"TRAIN ENGINE SWISHES PAST" "The Government and the rail industry are forever telling us that" "Britain's railways are a rip-roaring success." "And the railway is actually incredibly successful." "It is the safest railway in Europe." "It is the fastest-growing railway in Europe." "But if it's all so terrific, why are our railways amongst the least reliable in Europe?" "Quite often I leave work, and by the time I get to the station, it's also been cancelled." "Why do we feel so squashed?" " TANNOY:" " I probably have some space in the leading vehicle." "Please fill the gap." "And why are we paying so much for the privilege?" "I can't sit down." "We need somebody to get some more coaches." "Today, social media is exploding with pent-up frustration." "Do you think it's good enough running four carriages at rush hour?" " ALL:" " No!" " Do you think you should be paying more for standing longer?" " No!" "Tonight, the widening gap between the claims of the rail industry and customer reality." "And what it's going to take to close it." "I think people are frustrated, and it doesn't feel like a proper customer experience that you'd expect when you're paying hundreds or thousands of pounds for your train ticket." "For many, there have been months of misery on the railways." " THEY CHANT:" " Shame on Southern!" "Shame on Southern!" "Especially for commuters who use Southern Railway." " THROUGH MEGAPHONE:" " What do we want?" " CROWD:" " Trains!" " When do we want it?" " Now!" "Southern has been in meltdown for much of this year." "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Other parts of the network are in crisis too." "There are now 1.7 billion rail journeys a year, up 76% in 15 years, but with just 25% more trains." "Britain's railways are bursting at the seams." "This is a good day." "Usually, you're right up against the door struggling to..." "To get, literally get the doors closed." "I've had enough." "So, what is it here from Kidderminster, 40 minutes?" " About 40 minutes, yes." " So, we'll have to stand all the way?" " Yes." "So, this is not a journey you look forward to?" "Absolutely not." "I do everything I do to kind of avoid doing it." "The more disgruntled passengers have become, the more I've wondered about those glowing "How are we doing?" performance posters the train companies love to stick up at stations." "So, I've gone to some of the pinch points to experience them for myself." "Behind me is the Gatwick Express." "Now, their website promises to provide customers with..." ""a service you can depend on."" "Who writes this corporate guff?" "Official statistics show the Gatwick Express is one of the least dependable trains running in Britain today." "This year, one in ten have been cancelled." "Govia Ltd, owners of Gatwick Express, say that driver training and track congestion have led to so many cancellations." "Punctuality across the rest of the UK network is also falling." "The number of incidents causing delay has actually declined enormously, so it's gone down about 40% in the last decade." " The incidents." " The number of incidents, failures..." " But..." "But because there have been more trains and more people on those trains, every time something goes wrong it has a bigger impact." "And that's why, on some parts of the railway, it's not good enough." "And sometimes not as good as the headline official statistics suggest." "They still trumpet that on average only one in ten trains are late." "TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS" "But this masks big drops in punctuality during peak hours." "On some commuter lines out of Manchester, for example, more than six out of every ten trains are late." "Now, at this point, I should declare an interest, because like millions of others I also use the railways, and I am sometimes asked what my customer experience has been like." "Well, here's my answer." "To be honest, I don't feel like a customer." "I feel more like a captive." "It's the strike by guards on Southern that's dominated the headlines." "But the strike is just the straw that broke the camel's back, already weakened by chronic congestion and major engineering works." "We asked one Southern customer to keep a video diary of his commutes." "My name is Alex." "And all I'm trying to do is get to work." "My journey's taken up to about five hours." "Sometimes it just doesn't happen at all." "Southern have been massively letting people down over the last two months." "This is all linked to a dispute over who opens the doors on the trains." "The impact on the line has been absolutely crippling." "Alex commutes from near Horsham in Sussex to London." "He pays £4,700 a year for his ticket." " TANNOY:" " By standing next to the train, you are delaying the departure of this service and of the services behind." "And it's just one complete classic BEEP." "And Alex isn't alone in feeling frustrated." "This is the seventh week of Southern Rail hell." "Well, Southern Rail." "I'm stuck at Haywards Heath." " TANNOY:" " That's as far as I can go on my own, because we have lost the conductor." "Don't know where he is." "He's lost somewhere." "Stolen maybe." "Who knows?" "For commuters, reliability is their top priority." "Last year some quarter of a million trains were cancelled across the network, disrupting 61 million journeys." "Continuing my journey on Southern, I met Amy, who travels in from Merstham in Surrey." "Are you at the end of your tether?" " Yes." "Completely." " SHE LAUGHS" "It's the uncertainty, the squeezing on to the trains, the then worrying from as soon as you get in, you know, whether we're going to be able to get home in time to pick my son up, and, you know..." "Amy's son is four." "If she's delayed picking him up from nursery, she's charged £15 for every 15 minutes she's late." "Govia, who also own Southern, acknowledge reliability has been unacceptable, and they've told us they're sincerely sorry." "As soon as I wake up in the morning," "I check my phone and the app to see whether the trains are cancelled." "Last week there was an occasion when the train was so delayed the next train came in, but then I was told the train I wanted was only two minutes behind, so I waited for that one only for" "it to go straight through the station without stopping." "Alex too has spent the last six months struggling with what should be a simple journey." " TANNOY:" " Once again, my apologies for the confusion, ladies and gents." "Even when we manage to run a train on time, we still have a talent for embarrassing ourselves." "So, I thought it was going too well, and this train was indicated that Clapham Junction as going to Christ's Hospital, the rear four carriages." "Southern have got a delay on the train, and in order to try and recover some of the time, what they're going to do now is run the service down to Barnham, missing my station completely on the way." " THEY CHANT:" " Stop the fraud, lower fares!" "Stop the fraud, lower fares!" "It's quite something to turn your average commuter into a banner-waving street activist, but the Southern train company seems to have managed that." "Actually, to be fair to Southern, at the risk of being lynched, the right address for all this anger is probably not the boardroom and the shareholders of the company that owns Southern, but, yes," "you've guessed it - the Government." "What a lot of customers don't realise is that the train operating companies have to do what the Department of Transport tell them - on the timetable, the cost of many tickets and, effectively, the number of trains they can afford to run." "Another experience that customers haven't enjoyed is the raid on their wallets." "When the railways were privatised 20 years ago, we were promised there'd be lower fares." "In fact, many of our fares are now the highest in Europe by a stretch." "Peak-time travel is crippling." "A fully flexible fare to Manchester will cost you £332, and that's not even first-class." "To Glasgow, £365." "You could fly to Madrid for the weekend and stay in a five-star hotel for less." "So, why, since the days of British Railways, have fares become so expensive?" "At first the newly-privatised railway was starved of investment, which has meant huge catch-up costs, plus the costs of providing ever more services." "Today, those costs are being met by higher fares, because the share of Government subsidy has been shrinking." "The fact is that we're investing a huge amount to improve the railway." "We need to do more and more." " Yeah, "We" meaning..." " I mean the nation." " The nation, yes." "Not just the Government." " Indeed." "Because the Government speak as if it's them who's putting lots of money in." "And the impression I'm getting, actually, is increasingly they're putting less and less in, and increasingly the fare-paying public are putting more and more in, that's..." "Does that seem fair?" "Well, Government have made a choice, in the past, to change the balance between fares and taxpayers." "Not only have many British fares become eye-wateringly expensive since British Rail's day, the ticketing system has become fiendishly complex, too." "There are 16 million possible ticket permutations." "Which could work to your advantage IF you know how to use something called, "Split ticketing"." "What exactly is a split ticket?" " If you imagine a journey from here to here..." " Yeah." " ..that's the through ticket." " Yeah." "Split ticketing looks at the prices of tickets from here to here, there to there, there to there, and often the combination of those tickets can be cheaper than the through ticket." "So, if you're travelling, say, on Virgin Trains between Manchester and London, it can often be cheaper to buy two tickets instead of one." "Virgin are forever boasting they sell the cheapest tickets." "It says so here, "Unbeatable prices"." "Now, Virgin do sell some cheap tickets, it's true." "If you book in advance, on the right day, at the right time." "But the cheapest tickets?" "Eh..." "No." "For example, a peak-time ticket from London to Manchester, for which Virgin would charge £166, can be bought on split ticket websites for just £94, a saving of £72." "Virgin have told us that their ticketing system isn't programmed to offer split tickets, and it's here where the blame game starts, because Virgin say that their ticketing system has been imposed on them by the Department for Transport." "The Department, however, have told us that they expect the train companies to sort out the ticketing mess." "I mean, it's so difficult that you can't sort of level it all out and make it fairer and more even." "We'd love to." "We'd love to..." "Well, why haven't you?" "There was a review in, I think, 2012." "Ministers said, "You need to get on with it."" "The last minister, Claire Perry, said the same thing." "The current rail minister has said it." "It hasn't happened." "In order to do it, we need to work with Government, to be able to have that discussion about how fares should be structured in the future." "The railway industry cannot do that on its own." "I'm baffled." "The Government blame the rail industry, and the rail industry blame the Government." "Caught in the middle, of course, are the fare-paying customers." "The train companies repeatedly tell us how passionate they are about providing customers with a" ""good customer experience"." "So "passionate" are the train-operating companies about delivering a good customer experience, that maybe they think it's this passion that's been responsible for the dramatic fall in the number of formal complaints, down from about a million at privatisation" "to under half a million today." "Maybe." "Here's the passion killer...." "The 1.1 million negative tweets in a year from customers." "They describe a customer experience that was anything but good." "I think more and more people are turning to social media because they're frustrated and they're tweeting about it." "It probably also reflects that, actually, often when people go through the official channels and they complain to their train company, they're not getting a decent enough response." "All you can do is hope that through dogged persistence, you can eventually wear the rail bureaucracy down." "Good luck with that." "One customer has been fighting the system for years." "He appealed against a penalty fare issued to his son for having the wrong ticket." "There's the whole sense that I am a nuisance to you because I complained." "In the course of a four-year battle, Paul Davies discovered an inconvenient truth about the railways." "What Mr Davies discovered was that the people dealing with his appeal, the Independent Penalty Fares Appeals Service, IPFAS, was anything but independent." "Mr Davies found that IPFAS is owned an operated by..." "Guess who." "Govia Limited, Britain's biggest train operator." "They own Southern, who issued the penalty fare he was complaining about." "How independent is that(?" ")" "Initially, they told me that it was an arm's-length subsidiary of Govia." "Then, when I found out that wasn't true, they said," ""Oh, well, this is a separate business unit,"" "which was also not true because it doesn't have separate accounts." "When Mr Davies took his concerns to the Department for Transport, an official there treated him with contempt." "Well, the most inoffensive, in a sense, word is git, but I'm also called a bastard" " and that I'm also called that word that is" " BLEEP." "Some of the civil servant's language was so uncivil, we can't broadcast it." "And I find that very, very unpleasant." "After the e-mails were disclosed to Mr Davies, the Department apologised and disciplined the abusive official." "It turns out that Paul Davies' "mindless drivel"" "about the importance of IPFAS's independence is no longer regarded by the Department as "drivel", because officials have come round to the view that, in order to ensure" "IPFAS's independence, it should be sold." "And guess what, the owner of Govia Limited agreed." "The next leg of my journey takes me north." "And, as they say, it can be grim up here, at least if you travel by train." "This is the North's most common and most reliable form of rail transport." "It's called a Pacer." "It's basically a 1980s bus body welded onto a freight wagon with a diesel engine stuck underneath." "I kid you not." "What's it like travelling in them?" "What are the conditions like?" " I mean, if you look there and there..." " Yeah." "..it's really wet on the floor." "That's because when the train moves when it's raining, it leaks through where it connects." " So, where's the water coming through?" " It's coming from up here." "Oh, yeah." " Up there." " Oh, God, I've just..." "PASSENGER LAUGHS" " Right." " It's raining in the train." " Yeah." "OK." "Can you get compensation for getting wet?" " I don't think it's in the charter." " It's not in the charter?" "These relics are still the backbone of commuter trains in the North and still even connect some of the North's great cities." "Now, Northern say they're "passionate about making sure" ""that your journey with us is a great experience."" "To be honest, it's not an experience you'd want to repeat." "This train is about 30-odd years old, and we tried to export this train around the world - only the Iranians have bought them." "Their Pacers are now rotting the desert." "But, hey, up here in the North of England, they're still going strong." "Northern Rail get the flak for not replacing these buses on rails, but actually, the people who determine how much is spent on the railways are not the privatised train companies but the Department for Transport." "BRAKES SCREECH" "Both the Department and Northern say services will undergo their biggest transformation in decades when the Pacers are finally replaced." "But not until 2020." "Three more years of being cramped..." " SPEAKER:" " 'Ladies and gentlemen, we currently have some space 'in the leading vehicle." "Please fill the gap." "Thank you.'" "..too hot in the summer... ..too cold in the winter..." "..and getting damp on rainy days." "Scarcely could there be a more potent symbol of the North-South divide." "Down south, there are lots of new trains." "Even so, they're fighting a losing battle against overcrowding." "Every day, some 160,000 commuters into London can't get a seat." "That's over 50,000 more than five years ago." "Earlier this year, tempers boiled over when commuters into Fenchurch Street found their trains had filled up overnight because of a timetable change." "Do you think it's good enough running four carriages at rush hour?" " CROWD YELLS:" " No!" "Do you think you should be paying more for standing longer?" " CROWD YELLS:" " No!" "Again, social media has been an outlet for commuter frustration." "I took an early morning trip out to Rainham, in Essex, to see for myself." "This is 6.30 in the morning." "We can see it's filling up quite rapidly now." "Go, go metro train." "This service, run by the company C2C, is regularly crammed with City workers." "Here we are, crowded already." "Perfect(!" ")" "In December, the Department of Transport signed off on C2C's plan to deal with overcrowding." "The result was a new timetable with extra stops at busy stations to make more efficient use of C2C's existing trains." " It will get worse in about ten minutes' time." " Right." "What happens in ten minutes?" "We hit Barking." "And?" "You'll see." "While the timetable change brought relief to some parts of the C2C network, it also unleashed pent-up demand from elsewhere." "On this line, another 4,000 people were scrambling onto packed trains every evening." "Welcome aboard(!" ") HE LAUGHS" " What sort of state are you in when you get to work?" " Fed up." "You can't necessarily park everything at the doorstep of your place of work - you do take it in with you." "It's not a good way to start the day." "Indeed, Dan's new customer experience was such a horrible experience, he says it affected his work." "He continued to vent his anger via Twitter." "In the end, Dan says, it got so bad he decided to move house and change his commute." "I changed because of this." "Look at it, all around, right now." "You're about to get stamped all over." "It's awful." "It's absolutely awful." "Why would you want to start your day like this, every single day?" "C2C say the passenger surge caused by the new timetable has now reduced and new trains are on order." "Even so, that won't mop up forecast growth, driven largely by record rises in population and house prices." "The urgent need is for much more capacity - more tracks, more trains and hi-tech signalling." "Some of that is coming in the form of London's £15 billion Crossrail project, which will bring much-needed relief to commuters." ""Phew," I hear you say." "What we're doing now is building these systems as big as we can to cope with the most capacity." "So, this station here is going to have 200m-long trains, almost double the size of a London Underground train." "You would acknowledge, wouldn't you, that this 200m-long platform will fill up almost as soon as you open it?" " It will be well used from day one, absolutely." " That's a polite term." " It'll be chocka, won't it?" " It will be well used for sure." "It will be very busy, I think." "Crossrail will provide space for another 200 million journeys a year, but enjoy it while it lasts." "If demand grows at its present rate, by 2021, just three years after Crossrail opens, you may feel just as squashed as you do today." "Relieving congestion across the rail network requires a series of megaprojects countrywide, costing megabucks, well north of £150 billion." "Only investment not seen for a century will solve this problem." "But where exactly will the money come from?" "Bring back British Rail and renationalise our railways." "CROWD CHEERS" "That's what Labour want too, and several polls have suggested that on this issue, the public is behind them." "But whether the railways are managed privately or publicly doesn't even begin to address the titanic scale of the challenge." "In 25 years' time, the forecast is for a doubling of journeys, to 3.4 billion." "The government presents this dizzying rise in numbers as the real measure of success, but for many customers, it's at the root of so much that's wrong in a network that can't cope." "We wanted to talk to ministers about this, but they were just too busy, we were told." "Roasted lamb?" "Roasted lamb for me." "That sounds great, thank you so much." "In my lifetime, the railways have changed beyond all recognition." "Even first class is fading into history." "This is the last mainline dining car service operating in Britain today." "It's run by Great Western Railways, and very enjoyable it is too." "The dining car is sharing the same fate as toilets on some commuter trains, flushed away to make room for the railways' ever-growing army of customers, or should I say captives?" "If I've got it to work, I'm not really a customer" " I haven't got a choice, I can't drive a car in, I'll be there all day " "I'm a captive." "They have choice." "They have choice about where they live." "They have choice about whether they go by road or by train." "They have choice about where they get their jobs." "I mean, we all have those choices." "Actually, more and more of us have less and less choice about where we live or work." "Without massive new investment, our customer experience will continue its decline, something to be endured, not enjoyed." "Welcome to the new normal."