So why Davos?

With the snow melts starting in the alps meaning skiing can’t be guaranteed, but the snow melts not having progressed enough to ensure the summer hiking and biking trails are open Davos would appear an odd destination for early April.

And I’d admit that prior to 2020 I wouldn’t have considered it either – the only time the place ever got mentioned was when the World Economic Forum meetings took place.  Depending on your views either a gathering of some of the wealthiest (mostly men) to discuss the economy; a meeting of the bigwigs of global capitalism thrashing out how to take more from the poor; or – bonus internet points – the Illuminati…

However, that was before the lockdowns and a time when time itself appeared to slow down.

Once you’ve been bitten by the travel bug it’s quite difficult to shake it off, and being forced to go cold turkey on wanderlust isn’t the easiest of things.

During the early days of that first lockdown, between completing online claim forms to get bookings converted into vouchers and hotel nights pushed to undefined dates in “the future”, I spent quite a bit of time on YouTube to while away the long evenings.

And it was on there that I discovered that I could still travel, albeit virtually from home.

Several drivers working for rail companies across the globe had done the simple thing of putting a Go-Pro (other action camera makes are available) on the dashboard of their cab and recording the journey.  No commentary, no music, just the sight of the countryside rushing past, the clack of the track and the occasional beep or bell from the trains safety systems.

Of all the journeys I took from the comfort of my PC, there were a series that were the most breath-taking – and they were all from one narrow-gauge railway in the Swiss Alps.

The Rhätische Bahn or Rhaetian Railway, running services up through the Alps of Graubünden, to places I’d heard of but never seen before – St Moritz, Tirano, Klosters, and of course Davos.

And so that’s why for the next few days I’m taking the chance to see physically the places I visited virtually during those dark days, and the best place to do that from…

Is Davos

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?

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.

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?

They still don’t get it

The government is cutting left, right and centre (though mostly left if the truth be told).

The Public appear to accept that cuts are needed, but there is also the feeling that we have to pay the price for banker’s recklessness and greed.

So it was a little alarming to overhear the conversation that two “bankers” in both senses of the word, were having on the train between York and Durham today.

I’m not going to name the bank that one of them mentioned they worked for, but it is one that owes the UK tax payers quite a bit of money.

Their discussion revolved around the issue of expenses.

Now before I get accused of glass houses I will put my hands up and say that yes, in my job, occasionally, I have to claim things on expenses. Usually this is for dinner when I’m away at a conference and then I stick well within my employer’s guidelines of keeping bills at under £25 per head.

When you think about it, £25 per head is still quite a bit for dinner, but then I am happy to eat quite cheaply if I’m doing it with other people’s money.

On the other hand my expenses claims are only ever living expenses whilst away from home for work, I’ve never had to “entertain clients” and really can’t think of a reason why I would want to.

The two “bankers” were discussing one’s complaint that his employer was not giving him his entire expenses claim. His employers limit was £70 per head (I don’t think I’ve ever had a meal that cost more than £40 per head, including booze and that was in Iceland!), and he had spent £75 per head “entertaining clients”. He felt that only getting £70 per person back and having to personally take the hit for £20 (there were three “clients”) was grossly unfair.

Now forgive me for being naive, but if an employer sets a limit that’s the upper amount you can claim for. This is only to be reached in exceptional circumstances. It’s not a target to aim to get your claim up to that amount, if you can submit at £40 a head than do that, don’t look to bump it up another £30.

Perhaps I’m in the wrong sector, perhaps I’ve just been stirred up into moral outrage against bankers by the popular press, or perhaps I’m not in the minority of thinking it morally wrong to try and get as much as you can rather than only as much as you need out of expenses.

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.

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".