A passenger on the 7.00 pm service from London Paddington has reported that following problems with a first class carriage, the guard (that’s train manager to you) announced that passengers in standard class carriages should give up their seats for first class passengers. First Great Western, which owns the franchise to print money at the passengers’ expense, denies this ever happened, but it all seems fair enough to me.
For a start, why do we refer to “standard class” at all? If we have first class for the better off in society, anything below that should surely be second class, reserved for society’s riff-raff, unless there’s no room for first class passengers. Theoretically, this could cause a problem because if second class passengers had to move, where would they go? To my mind, it’s simple: re-introduce third class travel.
This might actually encourage more ordinary working class people to use trains. The new coaches could be “low cost”. No need to bother with seats, or even a roof. There must be hundreds of old coal trucks which are no longer in use. Why don’t First give them a quick power wash and attach them to the back of their geriatric fleet of HSTs?
Each time I travel by train, after taking out the necessary overdraft, I am reminded of the class divide that still exists. Not long ago, I travelled on the London to Paddington line and had to stand for much of the way. This was not exactly what I had hoped for given the amount of money I was handing over to First’s gleeful shareholders, but needs must. Having squeezed my way from one end of the train to the other, I found two first class coaches, populated between them by around six people. The number soon became around five people as the guard made his ticket check and found someone who had tired of standing all the way and rested his weary body on one of the many empty seats. The guard was not amused, first demanding that the man move immediately and then threatening to throw him off the train and even be arrested. I half expected members of the Gestapo to arrive in the carriage to start inspecting people’s ID, like they did with Richard Attenborough in The Great Escape. I felt like joining in to defend the man whose crime was buying a ticket and then not being able to sit anywhere, but before I knew it, I too was being moved from outside the carriage back to the squeezed masses in the corridors. “You can’t stand in here: this is a first class area”. Oh right. Not only can I not find anywhere to sit, I can’t stand anywhere comfortably either. Thanks for that. “Tickets, please!” I felt like telling him to stick his ticket clipper where the sun doesn’t shine.
And tickets are so expensive. “Ah,” says the nice man in the ticket office, “If you buy your ticket two years in advance (I might be exaggerating a bit here, but only a bit), you can travel at a much cheaper price”. “Yes, but what if you have to travel by train at short notice?” “That’s be £129.50, sir. That’s the cheapest available offer. You can always travel first class. Can I have the shirt off your back, please?”
The seats are so much different these days now that the companies have rumbled how to make even more money. Gone are the nice tables and arriving on these 35 year old carriages are Pound Shop seats, seemingly the ones rejected by Ryan Air, tightly squeezed together so your knees are often level with your face. At least there is room for an overpriced coffee from the buffet car, but little else, and if you are really lucky you get a view out of the window. (This is not always the case because there are so many seats in each carriage that you often get a lovely view of the partition between windows. Lovely if you are traveling from, say, Plymouth to Edinburgh.)
It turns out that more people than ever are travelling by train and if that’s true, I wonder where they are going. What used to be a thoroughly enjoyable mode of transport is now a form of purgatory, the local trips being performed by cronky old rattlers, misnamed as Sprinters, and a mixture of elderly diesel units which are about as green as a a chemical factory. My lungs always feel like they have inhaled a large quantity of carcinogens by the time I have reached my destination.
Give me a car journey any day. Public transport, especially in Bristol, is a disconnected, expensive nightmare. Nothing is linked, buses don’t connect with trains (even though most are owned by the same monopoly company) and the main railway station is nowhere near where anyone actually wants to go.
And if anything illustrates the continuing class divide, it’s the trains, especially the inter city ones, where seating is still divided between the haves and the have not quite so much folk. The have nots either have to drive, get the bus or stay at home.
Please, First Group, do not refer to your operation as a service. It’s not a service anymore because your raison de’tre is to make money and everything else is incidental. That’s not picking on you in particular; it’s how the market works. Tesco doesn’t really want to sell you stuff as cheaply as they can, it wants to sell it as expensively as they can get away with and force staff to smile, pretending to like their customers, even those with unpleasant body odour. That’s the same with the train companies to whom the taxpayer now contributes more than it spent when it actually owned the railways. That’s the free market for you.
