rpcutts

My unashamedly childish complaint to Northern Rail

You need to work on vastly improving how your delays, cancellations and general chaos is communicated to your paying customers. Having train delays in these conditions may be irritating but it is also understandable. What is inexcusable is how Northern Rail manages to treat its customers.

After standing on a freezing platform and seeing an idle train with 'Arrived' on the departure board for an hour, many passengers elected to go to the waiting room to wait for the 06:40 (or 08:10 I'm unsure which it was) service to depart.

At 8:38 the boards then changed from 'Arrived' to 'Exp 8:38'. We left the waiting room and went to the platform only to find that your oh so professional and dedicated staff had deemed it perfectly acceptable that a hugely delayed service should depart with no station announcement of any kind.

It is completely unacceptable to expect people to stand in the cold next to an empty train with no information in the small chance that it may depart whilst passengers aren't looking.

All other passengers in the station awaiting trains from real travel companies were being kept informed of what was happening with their journeys while Northern customers were yet again treated like second class citizens. I don't enjoy paying £70 a month to be screwed over at every opportunity by Northern Rail's ineptitude. It is shocking how badly a company is able to treat it's customers.

I do hope that Northern Rail will soon either:

1) Somehow come to grips with some form of communication technology that enables them to contact other people and convey information (I suggest telephones and tannoys but other options are available.)  

or 

2) go out of business.

A response from the Tory PPC for Darlington

Dear Mr Cutts

Thank you for getting in touch

My quick views on this thorny topic.

As always, the key is where and how to strike the appropriate balance
between safeguarding personal freedom and safeguarding the general (and law
abiding) population against acts of terrorism and organised crime.

I tend to take a (David Davis) approach - that is: the presumption is in
favour of maintaining personal freedom (which includes freedom from
unsolicited surveillance etc.).  It is for the govt of the day to make out
an extremely strong case (backed by evidence) in order to justify any
rebuttal of that presumption in favour of the state.  Absent such evidence,
the status quo prevails.  I recognise that we live in a fast changing world
where information is easy to gather and disseminate etc. but, if elected, I
would see myself as a defender of the law-abiding man in the street!

I deplore the harassment of photographers and would like to see the law
altered in order to prevent abuse of this type (eg law abiding plane
spotters getting arrested; tourists taking innocent photos of landmark
buildings or police officers).

I adopt David Davis' approach to withholding suspects without charge - that
is to say, the Government singularly failed to make their case for this.

I am taking advice re: Digital Economy Bill and will revert if I can before
the election.  One thing is for sure, however, This piece of legislation is
being hurried through without proper debate and that, in itself, is a
dangerous precedent.

Kind regards

Edward (Legard)

PPC Darlington (Conservative)

identica disclaimer

If any of the below are true then I highly recommend that you don't follow me (or even acknowledge my existence), it will save time in the long run. Chances are you'll hate me and I'll hate you back. Plus you're ugly and stupid.

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