No Way to Run a Railway ...

Or anything else, for that matter!

In a week when five major banks were lambasted for their cavalier attitude to two million customers' complaints, I muse on the day my local rail franchise failed miserably to convey a few hundred frustrated commuters to the capital.

Focus for Change, among its wide portfolio of interactive workshops and seminars http://www.focus4change.co.uk/ offers valued courses in customer care and communications.  Nowhere among them is included a suggestion that it's best to remain discreet about shortcomings and shy in offering explanations.

With that rather endearing British phlegm on display when those united in any kind of misfortune bond in the spirit of Dunkirk, we climbed aboard a train that was to take us part-way on a 50-mile journey.  Sure enough, buses promised by explicit notices posted around the departure station waited at the destination and we were bowling happily through unfamiliar spring-refreshed countryside to a rural railway platform on another line, there to find a train to complete the trip uninterrupted by engineering works.

A thirty-minute wait was entertained by robotic warnings that unattended belongings would be destroyed and that this was designated, for our safety and convenience, a non-smoking station.

With leisure to ponder these repeated strictures you have to wonder just how safety might be compromised by casual contact with smoke. The robot might better be programmed to fear for our health and convenience. But then, it's only a robot!

As first one scheduled train then another some time later was cancelled, customer satisfaction degenerated into universal irritation with no explanation forthcoming of how not one train but two came to be wiped from the timetable by some unseen and uncaring Fat Controller.  Tempers were not helped by three empty out-of-service expresses thundering by on the opposite track heading non-stop to their coastal terminus, each heralded by a helpful direction to anyone straying to that empty platform that these trains were not stopping, so to stand well clear.

Rumours gained ground that, having been abandoned at this wayside stop, we were going nowhere. Ironically in a city far away even sporting pensioners were making lively tracks towards the Marathon's finishing-post. Here, though,  philosophical good-nature was well-stretched - especially by travellers whose haul-along luggage suggested this was but the first step in a long-haul journey to exotic places - until somebody in the crowd cried: "Buses in the car park will take London passengers to another station!"

Another coach, another journey through sunlit villages in their Sunday best, another rural platform and an on-time (hurrah!) train that completed our 50-minute commute in three hours.

Throughout that wait explanation came there none. Customers (er, passengers) waited in vain for reasons why their arrangements and onward connections seriously unravelled.

Somebody needs refesher courses in Customer Care and Communication. We at Focus for Change have proved helpful announcements have a wonderful way of winning understanding, tolerence and even sympathy n the most exacting of unexpected circumstances.

But I have to say the crumbling Victorian halt where we found no transport of delight would make an ideal location for a revival production of The Ghost Train!