It must be winter again, because having made us sweat our way through a mild autumn, Merseyrail turned off the heating on the train this morning.
Thanks Merseyrail for a good start to my Monday morning, travelling to work on a freezing cold train.
Thank the Gods I’m away for the rest of the week, in my own car, without a yellow and black train in sight 
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxypar4/2533571894/
In an incident almost as bizarre as the recent adverse weather excuses used by Merseyrail …
A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher’s subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut. (source)
Thanks to PopSci.com and El Reg for the story.
Click Liverpools "viloent doger"
While violence against Merseyrail staff is not to be condoned, in any circumstances, I’m not sure that Click Liverpool’s violence against the English language isn’t worse!
The article is here, although they may hopefully edit the headline to save their embarrassment.
If, like me, you’re an honest passenger but are worried about landing a Penalty Fare because you were legitimately unable to buy your ticket, you should pop over to the ‘Penalty Fare Appeal Support’ website, and read their article on how to avoid potentially being bullied into paying a fine, over and above the cost of a standard single ticket.
I would like to print the details here, but the article is expressly stated as being the Copyright of the publishers, and I can’t find a way of contacting them at the moment, so you’ll need to follow the link below.
The article was written by Andrew Gilligan. Yes, THAT Andrew Gilligan - the one unlikely to be getting a Christmas card (ever!) from Alastair Campbell
I’ll continue to try and get in touch with them so I can at least print an extract from it here, if possible. I’m no legal-eagle, but it makes sense, and would seem a rational way of dealing with the situation should it arise.
This has nothing to do with me at all, but it was brought to my attention this morning – there is a Miseryrail Facebook group:
I’m so sick of Mersey Rail – their treatment of the people who use the train service and the way that they con us into paying hard earned money for a rubbish service!!
There are only a few members so far, but I don’t know how long it has been going, or who runs it. It might be worth joining though to see how it progresses.
That makes two nights running that Merseyrail have managed to turn a journey into a trauma.
But last nights really WAS a trauma. It would almost have been funny.if I hadn’t been trying to get home from an after-work beer with SWMBO*, been lied to by a member of Merseyrail staff and saw someone nearly fall under a train.
Basically, it went like this:
Waiting in James Street for the 20:37 West Kirby train, on the normal platform (3, I think it is) an announcement was made that there was a ‘track fault’ at Central (you know, the same track that was shut for a whole month earlier this year for maintenance, causing a good deal of inconvenience). All Wirral Line trains would now start and terminate at James Street.
Note that the electronic board still said our West Kirby train was about 2 minutes away.
This is what the Merseyrail website said last night, at 5 o’clock, some 30 minutes after chaos descended upon the Wirral line and it’s hapless commuters thanks to a broken down train somewhere in the vicinity of Hamilton Square.
The Merseyrail website this evening
Luckily, someone called and warned me, so I managed to avoid the worst of it, but there was no warning to commuters as they entered Hamilton Square, so my girlfriend wandered unwittingly into the middle of it. You’d think they would at least provide passengers with the info they need to make a decision, before diving underground.
So never, ever believe their website status ticker, because it’s bullshit (probably so the regulator doesn’t get to see).
As an aside, it would be interesting to know how many trains technically ran late last night (which count against Merseyrail’s performance figures) and how many they cancelled (which, somewhat strangely, don’t count). So late is poor performance, cancelled isn’t – go figure!
Merseyrail first for service?
Who the hell did they ask, that’s what I’d like to know. And where did they find the smiley-faced staff members, I wonder?
“Summary: They’ll get you to where you’re going on time as long as you don’t mind the unhelpful staff” (source article)
So, despite what the posters tell us, Merseyrail staff aren’t quite as popukar as Merseyrail would have us believe, are they?
You can read the full Merseyrail review here. In fairness to them, if you read all the reviews of Merseyrail going back a number of years, it’s plain that they’re getting better. Much better.
My point is that they’re not as good as they’d have us believe. If they spent less time trying to convince people how good they are, and more time actually working on the problems they have, they might piss fewer people off.
The MerseyTart
For a light hearted, and pretty interesting, take on the Merseyrail network, visit the Mersey Tarts blog
Who he?
The diary of a man who wants to make the Merseyrail map his own. Simple: visit every Merseyrail Station – Northern, Wirral and even the City lines – and take a picture of myself in front of the station sign. Plus any Attractive Local Feature (ALF) boards. I am the MerseyTart!
Different, certainly.
