Rail firms pander to unions while ignoring paying customers’ needs

The railways should be there to serve us (Image: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu Agency via Getty) Britain prides itself on being a caring, compassionate country yet in the name of profits greedy rail chiefs are set to close down almost all the ticket offices in England and Wales. Of course, this won’t hurt the tech-savvy millennials who are more than up to the task of working those baffling ticket machines on station concourses that you need a degree in computer sciences to operate (well, that’s what it feels like to me). No, this callous decision will affect society’s most vulnerable – the elderly and the disabled. But hey they’re the least likely people to kick up a fuss, aren’t they? They’re the ones who don’t have the will or the power to fight back against big companies and so-called progress. But how is it progress to convert more than 1,000 ticket offices into food outlets – like we don’t have enough of those already. How is it progress to deny the paying public – and by God we pay dearly for our train services – access to human beings if they have a problem? Ticket prices are already astronomical so what do we, the customers, get in return for that? Not much frankly. We get strikes, we get late trains, we get told at a moment’s notice that our ride home has been cancelled. What we rarely get is decent, face-to-face customer service and ticket offices, no matter how old-fashioned rail bosses might deem them to be, at least provide that. It’s a point of human contact for people to seek help if they need it.   Strikes have returned – it is just like the 70s all over again (Image: Rasid Necati Aslim/Anadolu Agency via Getty) Because ticket offices aren’t just about buying tickets. The Husband and I travelled to Newcastle recently. We’d got to the station ridiculously early – an hour and a half sooner than we needed to. So we decided to ask if we could change our tickets as there was a train leaving 10 minutes after we got there. We needed to talk to a human being to do that – and we did. And not only did we get the earlier train, the nice man at the ticket counter told us there was a cheaper way of getting there. A ticket machine could never have done that. Go into the few remaining ticket offices that exist and you’ll see people asking a myriad of questions – not always about buying a ticket but about their actual journey. Travelling is often stressful and, yes, scary if you’re elderly or disabled and a human being making that easier by talking you through it is a good thing. That’s why a ticket office is important. Because for many, closing these offices means that those people simply won’t be able to use trains anymore which will mean they can’t get about.   So, closing all these offices is saying to society’s most vulnerable  – go fend for yourselves. And I’m sorry but that’s simply not good enough. It may seem like an aberration to rail chiefs that not everyone has a smartphone but it’s how it is. Not everyone is tech-savvy or even has a laptop with which they can book tickets online. And not everyone – me included – is easily able to use those space-age ticket machines in rail stations. Rail operators are screaming that only one in eight tickets is currently bought at a ticket office. So what? That’s still 118,000 MILLION tickets a year. And why are the rail companies happy to throw money at rail workers and their unions in order to keep the trains running but the people who really keep the trains running – the public – are treated like an irrelevance?   Already 759 of the 1,796  stations in England and Wales operate without a ticket office and another 708 only operate a part-time service. What good’s that to a blind or a wheelchair-bound person? What good is it to people who can’t drive and whose ability to move around depends on being able to board a train? On two occasions when I’ve offered to help an elderly person at a train station they’ve freely handed over their credit card to me so I could buy their ticket because they couldn’t work the machine. I’m never in a million years going to steal from these people but you can bet your sweet life there are those who will. What kind of position is that to put vulnerable folk in? Recent stats show that private train operators made £310m in taxpayer-funded profits between March 2020 and September 2022. By September this year, that figure will have rocketed to more than  £400m, which could be turned into shareholder dividends. And rail unions are claiming that train companies whose workers have recently been striking over pay have made hundreds of millions of pounds in profits since the Government put them on new contracts at the start of the pandemic. And while I’m not one to swallow info given up by angry rail unions it’s clear that huge profits ARE being made. And maybe some of them need to be reinvested into the people who keep the trains going. And no I don’t mean rail workers – I mean the public who despite a very expensive and often shoddy service have no choice but to keep going back for more. But unless those rail companies start taking care of their passengers there will come a day when they won’t.