Virgin vs First

Earlier today I was asked in a Tweet where I stood regarding the franchise on the West Coast Main Line.

There has been a lot of press coverage over the decision to award the franchise to First Group over the incumbent Virgin Trains, with the whole process looking like the Government have awarded the franchise based solely on the amount of money that was being offered without taking into consideration that this has not always worked in the past.

As my travels show I am a fairly frequent traveller on Britain’s Railways, and in addition to my journeys on trips I also commute to work by train and regularly travel for work, so have a fair breadth of experience on the niceties of the various train operating companies.

Personally, I am disappointed that Virgin has lost the franchise.  Whenever I’ve travelled with them for work the service has always been excellent, and even on my travels they have scored highly, with just one journey being marked down (and re-reading my review I was probably being a little over harsh with them.)

Virgin does have its faults.  I’m a Virgin Media customer for broadband and TV at home and at times I would happily wrap the telephone cord round Richard Branson’s throat, their service can be patchy and unreliable and when things go wrong they take ages to get fixed (so, in summary as useless as BT)

I always preferred HMV to Virgin for music and if you gave me a choice between BA and Virgin Atlantic I would probably go for BA.

So I’m not enamoured with the Virgin brand, but their trains are something different.

When First ScotRail totally failed with the sleeper service it was the Virgin trains staff at Stafford Station who helped calm everyone down and try to make onward arrangements.

You always get the impression that Virgin train staff actually enjoy their jobs.

That’s not to say that First Group services are all bad.

From recent experience First Hull Trains is an excellent service and I’ve not really got much to hold against First Transpennine express.

First Great Western, when things are working fine, are great – but when they start to have wobbles, you can see how little backup there is.

First ScotRail in general are good, but again, when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong.  Twice I’ve had the sleeper fail on me and the number of times I’ve had other trains cancelled is pretty high.

Then there’s First Capital Connect.  And this, I think, is the one that really does make me scared for the future of the West Coast Main Line.

I use the Thameslink service quite a bit and it was always pretty useless when it was run by Go-Ahead.  West Anglia Great Northern was regularly called We Are Going Nowhere when it was run by National Express.

These are pretty low baselines to start from, so it was with high-hopes that First Group was awarded the combined Thameslink and Great Northern franchise.

Sadly, from a dire service they’ve actually managed to make it worse.  First Capital Connect is an example of how to run trains for profit rather than customer service.  The trains are dirtier, the carriages more uncomfortable than they were before.  The number of trains they allow to run around absolutely covered in Graffiti that other companies clean off is amazing, it’s almost like they don’t care about the customer experience.

I’d like to think that if First Group do get the franchise that they will bring the Hull Trains level of service to the West Coast, which will match and possibly slightly better Virgins.  However, I fear that it’s three years of First Capital Connect levels of service before First Group do a National Express and decide they can’t be bothered any longer, throw the keys back at the government and walk away.

GNER was an excellent service, they overbid, cut and became so poor that they collapsed and the franchise had to be re-let to National Express who over bid, cut and then walked away from the service.

You would have thought after that the department of transport might have learnt some lessons.

I’m not going to refuse to travel on the West Coast if it is run by First, but I will be quick to complain if the service is anything less than Virgin’s standards.

And yes, I have signed the petition to get the whole fiasco reversed.

…due to a fault on the train which cannot be rectified at Aachen

Perhaps the next time my journey to work is disrupted due to a “Failed train at Balham”, I’ll be a little more understanding.

I always thought failed train was a euphemism for “you know what, we can’t actually be bothered”. The sheer number of trains that appear to fail in South London on a daily basis had me wondering how our trains can be so bad, when, for example, the German’s are so reliable.

Except, I found out today, they are not.

Whilst I was sitting on my train in Aachen station waiting to head back to Köln there was a train on the adjacent platform.

It was already 10 minutes late and getting later by the minute, which I’ve discovered is not as rare occurrence as one might have thought on German railways.

After another couple of minutes a member of staff could be seen kicking at something underneath the doors. He stepped back, looked at it, kicked it again, stepped back and repeated for a good six or seven times.

He then walked away and a couple of minutes later returned with several other members of staff. They all took it in turns to kick whatever it was underneath the door, then tried opening and closing the doors.

There was much staring and pointing, and then a decision was made.

30 seconds later there was the sound of an announcement being made in the train, within a few more seconds everyone on board the, pretty busy, train got up and disembarked.

I think that officially makes it a cancellation?

Cover blown

I was doing so well, I was blending in, I was being mistaken for being German.

And then I fell to an elemental mistake…

I’d booked my tickets online in advance and printed them at home. The tickets were all in German so that wouldn’t be the give-away. All you have to do is present your identification, in this case the credit card they were booked on.

And that’s where my cover was blown. I’d forgotten across the front of my credit card, in very big, very obvious letters, even larger than the MasterCard logo is the name “Amazon.co.uk”. Not “Amazon.de” not “Amazon.com” but quite clearly ein Engländer.

Getting round just got that little bit harder

Over the last couple of years I’ve done quite a bit of travelling around England, from the Northumbrian borders with Scotland down to the English Riviera, and the thing that has kept striking me is actually how easy it is, usually, to get around, even without a car.

There’s been a few places that I haven’t been able to get to either because I’ve left it too late in the day, tried to go on a Sunday or in a couple of very rare examples there just isn’t any public transport to get you there.

I’ve taken the bus from Berwick to Alnwick on a Sunday morning, full sized double deck with just me on it the whole way, but I’ve also been wedged into a bus from Torquay that was so full I had to give up any chance of visiting the castle I was aiming for as I would never have been able to get off.

But now, it appears, things are about to change.

Standing in Wells waiting for the bus to Cheddar I noted, with some disquiet, the signs on the back of the bus shelters informing customers of the “amendments” to bus times that were due to come in force from tomorrow.

I think Amendment is a bit of a weak word to use when you actually mean whole scale slash and burn.

The most obvious example was the buses to Cheddar itself.

Today there are 15 buses, with the last one leaving Wells around 22:15, from tomorrow everything after 17:00 has been cut.

It means that in the height of summer, even if the weather is lovely and you were really looking forward to having an evening meal in Cheddar before heading back to Wells, Bristol, Bath or Weston you’ve got to be on the bus by 18:00 otherwise it’s going to be an expensive taxi ride.

Whilst I know there is a massive black hole in the public finances, and cuts do have to be made, it does appear that some of these are being made purely out of spite rather than any logical reason. Given how many people got off the bus at Cheddar this morning cutting the service will have an effect on the numbers visiting. At a time when we are supposed to be trying to encourage people to spend (and the tourist Pound, Dollar, Euro and Renminbi are now significant parts of the economy), it does appear a little illogical to make spending it more difficult (though some taxi drivers may disagree with me on that one!)

Perhaps it is just North Somerset council that are carrying out such large scale mutilations to their public transport infrastructure, but somehow I don’t think they are alone, and in future it’s going to take that bit longer, and be that bit more complicated to visit places that aren’t slap bang in the middle of a large urban space.

Given they don’t appear to be cutting, perhaps it’s time to focus on travelling Wales and Scotland instead.

It’s probably far too early to say public transport in England is dying, but it’s certainly suffering from a number of serious knife wounds and at present is stable in hospital, unfortunately we’ve also just cut funding to hospitals…

Whisper it, but they may be better off without the train

The railway line between Darlington and Richmond closed in 1969. They weren’t part of the Beeching cuts, but they didn’t survive for that much beyond his cuts.

Today the branch lines round this part of the country that do survive have roughly hourly services, many of which end early in the day (In particular the line from Darlington to Bishop Auckland)

However, between Darlington and Richmond there is now a regular bus service. In fact there is a bus every 15 minutes throughout most of the day and it runs late into the evening.

It does lead you to wonder if a level of service that good could ever be provided if the branch line was reopened.

Add in the fact the buses stop in the town centre, and the station is nearly a quarter of a mile away and at the bottom of the valley near the river, and the implication is actually the current set up, whilst perhaps not as environmentally friendly, is certainly more tourist friendly.

Perhaps we might have to demolish the Olympic stadium

There has been a row brewing in the regional press this week about what will happen to the Olympic Stadium once the 2012 games are over.

BBC News: IOC Chief wants running track left at 2012 stadium

One plan sees the site being remodelled slightly as an athletics and football stadium

The other plan sees the site being demolished and a new football stadium built. A much older athletics ground south of the river would be regenerated, so the Olympic park would be left without a stadium.

Personally, I think the idea of tearing down a brand new (tax-payer funded) stadium just 8 weeks after it has opened is wrong, not least of all for the horrific waste of money and resources.

However, walking between St Pancras and Kings Cross stations this afternoon my certainty about this has started to waiver.

St Pancras International station opened in 2007 after a complete refurbishment. The underground link from the domestic high-speed platforms to the tube station didn’t open until much later.

Today, walking along the passageway I was intrigued to see areas fenced off and signs reporting that “To help with the improvement of St Pancras International station this area is having new flooring installed”

Forgive my ignorance, but surely when you build a new bit of station you build it to last a good few years, not to have to close of bits for “improvement works” a year later.

But, on that basis, perhaps the best option for the Olympic Stadium will be to pull it down. After all, at the end of the six weeks of Olympic Games it will need to be closed for “Improvement works” to fix everything that’s falling to pieces.

Just to be sure

The train I caught down to Salisbury was made up of six carriages. The rear three terminated at Salisbury, the front three continued on to Gillingham.

This isn’t particularly rare, it happens all the time all over the UK

And what happened just outside Andover is also pretty familiar.

I was sitting in the middle of the front carriage and just after Andover the guard broadcast a reminder message that at Salisbury the train would be splitting.

About 2 minutes later at least three people walked down the carriage and tried to get through the locked door at the end, into the drivers cab.

They started to panic that they couldn’t get through, until someone told them this was the front carriage.

They asked if they were absolutely sure it was the front carriage as they wanted to go to Gillingham, and they took a fair amount of persuading that they were in fact well into the front, so far into the front three carriages that if they went any further they would no longer be in the train.

I know people want to be certain, but when the guard has mentioned that the train is six carriages long, and you’ve walked through four, basic maths must come into play?

When two worlds collide

I witnessed an interesting interaction on the bus yesterday which threw into stark contrast the different approaches to organising transport around the world.

Copenhagen, in line with most other sensible cities (and I deliberately exclude everywhere in the UK in that statement), operate a single ticketing system with tickets that are interchangeable between any form of transport in a set period of time after stamping. The system works on honesty as there are no barriers, the only difference to the system in say, Rome, is that when you board a bus you have to do so through the front doors to show your valid ticket to the driver.

I picked on Rome specifically, as it was two Italians who had the interaction with the driver (I’m assuming they were from Rome, they could have been from anywhere in Italy, but it’s only in Rome that I have seen similar disregard to signage)

On the rear and middle doors there is a no entry sign. It’s not a complex sign in Danish, it’s the international red circle with a short white line in the middle.

In Rome, no attention is paid to this and boarding takes place through any available door, in fact the only people who follow the signs appear to be tourists (after a couple of days in Rome I found even I had given up on bothering to queue up for the correct doors with the other tourists and was leaping on through any open door.)

However, this isn’t Rome and the bus driver was less than impressed with these random people ignoring a no entry sign. There were some words said in Danish, with no response. In the end the entire interaction was played out in English. It was almost like being on a bus in London when someone fare evading gets caught by the bus driver boarding by the back doors. The shrugs, the mangled used of the English language, and then the international signal for an unhappy driver, the engine being switched off.

At this point a helpful Dane who obviously spoke some Italian (so not satisfied with being fluent in both Danish and English they had obviously learn Italian as an extra!) let them know that they needed to get off the bus, and board properly.

Once they had done this, all was fine, but I suspect that when they get back to Rome it’s going to take them a little bit of time to get back into the swing of boarding through any door that’s open.

Just how many links do you need?

As I was walking through the city centre earlier today I noticed there was a bus stop for the airport express to Copenhagen Airport.

Normally this wouldn’t be a particularly odd thing, most airports have an express bus link.

It’s just with Copenhagen, it’s so well connected to the airport that does it really need this extra one.

To put it into context, Heathrow is the UK’s largest airport, and one of the most important airports in the world. Copenhagen is certainly the most important airport in Scandinavia, and certainly comes in the top 10 of major European airports.

Heathrow:

• Quarter hourly train service taking around 20 minutes at the cost of around £20


• Tube every 10 minutes or so, taking well over the hour, but only costing around the £6 mark


• Coaches pretty regular, taking well over the hour, but again costing only a couple of quid


• Buses, local buses from nearby train and tube stations, nearest advertised link is in Feltham taking 30 minutes and costing £1.20

Copenhagen:

• Train every 10 minutes, taking around 10 minutes, cost £4


• Metro every 4 minutes, taking less than 15 minutes, cost £4


• Bus every 4 minutes, taking less than 30 minutes, cost £4

Which brings me back to the question, why, on top of 6 trains, 15 metro’s and 15 busses an hour (and that’s only the buses from the city centre, not the local ones closer to the airport) would you need a coach service?

And then, in small writing, I discovered the real reason. And it’s an old favourite, it’s RyanAir.

The “Copenhagen” airport express is actually to take you over into Sweden to an airport on the outskirts of Malmo that RyanAir use as their “Copenhagen” base.

They used to actually call it Copenhagen, but then some busy-body in the EU decided that landing at an airport in another country which uses a different currency to the city your advertising you are flying to is a bit misleading and perhaps they should be a little more honest. Just who do these EU Bureaucrats think they are? Next they’ll be saying the plans to rename Birmingham as London-Birmingham International are not on!

Ah, so it’s not just Britain

I thought it was something unique to Great Britain, that nowhere else in the world would hamstring themselves in the same way, but the Danes have proved me wrong.

For an eight week period a large chunk of the S-Tog network is replaced by buses whilst they carry out engineering works.

I have to say every place that the replacement bus went near the tracks there appeared to be lots of people working and getting on with stuff the whole length of the line that was closed, which is more than Network Rail ever manage in the UK (one bored looking bloke with a pickaxe picking at a bit of track in the distance is all I think I have ever seen.)

It’s obvious that there are major works going on, and they intend on getting many kilometres of track re-laid and several stations rebuilt in the, in the grand scheme of things, short closure.

It also helps that there are multiple replacement buses, including ones running express from a station on another line to Hillerød (where I was headed) without the need to sit on a bus stopping at every stop along the line (perhaps something someone at Southern could learn about perhaps?)

The whole operation appeared to be running very smoothly, with no issues, excellent signage (in more than one language, recent experience has shown that Network Rail and most of the train companies struggle with the one language) and comfortable replacement coaches.

If engineering works were carried out like this in Great Britain then I doubt there would be so many complaints.

So come on Network Rail, I’m not asking for the signage in English and Danish (just intelligible English), just get engineering works to work and not turn into their usual farce.

Köln/Bonn – Not just an airport, instructions as well

When I last came to the airport in 2004 they were in the process of finishing off building works on the new terminal train station.

The trains were going to link the airport to the city centre in speed and comfort and replace the coach journey.

Unfortunately, I’d taken that to mean both city centres, not just Cologne.

Bonn is still linked by a pretty slow (especially at 6pm on a Thursday evening) bus link which crawls into the centre of town.

In fact when I searched VRS’s website (the local public transport authority) they suggested that as the bus takes 35 minutes I might have wanted to consider going via Cologne and the train and taking five minutes longer, all for the same price.

I think I know how I’ll be getting back to the airport.

Köln/Bonn isn’t just the name it’s the instructions. To get to Bonn, go via Cologne!

Have you tried switching it off an on again...

Modern technology is a wonderful thing, but when it goes wrong it can create problems that wouldn’t have happened in simpler times.

Today I experienced this on my journey back from Great Yarmouth.

I’d timed leaving Great Yarmouth so that I could go back a slightly different and possibly more scenic way that the way I had arrived.

There are two lines into Great Yarmouth, one via Acle which most trains go along, and one via Berney Arms which only one or two trains a day go along.

Berney Arms is possibly the remotest station in England. It’s not that it’s very far from anywhere; it’s just that the only way to get to Berney Arms station is by train or on foot or by bike; it isn’t possible to get there any other way. The nearest road access is miles away.

The train merrily made its way along the tracks to Berney Arms. The driver pulled into the station and then went to open the doors.

And that’s where the problems began.

These modern trains use GPS to tell themselves where they are. In theory this means that a train will always know where it is. If it’s in a station it will know which platform it’s at, so it knows how long the platform is compared to the length of the train and only open the doors that are actually in the station.

Unfortunately, this does require the GPS to be working correctly.

I’ve been on trains before where the GPS has gone wrong and it’s not been possible to open the doors. In those occasions the driver has apologised profusely to the passengers wanting to get off and then driven on to the next station.

This isn’t a problem if there is a train every fifteen minutes. It would be a pain if there were only a train every hour, but it still wouldn’t be impossible.

However, when this is the second and last train of the day, and the next one isn’t due for another 20 odd hours, and there are 10 people waiting to get on it does start to become a problem.

Try as they might the train just refused to accept that it was in a station (I think it thought it was either still in Great Yarmouth or perhaps on a beach in the Maldives)

In the end they resorted to the oldest trick in the book. They switched the train off, and then used the emergency door release to get the doors open and let the people back on. They then closed the doors and fired up the engine (and I’m assuming the computer) again. At this point the train proudly announced "We are now arriving at Berney Arms" and promptly opened the doors, then refused to shut them again for about five minutes.

It was starting to look a little problematic, how do you deal with a train load of passengers when the trains broken down. Normally you would make them wait for the rail replacement bus, but when there is no road to get the bus to you, what do you do?

Eventually, after lots of going backwards and forwards (and some pretty hefty kicks it sounded like to the doors) the doors finally closed and stayed closed and the train was able to pull off.

But I don’t know if they ever properly fixed it. All the way into Norwich the train was still merrily displaying a message that "This is Berney Arms".

Dis-Jointed planning

I booked the travel for my trip to Norwich in the middle of March, at the time the really cheap tickets were released.

The journey back on Friday no problem, all booked. However, I couldn’t find any cheap tickets for the journey up on the Monday.

I knew that given it was the bank holiday it might be a little more problematic to get up, but it’s only when I checked the tickets available and realised that they were nearly five times as expensive as the cheap ticket that I suspected something more complicated was going on.

So how was it recommending I make my journey from Liverpool Street to Norwich (bearing in mind the sensible answer is the hourly direct train).

First walk from Liverpool Street Railway Station to the Underground. Catch the tube to Kings Cross St Pancras. Walk from the tube station to Kings Cross. Catch the train from Kings Cross to Peterborough. Change at Peterborough for a train to Ely (changing part way for a replacement bus). Change at Ely for another train across to Norwich (changing part way again for a replacement bus).

If that was the suggested route, what where they doing to the direct route to make that more complicated.

Today I found out!

From Norwich, so the reverse was true from London, catch the train to a random station between Colchester and Romford. Get off there at take a 45 minute coach ride to a random tube station at the far end of the Central line. Catch the central line into Liverpool Street.

All well and good.

Except large parts of the central line were closed for engineering works meaning that there was a heavily reduced service and yet more replacement busses.

Can someone remind me of this the next time I book to start a holiday during a Bank Holiday Weekend!

Domestic flights

I’ve had to wait a bit for my train at Preston, so I’ve heard quite a few announcements about the disruption that the Eyjafjallajökull Volcanic ash cloud is causing.

The key problem appears to be that people who would normally fly from London to Scotland have all descended onto the railways and they can’t cope.

The trains coming up from London are packed to capacity and people are struggling to get on.

I’m all in favour of trying to get as many people off of domestic flights and onto the railways, but based on today’s evidence the railways just can’t cope.

Perhaps this is the clearest evidence needed that more railway lines are needed, or perhaps it’s proof that we have become too reliant on being able to zip around the country on cheap flights.

Perhaps its also evidence that it always helps to read the timetable when you’re booking your train. The trains from Glasgow, packed, my train five minutes later started at Lancaster, one stop up the line, virtually nobody on board when I got on!

Yes, it’s appropriate, but is it necessary

I hope they don’t do it when it’s a commuter service. I can only imagine what it does to the mind if you have to hear it every day, then again perhaps it just disappears into the background.

It certainly is prominent during the day when it’s being a tourist service.

What am I talking about?

It’s playing “Ferry across the Mersey” on a Ferry crossing the Mersey.

Alternatively, could this be the start of a whole range of transport operations adding “Theme tunes” to their services.

Perhaps a continuous stream of Gerry Rafferty at Baker Street,

Maybe a constant invitation to do the walk at Lambeth North

Or worst still a very, very long and slow sea crossing to China.

At least co-ordinate your lies

It’s the usual story, a small amount of snow falls in the UK and the transport infrastructure grinds to a halt.

I got up early today because I wanted to have the maximum time in Stratford-upon-Avon. As the first train to Birmingham wasn’t until 08:37 it wasn’t that early, but 07:30 on a Sunday is still unpleasant.

When I woke up I looked out of the window and noticed that there was a small amount of the white stuff on the ground, so I had an idea that there might be disruption.

I got to Coventry station and the train was still showing as being on time.

It was still showing as being on time at 08:39. Then it started to update itself, first to 08:42, then at 08:43 to 08:47, at 08:49 it disappeared from the display at which point someone finally decided it might be useful to make an announcement.

The train was still running, but it would now be leaving from another platform in four minutes time, so we all troop over the bridge to platform 2.

Four minutes later, still no train. Finally just a couple of minutes before 9 as the train pulled into the station there was an announcement apologising for the delay caused by frozen points just outside the station.

OK, we had a reason, we had a train, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, until a minute or so later as the train pulled out the guard apologies for the delay caused by the train that was supposed to be forming this service having broken down and having to get a replacement.

So London Midland, what was it, frozen points or a broken train. If you are going to lie to your customers at least get everyone telling the same lie.

Sort it out Boris!

I suppose it is partly my fault for assuming that the tube would be running OK, that on a day when several London football clubs were playing at home TfL wouldn’t have most of the tube closed for engineering works.

Unfortunately, TfL did have engineering works, lots of engineering works, in fact the Victoria line was about the only line which didn’t have line closures and consequently was very busy.

This in itself wouldn’t have been a problem, except that when it gets busy the train bunch up and the have big gaps between them. The big gaps mean lots more people waiting on the platform and that then means the next train is even fuller, more people get left behind and the platforms slowly get so full it’s dangerous.

That’s pretty much exactly what had happened a minute or so before I arrived at Victoria tube station (with 50 minutes to spare to make the 10 minute journey), and when I got to the ticket barriers they had all been locked off.

They kept announcing that we would be let in very shortly as soon as the next train cleared the platform.

Unfortunately, for a line where there are supposed to be trains every 3 minutes or so, there appeared to be several missing, as the next train took over 10 minutes to arrive, and strangely, was absolutely bursting at the seams so not very many people were able to get on and they had to wait another 5 minutes for the next train to arrive to empty most of the platform.

By the time they finally released the gates my comfortable 50 minutes had shrunk to a less comfortable 25 minutes.

The next train was due in 2 minutes and then 12 minutes. I knew full well that if I didn’t get on the first tube I would almost certainly miss my train at Euston.

So I called upon all my years of being a Londoner put my head down, elbows out and piled into the scrum around the door, managing, just to squeeze both myself and my luggage into the train, displacing a couple of people heading to Highbury for the Arsenal match, though having to bend into an awkward shape to avoid being trapped in the doors as they closed.

As the train was so full it, of course, took longer at each station to empty and load so by the time I surfaced onto the concourse at Euston I was down to just 10 minutes to my train (and very thankful that I had made it onto the first train I could)

Now I’m willing to accept that it’s partly my fault for not checking in advance and taking the inevitable disruption into account when I decided what time to set off, but at the same time it is slowly getting impossible to travel round London at the weekend as more and more bits get closed down.

Perhaps it’s time that the blond haired buffoon actually did something rather than just doing Hugh Grant impressions!

Why make it easy

There are two buses an hour between Holyhead and Bangor

However, they are not at half hourly intervals

One is the X4, it’s supposedly the express route, but wanders around the houses quite a bit

The other is the 4, except it doesn’t go to Bangor it goes to the town of Llangefni where you can connect onto Bangor on the 4A, except in Llangefni the 4 just becomes the 4A without anyone mentioning it. (Is your head hurting yet!)

Neither route goes down the direct route to Bangor, both crossing over the A55 main road on multiple occasions heading off down to random villages (I know that’s the purpose of a bus route, not sure its the purpose of an express route though).

At one point we even went through a village called Llanddaniel Fab. I don’t think Fab has the same meaning in Welsh as it does in English though.

I thought that the locals would know what was going on, but on several occasions I heard comments like “Oh, this ones going this way today”.

Perhaps I should have just taken the train instead!

The British Disease continues

Today, wandering back to the hotel through the station, I noticed that again the trains were all running with massive delays (actually what I first noticed was the massive long queue to the information kiosk which alerted me to the fact that something might have been up).

I really wasn’t expecting there still to be problems, I would have thought that they could have got it sorted out, but obviously no.

The idea of Privatising the railways in the UK was to make them more responsive and more like the German railways, Deutscher Bahn now even own a couple of the companies that run trains in the UK. Sadly, it looks as though the process is working in the wrong way, and the UK’s inability to cope is now spreading through Deutscher Bahn and back into Germany itself.

The British disease is spreading

It’s heartening to know that it’s not just the Brits who can be crippled by some wintry weather in, well winter.

Normally I would have thought that snow is so common in Germany that they would have the infrastructure in place to be able to deal with even relatively heavy snowfall.

So it was somewhat surprising to see that Dusseldorf Airport had been closed for the whole of the day, and when I got to Nuremberg, that most of the trains were running with delays in excess of 30 minutes, in some cases up to two hours late (yes, that’s right, a German train running spectacularly late!)

Of course, the UK grinds to a halt when there is 2.4mm of snow, it was almost 24cm of snow that had fallen on Dusseldorf.