VT day (Victory on the Trains)

Everyone in East Anglia pour themselves a cold one... National Express will be losing their rail franchise for the region in 2011. This is as a result of their default on their East Coast franchise. National Express thought they could give up on loss-making franchises while continuing to milk the profitable routes. Sorry guys, you is dead wrong. Congratulations to Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis for sticking to his guns on this one.

I won't be sorry to see the back of National Express management. They are a bunch of shysters committed to screwing the customer in exchange for ever-deteriorating levels of service. They are the most wretched hive of scum and villainy this side of Mos Eisley spaceport. If you see one of them... put him/her in the bin.

Would be even better if the franchise were being returned to the public sector in 2011, though.

National Express East Anglia: towards competence? Tell 'em what you think

Previous mentions of the National Express East Anglia train company on this blog have ranged between pissed off and incendiary - but they may be about to turn over a new leaf in some ways. Their new consultation on train service capacity enhancements is a good read.

The big proposed improvements are:

• additional train service capacity into London Liverpool St of 11,000 seats between 7am and 10am (unfortunately they don't say what percentage increase that is but the overall percentage increase in the size of the train fleet would be 17%)
• additional peak hours stops at Stratford
• half-hourly off-peak stops at Kelvedon in Essex. This would get the service back to the levels that the old British Rail were able to provide prior to 1995 - which doesn't sound that spectacular in itself, but in the context of privatisation, is something of a miracle.
• a Harwich-Manningtree shuttle service to connect with intercity trains at Manningtree (not everyone will like this)

A lot of this would be facilitated by the replacement of the (in my view fairly daft) direct Peterborough-London and Lowestoft-London trains with services that connect with Intercity services at Ipswich.

It's the way the whole timetable should have been organised in the first place - it's taken these guys 5 years and a lot of pain inflicted on commuters to get there, but better late than never. (As British Rail might have said).

I will certainly be writing to NXEA to endorse these proposals - the first positive feedback I have ever given them (apart from when they introduced the 0815 morning service into Liverpool Street) and I recommend that you do the same if you live on this line or even if you don't live there but still occasionally use it. The more support there is for the proposals, the more likelihood there is that this thing will actually happen. The timetable changes are scheduled for the end of 2010 if they decide to go ahead, so you wouldn't have long to wait to experience the benefits.

The consultation ends 11 September so get your views in while you can.

And a final thought - this may just be a desperate move by NXEA to try to stop Andrew Adonis clawing back their franchise as collateral damage after the collapse of their East Coast franchise. Which would expose them as cynical bastards, but would also prove that, given the right regulatory framework, maybe even cynical bastards can be made to toe the line. Carry on Andrew...

National Express East Anglia: incompetent management + militant unions = misery for 100000s

Man, I'm so glad I'm self-employed these days and working at home most of the week. Otherwise I'd have been well and truly kyboshed by the NXEA train strike.

It's a joint RMT and ASLEF effort and it's massive. 48 hours this Thursday and Friday and the same thing for the next four weeks.

This really is putting a lot of people out very badly - people might be able to work around a 24-hour strike by staying in London overnight or taking a day working from home, but a sequence of 48-hour stoppages will test anyone's patience.

Predictably most media commentators will blame Bob Crow and the rail unions, and it has to be said that they're doing themselves no favours in the public eye by staging a long and disruptive series of strikes to secure a minimum 2.5% pay award at a time when a lot of shopfloor workers are facing pay freezes, pay cuts or even redundancies. (Although, of course, the NXEA management, as usual, have awarded themselves huge bonuses - if they were having to go without then their claim that the unions are being "unreasonable" would have more credibility. Update: Also, on the news, the ASLEF representative claimed that the unions were not seeking a minimum 2.5% pay offer - I will try to get to the bottom of this over the next couple of days). Most commuters will be incredulous that the unions and NXEA management can't sit down and hammer this one out.

But seeing this as solely the fault of the RMT and ASLEF would be a huge mistake. It's painfully clear to me from 5 years experiencing what NXEA tries to call a 'train service' that they haven't got a bloody clue how to run a railway most of the time, and to the extent that they do run it, they run it to screw the last penny out of the paying customer as much as possible. Some examples of their viciousness and incompetence:

• the 1908 service from London Liverpool Street to Colchester is, for no explicable reason, 4 coaches only. It is always full to bursting point, and very frequently people can't get on the service. This was pointed out to NXEA (who were then called 'One', but it was the same people running the company) as early as 2005, but have they done anything about it? No - it's still the sardine express. They claim they've got no spare carriages - so why not buy another f***ing train carriage you morons? Words fail me.
• a discount scheme for season ticket holders which allowed free travel on the network at weekends for the ticket-holder plus one extra person was scrapped without any explanation or compensation for season ticket holders 18 months after NXEA took over the franchise.
• Repeated overhead line problems on several evenings in the last few years have resulted in thousands of commuters being stranded at Liverpool St with minimal information on what was going on and few, if any, replacement buses.
• NXEA deliberately tries to overcharge customers by refusing to advertise the Network Railcard (which gives 1/3 off fares in the southeast and home counties) at their stations. You can get it if you know about it but they won't volunteer it to you even if you could save money by buying a railcard. I asked about this and was told it had been imposed as company policy.
• Like all the other London area train companies, NXEA have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into installing the Oystercard system, and then only from about 2012 onwards. It's been operational on the tube network and buses since 2005.
• Plenty of money has been spent on rebranding all the stations, trains and staff uniforms to 'one' (in 2004) and then to NXEA (in 2007) with no benefit to passengers whatsoever. At the same time, NXEA has refused to replace the 40-year-old intercity trains that run the London-Norwich route (and break down all the time) and has refused to put on extra trains to address congestion. But it's been very happy to hike fares by a lot more than inflation and to impose absurd evening restrictions on travelcard users and cheap day return tickets which mean that people can't travel back from London between about 4.15 and 6.45 pm.

NXEA management are, quite simply, a shower of bastards. Their managing director, Andrew Chivers, was on BBC East last night. Chivers has featured in this blog once before, under the heading "everybody do the Chivers chase", referring to a six-month period in 2007 where the local paper the Essex Chronicle were trying to track him down for an interview but the bastard was leading them a merry dance. On the evidence of last night's BBC East performance, the guy was in hiding because he's a charisma bypass zone. It was the most anodyne, drippy performance I have ever seen on TV. Even the lacklustre boss of Corby council, who appeared on the same programme trying to justify not apologising to some families who were exposed to toxic waste from a brownfield housing development on an old steelworks as a result of negligence by council-appointed building contractors, wasn't as crap as poor old Chivers.

Bob Crow and the RMT and ASLEF say that the NXEA management has treated them like shit and, whilst that doesn't in my opinion justify strike action on this level, if the way NXEA treats its employees is anything like the way it treats its customers, I can well believe the unions aren't exaggerating. Only the aggrandisement of the management and the dividend to shareholders seem to matter at NXEA - all else is a mere inconvenience.

The way forward is pretty clear: nationalise NXEA (this might happen anyway due to the nationalisation of National Express's other franchise on the East Coast main line - they are trying to say that the two companies are separate but that is such obvious bollocks that any sensible court will throw it out), and reinstall a management that actually wants to work with the trade unions to improve services. In the longer term, we need a structure put in place that minimises the likelihood of strike action. It's incredibly inefficient to have large parts of the economy grinding to a halt like this, and there's got to be a better way forward. Turning rail franchises into mutual companies - where the workers (and indeed the customers) have equity stakes and management roles in the company - would eliminate the conflict of interest between shareholders and the people who actually have to work in and use the service. If strikes were hitting workers in the pocket - which would be the case in a mutually owned model - we'd be far less likely to see this kind of industrial relations mess happening.

Hello darling, I'm on the *nationalised* train

Writing this on the, for want of a better word, British Rail - formerly National Express East Coast - train on the way from London to Newcastle, and I must say it's great to be back on the nationalised trains after all this time. Look, even the wi-fi's working.

You'll probably have seen this already if you're based in the UK as it's been all over the news, but yesterday talks between NXEC and the Department of Transport over a possible renegotiation of the East Coast rail franchise broke down. NXEC were meant to be paying the DfT £1.4bn over the 10 years' duration of the franchise but this was based on passenger forecasts that were optimistic to begin with, and as the recession bit, it became clear that NXEC was going to run a massive loss. Hence, the government had to step in to keep those goddamn trains running.

Whose fault is this? Well, really a combination of National Express (for making a reckless franchise bid) and the Government (for accepting that reckless bid in the first place). As a monopoly operator of the East Coast rail route, NXEC could expect to make substantial profits under normal economic conditions, but even so, £1.4bn is a hell of a lot for the govt to cream off from the railway. And environmentally it makes no sense whatsover - we should be subsidising the railways to get more people out of their cars and reduce overall CO2 emissions. (Network Rail, the infrastructure operator, does receive a subsidy but this is not enough to offset the East Coast franchise premium payments.

Of course, National Express have tried to weasel out of their liabilities for defaulting on the contract by claiming that NXEC is a separate company to the rest of the National Express group and so their liability should not extend into the rest of the company. For example, they argue that the Government shouldn't be able to take over the other 2 franchises that National Express runs (National Express East Anglia and C2C, which runs the Southend to London Fenchurch St line) as compensation for NXEC's failure. This is blatant financial engineering by National Express to try to swindle money out of the taxpayer by any means possible, and if necessary the Government should make retrospective changes to corporate law to make parent companies liable for losses incurred by fully owned subsidiaries so that National Express can't get away with this.

I'd be very happy to see the back of National Express on the East Anglia rail service as well. They deliberately run trains with fewer carriages despite overcrowding to save money on fuel costs. They have imposed progressively more ludicrous evening ticket restrictions to stop people travelling on cheap tickets in the evening rush hour - again to save money instead of running longer trains, which is what people really want. And they deliberately fail to advertise the Network Railcard, which provides 1/3 off off-peak fares, in case people find out about it and save money. F*** them.

And full marks to Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis - not my favourite politician at all most days - for standing firm in the face of National Express's attempts to renegotiate their franchise just because of the recession. Adonis reasoned - correctly - that if he gave way on this franchise it would open the floodgates and every other two-bit rail operator would be hammering on the door for the soft treatment. He did The Right Thing.

But he plans to re-franchise to a private operator as soon as possible, which is a pain. There have been some improvements to the rail rolling stock under private ownership, it's true (although that was partly the result of a dreadful lack of investment under British Rail, which was starved of cash from its inception in the 1940s). The crappy old slam-door trains are long gone, which we can all be grateful for. But in most other respects, privatisation has been a disastrous failure. Lack of maintenance caused a sequence of dreadful crashes and disasters - Hatfield, Potters Bar, Ealing, etc. - and forced the nationalisation of Railtrack (Steve Byers's finest hour!) Fares have rocketed sky-high, especially for people who want to buy their ticket on the day of travel. And investment in new lines and tracks - Eurostar excluded - has been piecemeal. The recession presents an ideal opportunity to bring public enterprise back to the railways and Labour would be best advised to grab it with both hands. At the very least, a pledge to renationalise would provide a clear dividing line with the Tories at the next election (unless Cameron copies it, which is very possible.)