Handling the London Waterloo rush hour on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Handling the London Waterloo rush hour on Twitter

bbc.co.uk

37 pointsblearyeyed19 comments

I suffer South West Trains quite regularly. This is all spin over an utter turd of a service (Twitter included as it's useless and about as real time as tea leaf readings)

SWT reality trip:

a) Their staff are rude. The amount of times I've got a mouthful of abuse from ticket office staff for asking what is going on (when there are no trains and no information) is ridiculous. They also treat you like a criminal inconvenience, not a customer.

b) Their info boards are regularly broken. When they do work, they lie. Train on time? Turns up 10 mins later. Thanks - missed my connecting train. "Sorry Mrs Gouranga, I'll be home 2 hours later than usual. You'll have to eat dinner and send the kids to bed before I get in.".

c) Their service is just about as unreliable as it possibly could be. The last 5 times I've had to get on one of their service there has been major disruption to the point I've said "fuck this shit" and got a taxi, bus or hobbed it on foot for 6 miles home. The infrastructure is falling to bits as is the staffing

d) Boiling hot trains. Even the air con services are useless as the air con is always broken. Armpit city. I'm not joking, it's horrid, even in first class (if you can call it that). Crazy enough, the train drivers are stupid enough to leave the train heating on in summer as well.

e) Their ticket machines regularly just pack in to the point there is a queue out of stations of literally 50-60 people in the mornings. It's actually better to top up your Oyster card at a local shop before you get to the station.

It sucks. The article is a typical "feel good about SWT bollocks propaganda". They can go to hell, Twitter or not.

Substitute the words "Northern Rail" for "South West Trains" and you're right again. The train company up here are well-known for being terrible. The trains are antique early 1980s sheds, built on a shoestring during a recession and way past the end of their useful service life.

There are even several Twitter accounts dedicated to documenting the agony of daily commuting on this awful service: http://twitter.com/#!/ntfail

Agreed, I get a Northern Rail leg for part of my daily commute and actual route through Darlington to swap onto an East Coast just to save myself hassle.

In fairness, they have some nice people working on their Twitter desk, but the company and service in general is substandard.

I found the older trains (slam door ones) were more reliable personally. The new "one-piece" techno-trains are always broken or limping. It's a place where adding technology just increases the fail-o-meter rating.

Heh, I recently moved from an area covered by SWT back up north to Northern Rail territory. My physical experience on NR is much worse though (2 carriages at rush hour after the previous train was cancelled?!) but I doubt anyone can beat SWT for crappy customer service.

and London Midland too. A couple of years ago my rush hour commuter train was reduced to 2 carriages from 3 for several months - every official person I asked gave a different reason, but the net effect was severe overcrowding.

Ditto First Great Western. The biggest insult was paying £450/m for a 30-min (admittedly high-speed) journey where you were lucky to get on the train, let alone get anywhere near a seat. Especially annoying when you'd see the 4 full carriages of 1st class with maybe 10-20% utilisation.

Reading to Paddington is the most congested route in the country apparently. At peak times the passenger / seat ratio is around 2. I did it for a week before buying a motorcycle.

I bought a car to replace my train commute, and promptly sold it after a week of hellish traffic and "park and ride" car parks where the meagre 300 spaces fill up shortly after 6.30am. This isn't even London.

I got that commute for a week, hell on earth!

I did that once. Never again. To be honest it didn't take long, which is good because I was being constantly gassed by people's arses.

So about the same as the Caltrain, then.

I commute on SWT daily from Bournemouth so I understand your frustration, I'm yet to have a week that has run every service on time.

The low point was a bike falling on the track and the train having to stop for an hour and a half for the driver to turn off the power on the line and walk the 2miles to remove the bike himself, ridiculous!

On a positive note, i've sometimes got the Virgin trains and had nothing but a good experience from them.

I still don't understand why there aren't power points in all carriages and onboard wifi, I mean National Express can do it on the coaches!

To London? Wow, quite a journey.

2 Hours door to desk, though it was more like 3 when I was working in far West London!

I was trapped in Newcastle thanks to Britain's tendency to occasionally have ridiculous weather, @nationalrail became the best source of information pretty much all the way through until midnight when I finally made it home. Companies are finally, finally starting to understand how useful it is, and how much quicker a 140 character tweet can be shared compared to a web site link.

I find the unnofficial swt staff twitter accounts more helpful. Generally when there's problems with trains I do a search for a #swt, you get all the info you need as well as sweary comments from other passengers. Cheers me up slightly on those days when I can't get home till 11 o'clock.

Great tip - thanks for that :)

Interestingly, some trains (on the London-Cambridge line for example) now have posters with hashtags for use during delays in the carriages.

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