First Capital Connect
(Three posts in one work day, the crazy thing is I'm also getting stuff done too!)
As several of you may already know I commute from Cambridge to London to do a PhD. The reasons I do this are many and complex but basically involve a pretty classicist, a large box of mead and an 18 month long game of Ars Magica. There's also the fact that I'm crazy, but that's hardly relevant.
There are three ways to get to London from Cambridge which are not entirely batshit nuts:
a) Catching the train
b) Catching the bus
c) Driving
I tend to go for (a) as it's the only option which is reasonably fast enough (plus I don't have a driving licence). It's not cheap, but I budget for it.
Recently the monopoly on the Cambridge to London line has switched from WAGN to First Capital Connect.
First Capital Connect (a subsidiary of First Group, who also own StageCoach, who offer rather indirect buses to London from Cambridge) had a bold new strategy when they came in. They gave me a chocolate bar on the first day of their franchise, repainted the logos on the trains (they're slowly changing the livery, but they got the logos done fast) and did a really rigorous check of the tickets. They also promised we would be able to meet their management on trains, which given I like to sleep on trains wasn't a winner with me.
A few weeks later they announced they were going to do something about the appalling state of overcrowding on the trains. Their action was to perform a price-rise by stealth. They did this by reintroducing peak times on the return journey to Cambridge, in effect if I want to travel back to Cambridge before 19:15 (which gets me into the house at about 20:30) I have to buy a £17.20 ticket rather than a £11.40. As you may have gathered this is more than a mild strain on my finances, it's something I can afford to do when I want to be back in Cambridge in the evening, but only then. It's costly but not insanely so. The only upside is that I have no reason not to catch the earlier trains when I want to get home early so I wind up not slacking off and making up the time the next day.
It also makes it tricky, as I'm rarely sure when I have to get back to Cambridge early more than a few days in advance, this means rather than getting a stack of Cheap Day Returns on a Monday night for the week I have to buy my tickets day by day (if I'm lucky, I'll be able to get the ticket the night before, however I'm often in a rush or too late to buy the ticket or just too sodding knacked to wait in a 10 minute queue for a ticket when I want to go home, eat, spod and sleep), so I'm queuing for tickets in the morning more thanks to this rise.
The queues in the morning are also longer. My advice to people queuing for tickets in the morning used to be to go in the counter queue, not only is it deceptively short compared to the fast ticket machines (divide the queue in 4 and then compare to that at the machines), but the connection to the debit card service is much, much faster. The counters are also more reliable (not only have I seen the fast ticket machines take 2 minutes to process the debit transaction, I've seen them fail just as I reach them and my train pulls into the station). Now however people have to be questioned in a detailed manner about their journey, about when they're coming back and they need the new restrictions explained to them. Now the queues take 15 minutes and stretch out the doors in the morning. As a result I've been missing an awful lot of trains and have to get to the station even earlier to get my tickets.
And no, they won't let you buy a ticket on the train, God forbid that they implement a policy which may cause them to spend money on a problem rather than letting their customers suffer. What do you think this is? A free market? A public service? Fortunately I think they allow you to upgrade a Cheap Day Return to a Standard on the train, I shall have to investigate this possibility. However it does mean that I will inevitably make some journeys without upgrading and thus without a valid ticket, this grates against my fundamental sense of honesty. Although paying through the nose to a bunch of robber baron fat cats and shareholders also tends to grate somewhat.
Of course this might be acceptable if there was a noticeable decrease in the overcrowding on the trains. But there isn't. I've already counted more people standing or sitting on the floor rather than on seats since the service was introduced, effectively they've increased revenues and made the service worse.
My ire is also direct at One, who provide such crap services at Cambridge Station, oddly it seems that they tend to provide overflow relief (re-purposing the Advance Ticket windows to immediate sale and putting people on the ground with machines to increase the number of ticket vendors) exactly when it's not needed. I realise this has hit them as a bit of a surprise, but they've been somewhat slow to pick up on the problems and deal with them.
So in conclusion First Capital Connect have made my life more difficult and more unpleasant and are bastards and I've been pissed off at them for weeks now. Grrrr.
(note: It may amuse regular readers to know that First Capital Connect have also taken control of the Thameslink trains I used to catch while in London, given that my lasting memories of these were that they were massively overcrowded, smelly and run-down I can only assume that First Capital Connect are doing a sterling job fucking them up even more too)
As several of you may already know I commute from Cambridge to London to do a PhD. The reasons I do this are many and complex but basically involve a pretty classicist, a large box of mead and an 18 month long game of Ars Magica. There's also the fact that I'm crazy, but that's hardly relevant.
There are three ways to get to London from Cambridge which are not entirely batshit nuts:
a) Catching the train
b) Catching the bus
c) Driving
I tend to go for (a) as it's the only option which is reasonably fast enough (plus I don't have a driving licence). It's not cheap, but I budget for it.
Recently the monopoly on the Cambridge to London line has switched from WAGN to First Capital Connect.
First Capital Connect (a subsidiary of First Group, who also own StageCoach, who offer rather indirect buses to London from Cambridge) had a bold new strategy when they came in. They gave me a chocolate bar on the first day of their franchise, repainted the logos on the trains (they're slowly changing the livery, but they got the logos done fast) and did a really rigorous check of the tickets. They also promised we would be able to meet their management on trains, which given I like to sleep on trains wasn't a winner with me.
A few weeks later they announced they were going to do something about the appalling state of overcrowding on the trains. Their action was to perform a price-rise by stealth. They did this by reintroducing peak times on the return journey to Cambridge, in effect if I want to travel back to Cambridge before 19:15 (which gets me into the house at about 20:30) I have to buy a £17.20 ticket rather than a £11.40. As you may have gathered this is more than a mild strain on my finances, it's something I can afford to do when I want to be back in Cambridge in the evening, but only then. It's costly but not insanely so. The only upside is that I have no reason not to catch the earlier trains when I want to get home early so I wind up not slacking off and making up the time the next day.
It also makes it tricky, as I'm rarely sure when I have to get back to Cambridge early more than a few days in advance, this means rather than getting a stack of Cheap Day Returns on a Monday night for the week I have to buy my tickets day by day (if I'm lucky, I'll be able to get the ticket the night before, however I'm often in a rush or too late to buy the ticket or just too sodding knacked to wait in a 10 minute queue for a ticket when I want to go home, eat, spod and sleep), so I'm queuing for tickets in the morning more thanks to this rise.
The queues in the morning are also longer. My advice to people queuing for tickets in the morning used to be to go in the counter queue, not only is it deceptively short compared to the fast ticket machines (divide the queue in 4 and then compare to that at the machines), but the connection to the debit card service is much, much faster. The counters are also more reliable (not only have I seen the fast ticket machines take 2 minutes to process the debit transaction, I've seen them fail just as I reach them and my train pulls into the station). Now however people have to be questioned in a detailed manner about their journey, about when they're coming back and they need the new restrictions explained to them. Now the queues take 15 minutes and stretch out the doors in the morning. As a result I've been missing an awful lot of trains and have to get to the station even earlier to get my tickets.
And no, they won't let you buy a ticket on the train, God forbid that they implement a policy which may cause them to spend money on a problem rather than letting their customers suffer. What do you think this is? A free market? A public service? Fortunately I think they allow you to upgrade a Cheap Day Return to a Standard on the train, I shall have to investigate this possibility. However it does mean that I will inevitably make some journeys without upgrading and thus without a valid ticket, this grates against my fundamental sense of honesty. Although paying through the nose to a bunch of robber baron fat cats and shareholders also tends to grate somewhat.
Of course this might be acceptable if there was a noticeable decrease in the overcrowding on the trains. But there isn't. I've already counted more people standing or sitting on the floor rather than on seats since the service was introduced, effectively they've increased revenues and made the service worse.
My ire is also direct at One, who provide such crap services at Cambridge Station, oddly it seems that they tend to provide overflow relief (re-purposing the Advance Ticket windows to immediate sale and putting people on the ground with machines to increase the number of ticket vendors) exactly when it's not needed. I realise this has hit them as a bit of a surprise, but they've been somewhat slow to pick up on the problems and deal with them.
So in conclusion First Capital Connect have made my life more difficult and more unpleasant and are bastards and I've been pissed off at them for weeks now. Grrrr.
(note: It may amuse regular readers to know that First Capital Connect have also taken control of the Thameslink trains I used to catch while in London, given that my lasting memories of these were that they were massively overcrowded, smelly and run-down I can only assume that First Capital Connect are doing a sterling job fucking them up even more too)