Southeastern will be holding one of their periodic “Meet the Managers” events at Cannon Street and London Bridge from 0800 to 1000 tomorrow (Tuesday) morning 5 January. If you travel through Cannon Street or London Bridge, please take a few moments to tell those responsible for your train service what you think of it and how it could be improved.
Issues you might raise:
- How can they justify fare increases at a time when passenger numbers are rising and their profits have doubled in the last year?
- Why do they have the most miserly Delay-Repay formula on the rail system?
- What you think of the new ticket design, and why there has not been more communication about these changes?
- Why there isn’t a better ticket offer on Southeastern for part-time workers?
- Why, after 10 days to get it right, were there still problems at London Bridge this morning?
- Why there is such a poor service during engineering works – at weekends and over the recent holiday period?
- What’s happened to the plans to install wifi on trains – or will this just be on HS1?
- Why it takes months to fix important but unchallenging issues like lighting or Permit-To-Travel machines at smaller stations like Dunton Green and Bat & Ball?
London Bridge is a big place. We understand that the manager will be by the barriers on the SE side of station near the exit to the bus terminal – those heading straight for the tube may miss them!
If you manage to speak to them, please share what they say with us!
Once again, Southeastern have chosen the same hopelessly inappropriate times. Many City people have to be at their desks by 8am or earlier, and you probably won’t have sufficient time to queue up and discuss anything if you need to reach your Docklands office much before about 8:45am. Too bad if you were hoping to complain that your train was late !
Similarly, the managers will all vanish just before the first Off Peak trains arrive ! Obviously it’s well beneath their dignity to speak to mere shoppers and day trippers…
It really shouldn’t be difficult to cover the time between 3:30pm and 7:30pm, at least for some events: that would make it easier for homegoing commuters, as well as for PAYG Oyster users avoiding the 4pm – 7pm peak fare period. 8am to 10am has obviously been chosen just to suit Southeastern’s managers, not the hard-working passengers whose fares and taxes pay their salaries.
It’s not just the small stations that suffer lighting problems. The Kippington entrance hall at Sevenoaks station is in darkness because both its fluorescent tubes failed quite some time ago. Similarly, parts of the £1,518-per-year Kippington car park are unlit because two lamps failed several months ago, and a lamp column that was hit by a vehicle was removed years ago and never replaced.
No lighting, no CCTV coverage. And this is supposed to be a ParkMark Safer Parking approved site !
Do the station manager and station staff not notice all these obvious problems, or do they think it’s a waste of time reporting them because they know that nothing will happen?
It is not true to suggest that the timing of the Meet the Manager session has been “chosen just to suit Southeastern’s managers, not the hard-working passengers whose fares and taxes pay their salaries”. We value the Meet the Manager sessions as passengers who approach us are all regular users of our service. We have accordingly experimented with different timings over the years and find the 0800-1000 slot works best.
We have held sessions at outlying stations in response to passenger demand. Last year sessions were held at Gillingham, Bromley South, Tonbridge, Orpington, Sevenoaks and other stations. We can look to running a session between 3.30 and 7.30PM, but is our experience that home going passengers are reluctant to stop and engage with us.
If a passenger wishes to raise issues with us one a one to one basis rather than email, ‘phone or letter and cannot make the MTM sessions, we are happy to meet him or her on site at a London terminal: MD David Statham, Train Services Director Richard Dean, Passenger Services Director Barbara Thomas and myself have had a number of such meetings over the last 12 months.
Lighting issues at Sevenoaks, Bat & Ball and Dunton Green have been reported and we are chasing our contractors.
The South Eastern Managers were out on Canon Street concourse on Tuesday morning, so I tackled one on the minor but irritating issue of the font change on the ticket printing machines, which now make it impossible to read whether an individual ticket is out or return (and this goes for their employees manning the ticket barriers as much as passengers).
I was told that Southeastern themselves thought the change was daft, but that this was a national ATOC initiative, and therefore beyond their control.
Seemed to me a convenient way to avoid responsibility for doing anything about it.