than not ploughing your services into an oncoming freight train, but hopefully further up the syllabus in Running a Railway 101 than pilfering the pension fund. But as far as I can remember it’s the second time in two years that they’ve got that particular basic right. Ah well, at least they’re improving.

According to an overheard announcement at Acton Central, the problem was due to an earlier failed train. Passengers on the train I was on might have been forgiven for thinking that it would be next to go. It was the train that does the alarming ‘thunk thunk thunk’ noise every time the driver applies the brakes – the one that makes me grateful that Silverlinks never get above a brisk 15 mph. This was rendered more worrying today by the fact that the fire extinguisher in the carriage I was on had no strap holding it in place, so it was only apparently inertia that was preventing it from toppling onto the laps of the passengers sitting beneath. This was also one of the trains where someone has carefully screwed wedges into all of the windows so that instead of opening fully they only open half way. Add in the last of the summer heat and a lot of sweaty people and the result was unpleasant. I don’t know how old the trains Silverlink uses are, they certainly seem to be on their last legs.

All over the stations today there are notices up about the planned closure of the North London Line from Stratford to North Woolwich. According to one leaflet I read earlier (which I haven’t been able to find again so this is from memory) one of the justifications for this was that the current service is so poor that it should be shut down and replaced by an improved and extended DLR. I’m not going to stand up and defend Silverlink’s performance (I’d much rather sit at the back and grouse about it) but this is a dangerous precedent. For a start, what’s to stop them doing the first part (axing the service) and then discovering oops, not enough budget to do the bit where they extend the DLR? And besides, if they start axing services just on the grounds that they are crap, we won’t have any trains at all by the time the Olympics arrive.

Total time wasted today: 11 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 11 hours 31 minutes
No of Silverlink days to go: 4

Pound of Flesh

Not mine for once but Silverlink’s. I was reminded of this as I renewed my season ticket for the last time ever with Silverlink today. Way back before records began, after a particularly traumatic delay involving a broken down freight train and the entire Silverlink network shutting down as a consequence, I found myself back at Hackney Central three hours after I’d set off, wondering if – given I couldn’t get my morning back – I could at least get my money back. A protracted correspondence ensued during which I managed to spend more on stamps than I ever would have gained from a refund. However, at one point one of the automatons that staff the Silverlink customer services department stuck a ‘passenger’s charter’ leaflet into the envelope along with the usual crop of evasions, denials and outright obtuseness.

I was annoyed enough to read it carefully and realise that the bastards did owe me money. After combing through the Silverlink website I found that as they had not achieved their (woefully lax) standards for the month I was entitled to a discount on my next ticket. So, armed with a printout of the relevant page, I marched into the station, demanded, and got (after a bit of discussion) a 5% discount. The next month, I did the same thing, and the station guy barely murmured. The month after that I forgot the printout but found I’d got the discount anyway without even asking. This passenger charter stuff must be working, I thought.

The month after that I renewed my ticket at Kew Gardens instead of Hackney.
‘Oh,’ said the hyper efficient lady behind the counter. ‘You’re eligible for a discount. You just need to fill in this form.’
‘Form?’ I said. I’d never had to fill in a form before.
‘Oh yes, you need to fill it in to claim under the passenger’s charter.’

It would appear that the guy at Hackney Central was obeying the first rule of all low level counter staff: when faced with a sufficiently determined customer armed with a printout from the internet, just agree with whatever they say. I don’t know how he had the discretion to award me a discount without the form, but he did. After that I have always felt too embarrassed to claim again.

(And for those of you wondering about Silverlink’s stellar performance today, I only took the train in this morning and had the glories of the District line in the evening).

Total time wasted today: 0 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 11 hours 20 minutes

Bird flew

Walking to the station this morning I noticed Hackney’s army of street cleaners busy going about their endless work – quietly and tirelessly clearing up the mess that had been left behind overnight. No, not the council – the pigeons. There was a knot of them around each puddle of vomit, another one assiduously pecking off any remaining chocolate from a Snickers wrapper, and on the platform at the station one very fat one tucking into the remains of a take away. Say what you like about pigeons – rats with wings, vermin – Hackney would be an even grubbier place without them (although at least I wouldn’t risk breaking my neck slipping on the slick of pigeon crap that builds up under the railway bridges – even the pigeons won’t eat that). If Wrigleys ever get around to inventing a chewing gum that’s palatable to pigeons even after it’s been flattened onto the pavement, half our littering problems would be solved. Teaching them how to recycle the remaining empties would solve the other half. I regard this as being only slightly less likely to happen than Silverlink ever giving us our bin bags back.

And talking of birds, I overheard the following snippet of conversation on the train the other day. Normally I don’t listen in much to my fellow passengers – partly because I don’t speak Polish and partly because there’s only so much fun one can have reconstructing the other half of a mobile phone conversation, but mostly because I just find it depressing.
Bloke to Girlfriend: ‘It says here 25% of people are going to die from bird flu if it comes to this country.’
Girlfriend to Bloke: ‘That’s because it’s got an 80% mortality rate. That means nobody ever survives it.’

There are some people for whom avian flu would be a kindness.

Total time wasted today: 8 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 11 hours 20 minutes
No. of Silverlink days to go: 6

Tour de Farce

I don’t know what was up with the trains today and apparently neither did anyone else – Silverlink’s new found communication skills having evaporated under the pressure. The platform at Hackney this morning was packed as though a train had been cancelled but once we’d all piled on, beaten, stripped and left for dead the guy who was blocking the aisle (I can dream, can’t I? No, we all just meekly squeezed passed him like good commuters) and got as far as Camden Road, there was practically nobody waiting on the westbound platform.

Then this evening the driver of the District line train which was stuck at the platform at Kew Gardens decided to pass the time by announcing that Silverlink was having problems and we should all get his train to Gunnersbury and wait there. Sure enough when we got to Gunnersbury there was a Silverlink waiting … just long enough for us to see it disappear off towards Richmond instead of turning around as advertised. By the time it had made the round trip to Richmond and back it was packed with all the canny commuters who’d stayed at Kew Gardens and got first dibs on the seats.

During all this chaos I did at least get the chance – as I was gazing idly out of the window at some station or other waiting for the train to move – to read, indeed practically memorise, Silverlink’s Cycle’s policy. This, boiled down to its essentials, can be summarised as: ‘In the rush hour, don’t even think about it.’ Which you would think would hardly need stating, as the laws of physics alone suggest that trying to get something as unwieldy as a bicycle onto a packed commuter train isn’t going to work. Yet this evening there were not one but two bicycles in the carriage I was in. Not only that but the second cyclist proceeded to be extremely rude and offensive to a woman who was trying to get past him and his bike and onto the train. Believing her not to speak English, he started swearing right in her face, pushing his bike towards her and making comments about her to the other passengers. Is it something in the lycra? Anyway, if anyone deserved to be left for dead by the side of the track it was him, but we all just confined ourselves to the odd disapproving look and tried to ignore him. One day …

Total time wasted today: 22 minutes (and they were doing so well)
Total time wasted to date: 11 hours 12 minutes
No. of Silverlink days to go: 7

Tickets please

They had the inspectors out in force yesterday – one set on the train, and someone standing at the gate at Dalston selling tickets to all those people who ‘forgot’ to buy one earlier. There don’t seem to be any penalty fares on Silverlink unlike pretty much everywhere else in London. Maybe they’re worried that if they started to get too picky about passengers actually buying tickets we’d start to get a bit picky about Silverlink actually running the occasional train.

But it does bug me when people don’t buy tickets. There was one guy who used to travel on my train who never had a ticket. He would only get caught on average about twice a month, at about two quid a time so it made sense for him not to bother paying for a season ticket and just buying the odd single when the inspectors came round. The inspectors never put two and two together and every time it happened it annoyed the hell out of me because I shell out my forty odd quid every month & I don’t see why I should be subsidising somebody who clearly has a job but chooses not to pay. Obviously, I didn’t actually grass him up to the inspectors but it burned, it really burned. I’m with the train companies on this one. Apart from anything else, if you’re not paying for the journey, you can hardly complain when it goes wrong.

But there is one little injustice that does rankle. The excessively polite gentleman who normally checks the tickets always takes great delight in pointing out to people with zone 2 travelcards that they need a zone 3 extension if they’re going past Hampstead Heath, even if they’re not actually getting off, and if both their starting point and destination are in zone 2. It would help if they actually displayed any travel zone maps in the ticket offices but even then you’d need to peer pretty closely to make it out:

Zone 3 takes a little detour south, just to take in Hampstead Heath. Nowhere else is included and the whole of the rest of the line from Hackney Wick to Willesden Juntion stays safely in zone 2. Why? It’s almost as though it’s something personal on the part of the map maker. What unspeakable acts of woolly liberalism did the people of Hampstead Heath do to deserve their exile from the fleshpots of zone 2? I think we should be told.

Total time wasted today: 6 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 10 hours 50 minutes
No. of Silverlink days to go: 8

Space Invaders

There was a UFO* on the train this morning. It hovered just above the passengers’ heads, baffling many, its purpose hidden in the mists of time, one more of those great unexplained mysteries like the pyramids and crop circles. Oh no, hang on a minute, it wasn’t unidentified at all. I know what it was, it was a luggage rack. Just like they have on the train every morning.

Which means the real mystery of the day was why the fat guy sitting at the end of the train felt that the last remaining spare seat on the train was a good place for his laptop to go. And when a slight cough and a glare from me persuaded him that however lovely his computer might be it didn’t get to sit down on its own seat, he still didn’t put it on the nice empty rack above his head but shoved it down in front of his seat and then spread his legs (this wasn’t pretty) so his knees were on either side of it, meaning he took up a good half of the seat next to him. He then took up the final few inches by opening his Metro out fully so that it draped itself over my newspaper (why can’t Metro readers fold their newspapers as they read them? Are they so proud of the fact that they are reading them all by themselves without having to run their fingers along the lines that they want everyone else to see?). I know we’re all being very careful about not leaving bags on the train (aren’t we?) but you’d have to be pretty dopey to forget about your laptop. Of course, he did look a bit dopey, so maybe he was doing the right thing…

Anyway at least Silverlink have risen to the challenge I set them so far… sure nobody wants to risk that bet?

Total time wasted today: 3 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 10 hours 44 minutes
No of Silverlink days to go: 9

* Unidentified Fixed Object

The Countdown Begins

The die is cast, we have given our notice on the flat and set a moving date – on the 7th of September we begin a new life in South London. We still haven’t actually signed a contract on the new place – but that’s the subject of a whole other potential blog provisionally entitled Why Letting Agents are a Parasitic Scum on the Surface of Society who will be First Up Against the Wall when the Revolution Comes (I may need to come up with a snappier title). But, potentially homeless or not, what is certain is that as I won’t be working on the Bank Holiday or on the day of the move I have precisely 10 more days of suffering with Silverlink to go.

So the interesting question arises, will Silverlink manage to keep the amount of time wasted (since records began) below 12 hours? I only started keeping track in the beginning of May, and since then they have almost single-handedly clocked up a magnificent 10 1/2 hours (helped by a late surge of almost two hours in four days last week) and after today’s performance they only have to waste another 79 minutes of my life in order to have robbed me of precisely half a day in less than a third of a year.

In order not to hit the 12 hour mark, all they have to do is be late by under 8 minutes a day, or 4 minutes per journey, for the next two and a half weeks. And to make life easier for them, on at least one occasion I won’t be getting the Silverlink back home and on two others I’ll only be getting it as far as Highbury and Islington. This doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly challenging target for a modern train company to meet, considering that the schedule is pretty padded already and it’s only supposed to be a 45 minute journey in the first place. Silverlink has managed to run trains in both directions on time on the same day, so we know it can be done. Yet something tells me this is one more target they’re going to miss. In fact, I’m prepared to lay a fiver on it. Any takers?

Total time wasted today: 14 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 10 hours 41 minutes
No. of Silverlink days to go: 10

Motorists: a pop quiz

Anybody know what those funny black-and-white stripes across the road mean? With the flashing orange ball on a stick? No? Nobody? Ah – you sir, in the chopped and lowered pimped black Mercedes with the tinted windows – yes, that’s right, it means you bring your vehicle to a halt and sit there with your suspension throbbing gently in time to your bass speakers while the pedestrian crosses all the way across the road before starting up again. And you, sir, in the taxi, yes that’s right, you stop as the pedestrian looks like they want to cross the road, not after they’ve taken their life in your hands and stepped out in front of you.

The rest of you have failed. You, young lad in the red Astra doing sixty in a built up area, it does not mean dropping a gear from fifth to fourth and swerving past the pedestrian on the inside with a screech of tyres. You, sir – elderly gent in the blue Rolls Royce, it does not mean driving over it at a steady 20 mph looking neither to right nor left, nor in your rear view mirror at the two fingers the pedestrian has just given you from the safety of the pavement. And you, madam, in the SUV with the three squabbling brats, it does not mean taking your eyes off the quarrel the back seat only just in time to avoid slamming into the rear of the car that has stopped for the pedestrian, the pedestrian you would have seen had you been looking at the road in the direction you were going.

Please leave your car keys at the door as you go out. You will be issued with a pair of comfortable walking shoes, an A to Z and a generous life insurance policy.

If you try using a zebra crossing as they ought to be used, you will be needing it.

Excuses, excuses

It started off as an ordinary Friday morning. We all stood on the westbound platform with the usual air of having got up too early and gone to bed too late to be able to do anything other than stand in grim contemplation of the weather. The eastbound train arrived, but seemed reluctant to leave. The minutes ticked by in silence, broken only by the occasional sighs and random whirrings that electric trains make when they’re bored. The guard got out and sauntered up and down the platform, stretching his legs – never a good sign. More silence, broken only by the rumble of distant thunder. It began to rain. The guard got back into his cab and started doing the Sudoku. The 7:15 vanished without trace from the monitors and was replaced by the 7:30. It started raining harder and we all went by imperceptible degrees from looking stoic to looking miserable.

So far, so normal. Then after about ten minutes, there was a flurry of activity. Maybe it was a bolt of lightning striking the control room, but the computer generated announcements suddenly started not just telling us that train services ‘were subject to delay’ – we knew that – but that this was due to a ’signal failure’ in the ‘Stratford area’. Not only that but ‘every effort’ was being made to fix this problem (well yeah, so we should hope. Are we going to start hearing on other days that ‘a half hearted attempt has been made to sort this out’ or even ‘nobody’s that bothered about this but it will probably right itself eventually’?).

Up until now I thought that Silverlink’s excuses were so many and varied that no computer generated system would be able to keep up. The only previous attempt had been the catch all ‘due to circumstances beyond our control’. No doubt some poor unemployed actress had spent a hard week in a sound booth recording everything from ‘dogs on the line’ to ‘alien abductions’ in order to cover all of the possible options. (My particular favourite which dates from before this blog began was a train being out of service ‘due to a passenger mistaking it for a toilet’. An easy mistake to make …)

Unfortunately, of all the excuses you want to hear, signal failure in the Stratford area is pretty much bottom of the list. Regular readers of this blog can probably fill in the rest themselves. The first train that was too crowded to use, the second that terminated at Gunnersbury (stopping first to pick up the several hundred passengers abandoned at Acton Central by the first train), the long damp wait at Gunnersbury until we were rescued by a passing District line train, the disgruntlement …

But it wasn’t all bad. I’m beginning to come round to this sociability thing that’s happening at Hackney these days. Today another regular let me stand under her umbrella while we waited together on the platform. It will be hard to go back to blanking someone you’ve shared an umbrella with for twenty-odd minutes especially as it was quite a small umbrella. I found myself thinking as I finally got on the train, you know I really shouldn’t be such a grouch.

But then what would I blog about?

Total time wasted today: 1 hour 4 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 10 hours 27 minutes

Chip & pinch

They’re always warning us about checking cash machines for signs of tampering or other changes, as though you have memorised the exact detail of every make and model of cash machines that NCR produce. (‘yeah but the cash 1000 has a green trim and the serial number on the upper right. This must be the cash 1001 with extra sun-shade protection and the advanced cash counting technology…’) But what about ticket machines? I went to top up my oyster at the whizzy oyster topper-upper machine at Highbury this evening and what did I find? In the normal slot where the card is supposed to go there was a strange device that definitely wasn’t there last time I used it. And it even came complete with keypad and a message telling me to enter my pin number. I mean, how dodgy is that? How stupid do these criminals think we are?

Now a naive and foolish individual might argue that this is just TfL getting all up to date and down with the chip & pin technology and it isn’t a transparent attempt by some high-tech gang to hack into my bank account. Indeed a really naive and foolish individual might not think any of these things until after they had trustingly typed in their pin number and got a message on the screen alleging that their oyster card had been topped up. Especially if their oyster card actually was topped up and there were posters all over the station announcing the arrival of chip & pin. But that could just be the gang’s fiendish cleverness at work.

I guess I’ll have to wait for my bank account to be cleaned out to know for sure…

Total time wasted today: 5 minutes
Total time wasted to date: 9 hours 23 minutes