The Liberal Democrats have signed up to the Campaign for Better Transport’s calls for a reduction in rail fares. That should be good news for commuters, who can currently expect their season tickets to increase in price almost every year.

Regulated fares in the UK, which includes season tickets, can currently increase in price by 1% above the rate of inflation year on year, and unregulated fares, which includes most other tickets, can increase by as much as each train operator can justify.

The Campaign for Better Transport has been pushing to change this, not only so that commuters get a better deal but also so that more people use the train, which is of course better for the environment.

With all of the main political parties keen to trumpet their environmental credentials in the run-up to the general election it is therefore surprising that only the Lib Dems have signed up to the cause. Their policy document on transport – a refreshing one-page of clear commitments – states:

We will make sure that regulated fares go up by less than inflation which means prices will come down and we will make Network Rail refund a third of your ticket price if you have to take a rail replacement bus service.

You can’t get much clearer than that.

The rest of the party’s policy briefing notes on transport can be found in this PDF document.

Bad news if your daily commute is affected by next week’s rail strikes. According to the Daily Telegraph you might not be eligible for compensation.

Why? Well it seems to come down to the fact that as a commuter you can use a whole host of different trains, so if your regular service is cancelled you can jump on the next one. Not so with anyone who has bought a one-off ticket for a particular service. Their chances of a refund are much better.

As the Telegraph reports:

National Express East Anglia, whose services into Liverpool Street are expected to be hit particularly badly, said the company would provide the ‘the best possible alternative timetable’ should a strike take place.

‘Where alternative services are not available, customers including season-ticket holders, will be eligible to apply for a refund for the days affected.’

The spokesman declined to say what was meant by the ‘best possible timetable’ or what would happen to commuters for whom this timetable was unsuitable.

Read the full story here.

UPDATE: Love Money suggests that if you’re having trouble getting a refund and you paid by credit card, you should approach your card provider. It says:

If you have problems getting a refund from your train operator, and have paid for a ticket costing £100+ by credit card , then Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act may apply. This legal right doesn’t apply to debit cards, although some Visa debit cards do offer similar ‘charge back’ cover.

Read Love Money’s full article on your rights with respect to the rail and British Airways strikes here.

So we’re heading for another rail strike in the week that follows the Easter break. A bit of a strange on this one, as while the maintenance workers are striking for whole days at a time, the signal workers will be downing tools for fours at a time, twice a day for four days.

Who is striking, and when?

The maintenance workers’ strikes run from 6am on Tuesday 6 April to 11.59pm on Friday 9 April. The signal workers’ strikes run on the same days from 6am until 10am and from 6pm until 10pm. Clearly they are timed to cause maximum disruption to commuters, who travel at the busiest times of the day.

Why are they striking?

Network Rail has asked around 50 signal workers (out of a workforce of 6000) to move to new signalling centres and switch to a four day a week roster.

With regard to the maintenance workers, Network Rail states that it wants to make 1300 job cuts. So far 1100 people have volunteered for redundancy.

Who voted to strike?

Of the 6000 signal workers, 1705 voted in favour of a strike.

Of 18,000 maintenance workers, 6055 voted in favour of a strike.

What do the unions have to say?

RMT, which represents the maintenance workers, stated:

RMT members… could either sit back and wait for these cash-led maintenance cuts to lead to another major disaster on Britain’s railways or they could vote to take action to stop the attack on rail safety. They have overwhelmingly voted to take action.

“Nobody should be under any illusions about just how determined RMT members are to win this dispute and to stop this reckless gamble with rail safety. Nearly 150 MP’s have signed the Early Day Motion opposing Network Rail’s cuts plans and have urged the Government to intervene to call a halt to this jobs carnage on the tracks. We are reissuing that call today.

“RMT is in no doubt that the cuts programme drawn up by Network Rail would drag us back to the dark days of Railtrack and would make another Hatfield, Potters Bar of Grayrigg disaster an inevitability. That is what this dispute is all about and even the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) has had to concede that the botched attempt to bulldoze through these cuts has raised serious safety concerns.

The TSSA represents the signal workers. Its General Secretary, Gerry Doherty, stated: “This is all about safety, the safety of the travelling public and the safety and security of our members at Network Rail. The Office of Rail Regulation agrees with us that these changes pose a threat to safety. It is time that [Network Rail chief exec] Iain Coucher started listening to his staff and the rail regulator.’

How does Network Rail respond?

Network Rail claims that the maintenance workers strike is about:

changing working practices (we need more people rostered on at night and weekends because the railways are too busy nowadays to do much maintenance work during the day). What it’s NOT ABOUT is safety – the railway is the safest it has ever been (welcome to check with Rail Safety and Standards Board) and we’d do nothing to jeopardise that.

With regard to the signal workers, Network Rail claims that ’small local issues [have been] escalated to a national level purely for political purposes’. It points out that of the average wage of the 50 affected workers is £48,113, and that the highest-paid receives £65,616.

What is the likely effect?

Network Rail claims that the effects of the maintenance workers’ strike will be minimal. ‘The network can operate for about a week with this workforce on strike as we have enough contingency staff to cover important safety work and to respond to incidents and kit breaking down.’

The last four-day maintenance workers’ strike was two years ago, and saw no cancelled trains, no safety incidents, and 92% of trains running on time.

The impact of the signal workers’ strike is likely to be more hard-felt. As few as 20% of trains may run, and some lines may see no trains at all.

For the second time in two months I’ve found myself turfed off the train at Stratford. What the problem is, of course, they don’t actually tell you, but you can tell it’s coming when it takes you close to 20 minutes to crawl that far from Liverpool Street. It should take about five minutes at the most.

This time we had the added bonus of a fitter travelling out to fix us, but it seems the problem was more serious than expected, and so after another 20 minutes of waiting we were turned out onto the frigid platform to wait for the full-to-capacity replacement trains to roll in.

No chance of getting on one.

Of course, I’d learnt my lesson last time not to try and get on one of the all stations stoppers that pulls up – it takes a couple of hours to get home that way as you roll to a halt at every station down the line. The only alternative was to ride back to Liverpool Street and start again.

It’s galling, and ironic, to be turfed out at Stratford, the station that serves the 2012 Olympic site, from whose platforms you can see the quickly growing stadium and swimming arena.

Will it ever be able to cope with the sudden influx of millions of spectators and competitors from right around the world? I doubt it. Not if tonight is any indication.

But then, it isn’t only this line that needs improvement. Tonight’s Evening Standard reports on a Europe-wide survey that puts the London fourth (out of 23) from bottom in public transport provision. Only Budapest, Zagreb and Ljubljana came out worse.

I’ve been to all of those cities, and frankly they have excuses. London does not. All are found in ex-Soviet states, none can boast the riches of London, pretty little Ljubljana is so small it really doesn’t need much in the way of public transport, and Zagreb has excellent buses and trams.

Admittedly Budapest could do better, and I got horribly ripped off by a taxi driver acting out an apparently common scam that I won’t fall for again, but let’s not forget that it is two cities united by a a river and doesn’t profess to be the world’s financial capital.

Transport into and out of London – on this line at least – is really rather shocking.

It isn’t the first time this has happened. Neither will it be the last, I’m sure.

How out of touch are our MPs? Sir Nicholas Winterton, a Tory MP for Macclesfield, and standing down at the next election, argues that MPs should still be allowed to travel in first class because the rest of us, who travel in ’standard’ class, are a ‘totally different type of people’.

Really?

Talking on Radio 5 Live today he said:

If I was in standard class I would not do work because people would be looking over your shoulder the entire time, there would be noise, there would be distraction… There’s lots of children, there’s noise, there’s activity. I like to have peace and quiet when I’m travelling. (source: BBC News)

Well don’t we all, Nicholas. Lots of us – myself included – work when we’re travelling. Lots of us would like peace and quiet and no distractions, but we have to make do with plugging into an iPod to block out everyone else.

MPs are the only people in any position to really do anything about the state of the railways in this country, and they should be forced to travel like the vast majority of us – in so-called ’standard’ class. Perhaps then they’ll see how most of their constituents (a ‘totally different type of people’) live their lives.

I want to be represented by someone who is the same ‘type’ of person as me. How else could they ever fight for those things that interest and concern me?

Like seats on trains, quiet coaches and a service that runs on time.

Image courtesy of M. Holland

A terrible, terrible journey home tonight. It was obvious something was wrong when we stopped at Bethnal Green, about half way between Liverpool Street and Stratford.

For quite a while.

Eventually the driver diagnosed the fault: the train had lost power. After 20 minutes or so he rebooted the whole thing (lights out, power down, power up, little effect) and we eventually crawled on to Stratford where we were all turfed off.

The most frustrating thing about that, apart from the fact that it meant we were thrown onto a platform that was already full of people waiting to get on, was the fact that our train had actually started to go quite quickly after a long, gentle ramp-up.

Nonetheless, the driver was (quite rightly) not prepared to take it any further, so it sat in the platform for ages, blocking the line.

We took an all-stations back to Shenfield and changed there, eventually getting home two hours and 40 minutes after leaving work. That’s not good on a 30-mile journey.

Points failure at Chelmsford. The 07h49 wasn’t going anywhere, so of course they had no choice but to turf us all off. A 12-coach train, full, with 70-odd seats in each coach. That’s 800 commuters plus.

Queues on the stairs from the platform. Queues in the tunnel beneath the lines. We had to let the next six trains go without us due to short formations and overcrowding, many of which were running late. We eventually took the 08h29, running five minutes late, and departed 48 minutes after our arrival.

How curious that the staff policing the ticket barriers had disappeared when we first came down from the platform. Coincidence? Who knows. It does seem to often coincide with delays or disruption, though.

The most infuriating thing was’t the poor service but the announcements. There’s a perfectly good, reliable automated system that tells you what’s coming, what’s late and what’s cancelled, and even which trains are departing from unusual platforms (there are only two, but even so). It’s timely, just the right volume and spoken in a pleasant female voice.

The guy in the office, though, interrupted her every time with ear-splitting repeats of what she was trying to say. It’s at its most frustrating when she starts to say something and then he jumps in with exactly the same thing. And then repeats it. And then repeats it. And then repeats it.

I know people want information, and it’s great that we’re getting it, but please – leave it up to the recorded professional, and TURN DOWN THE BLOODY SPEAKERS.

Arrived in London to find a dusting of snow had crippled public transport into the city. Great Portland Street tube closed due to flooding (it was yesterday, too, but they didn’t announce that on my train until it had already sailed straight through it), and team members arriving late.

After a week of ice and sub-sero temperatures, the snow is starting to melt, not that you’d know it from the way my bike was skidding around on the ride to the station this morning.

Sadly, though, the trains were still struggling. At least on National Express East Anglia. We arrived in good time for the 07h49 to find it had switched platforms. Fine – we can cope with that – except that platform one, where it was due to arrive, was still waiting for the 43. It came and it went, but there were so many people we couldn’t get on. Ditto the 49 when it turned up. Ditto the 53, which had been reduced from 12 to eight coaches.

We eventually got on the 57, and to be fair it was a good run in, but as with past years 2010 hasn’t had a good start for commuters across the country. The heavy snowfall has happened the smooth running of the trains and left plenty of passengers either crammed onto overcrowded services or waiting on frozen platforms.

That’s why we, like many others, spend three days last week working from home.

It’s been a poor start to the commuting year. Let’s hope it’s not a portent of things to come.

First up, delays on all lines running into Liverpool Street, including the Stansted Express and trains from Cambridge and East Anglia. Not National Express‘ fault, but whoever was managing the Christmas works for Network Rail.

Disappointing, yes. Unexpected? Not entirely.

There is a tedious inevitability to over-running engineering works, and so reports of hour-long delays on all lines running into London Liverpool Street didn’t come as a shock. This is the third year in a row that the return to work following the Christmas break has been troubled.

Network Rail was fined £14m by the regulator for over-running works affecting the return to work in January 2008.

Strikes on Virgin West Coast

Virgin West Coast passengers, meanwhile – and particularly those who have held off on renewing their season ticket until the first working day of the year (never a good move) – have been affected by a one-day strike by TSSA against the closure of ticket office windows in favour of increased use of automatic ticket machines.

You have to sympathise with their sentiments, even if you don’t agree with their actions. Strikes are rarely welcome, and timing them for the first day back at work isn’t a good way to get commuters on your side.

However, the fact remains that automatic ticket machines can’t offer help and advice and can only follow a set script rather than hunting down low fares on your behalf.

Ticket office windows are a vital resource, but claims by TSSA union leader Gerry Doherty that ‘this is all about defending a vital service to rail passengers’ have a hollow ring when the strike is clearly timed to cause the maximum disruption to those self-same commuters.

I can’t help wondering how the cable thieves that have been plaguing our line over the last few months know when the power is switched off. Granted there was one death back in the summer when the lines were still live at the point of being cut, but whatever the value of scrap copper it still strikes me as far too big a risk when you know there may be 25,000 volts running through those cables.

Are they getting information from someone on the inside?

Over ten days this month there have been four thefts, in Chelmsford, Marks Tey, Kelvedon and Boreham. The most serious resulted not only in the loss of 100m of cable, but also signalling and communications equipment, which was destroyed by a subsequent fire.

Since April, according to Network Rail’s own figures, the East Anglia region has seen more than 50 thefts or incidents in which cables have been damaged by would-be thieves.

The compensation costs alone, paid to disrupted travellers, amounts to £2m taken from Network Rail’s coffers, but that doesn’t take into account the cost to business. With 500 trains cancelled and a further 2000+ delayed on a line running into London, one of the world’s financial capitals, the economic impact is difficult to judge.

The sooner all copper cabling is replaced with aluminium alternatives, the better – for commuters, for rail companies, and for the thieves who are routinely risking their lives.