Despite the issues, South West Trains passengers seem relatively content with their service, but that doesn’t mean there is room for complacency, explains Sir Alan Greengross, Chairman of the Passengers’ Panel
It was about 200 years ago that the English essayist William Hazlitt wrote: “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”
Many people who use the railway today find themselves in much the same position. It’s not just that it is fashionable to be critical. There seem to be so many things that could be done to improve the travel experience; so many things that are wrong. Pick up almost any newspaper and you can revel in a long list of the railway’s shortcomings. It’s easy to dismiss at least some of these as the press preferring to print negative stories, but much of the criticism strikes an all too painful chord with many passengers.
Fare levels are high and apparently set to keep on rising. Maybe this is largely the government’s fault, after all they encouraged bids of £1 billion-plus from private companies to run rail services, and in considering those bids must have been well aware of the consequences—higher fares. Or is the train operator to blame? Once the government set the rules, can one seriously suggest that South West Trains’ parent company Stagecoach should have refused to put in a huge bid when its very business depends on securing franchises to run railways? And what about overcrowding? In the peak periods and now even in the “shoulders”, overcrowding has become a way of life. There are things that South West Trains could do to tackle the problem. There are still some trains that could be lengthened, for example, but this is almost equivalent to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. The real problem is a chronic shortage of capacity on the network. And the multi-billion pound sums of money required to put that right are never likely to materialise. Those sums are way beyond the resources of any operator—and it is clear that there is not much point holding our breath waiting for the government to pay.
So, on those two counts alone—never mind ticketing, parking, track maintenance and a myriad of other things—the travelling public might be expected to be up in arms. And yet the fact is that a huge majority of passengers on South West Trains feel that, overall, things are not all that bad. Perhaps in some amazing way they do not suffer all the things that daily infuriate us, or they are so numbed by life in general that they don’t notice. Or, whisper the thought, could it be that the overall situation is not that terrible?
We are currently interviewing a number of the many people who have expressed an interest in joining Passengers’ Panel. Because of the desire to keep the Panel as a representative cross section of those who use South West Trains, we are seeing everyone from commuters to leisure travellers, across all ages and occupations and from different areas.
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