East Coast’s New Menu
On my trip to Leeds on Saturday, I was able to look at East Coast‘s new menu.
I didn’t actually eat anything on the train, except for an EatNakd bar I took with me, as I had good breakfast before I left and knew I was going to be having a sensible lunch before the football.
However, the menu now has a couple of gluten-free items marked as such. One was a lamb shank, which I do like although last time I tried it, my hand wasn’t up to eating it. It’s got better in the last few months, so I suspect, it might be better.
If I had wanted to have one on the way home, I wouldn’t have been able, as there was no chef on the train. Sadly none of the snacky offerings were gluten free, although there was a chicken korma, which probably was gluten-free, but wasn’t marked as such.
But Leeds is only a two and a half hour journey and as there are restaurants at both ends, it is not the most important route for catering, as far as I’m concerned.
A Day in Leeds
Yesterday, I went to Leeds to see Ipswich play at Elland Road. I took the train from King’s Cross at 8:10 and arrived in the city on time just after 10:30, three cups of free coffee later.
In my view Leeds is a much superior city to Manchester, as like Liverpool, it is fairly compact and you can get most places on foot from the train station.
The station now has improved and is now near to what I would call a destination station.
The last time I came, the roof was going up and now it is complete.
The New Roof at Leeds Station
Is this roof the only complete modern station covering to match the great Victorian structures at St. Pancras, King’s Cross, Raddington and Lime Street in Liverpool?
I met an old Metier colleague and her daughter in the city and after lunch, we went to the ground to see the match.
Leeds United have a reputaion for being unwelcoming, but this was the firast away seating that had a proper Welcome Sign.
Welcome Sign at Elland Road
It should also be said that they were very accommodating in adjusting the tickets, so that I could sit with my friends.
The match wasn’t the most exciting but Town deserved their point and it was good to see Kieron Dyer in an Ipswich shirt again.
The Sunday Night Chaos at London Bridge
I’ve come back from London Bridge several times lately. Usually, I just catch a 141 bus from the station forecourt direct to close to my house.
But on Sunday night, it’s all different and the bus station on the forecourt is closed, so I have to walk across London Bridge to get the bus from a temporary stop on the other side of the bridge.
It is not a pleasant walk. But I’ve not had any serious problems.
Next time though, I’ll take the Northern Line a few stops towards home and then get a bus from Bank, Moorgate or Old Street.
It’s a pity that weekend connections are not good at New Cross for the East London Line to get me to Dalston Junction.
The Olympic Rings Are Here
The Olympic rings are now in St. Pancras.
The Olympic Rings in St. Pancras
But I don’t think they are in the right position, as Sir John Betjeman appears to be puzzling.
They don’t appear to be too well finished behind either.
The Back of the Rings
But the lovers don’t seem to be interested.
There won’t be too many Iranians on the Eurostars.
The Olympic Logo on a Eurostar Train
As they are now sporting the sign of Satan.
Is Yorkshire the County of the Pink Rose?
I came through these ticket gates at King’s Cross/St. Pancras this morning.
Pink Ticket Gates Advertising Yorkshire
As you can see they are advertising Yorkshire!
So why the pink colour?
Thoughts on Rail Ticketing
Modern Railways this month provokes a lot of thoughts with reasoned articles on the financing of the UK’s rail system and developments in ticketing.
- Ian Walmsley argues in an article called Rail’s Big Chance, that the rising oil price is the biggest opportunity for rail since the steam engine.
- An unsigned article describes how ticketing technology is developing, especially with regard to using bank and credit cards instead of cards like the popular Oyster on the London Underground.
- Chris Stokes goes surfing on the Internet for tickets and says that the companies could do better.
In my view rail is missing a few things and there needs to be a holistic approach to fulfil the objectives for the rail companies and passengers alike.
- The rail companies will want to tempt as many passengers as they can from their cars and keep them.
- The rail companies will definitely want the best cash-flow possible. In one sense this means having trains as full as possible at all times of the week and day. But it also probably means using innovative ways to sell tickets.
- Passengers will want the best value and trains at times to suit their needs. They will also want easy-to-use ticketing systems.
With respect to the first objective, they may be attracting new passengers, but are they trying their hardest to keep them?
Many of these new passengers will be business ones travelling on expenses. These passengers have traditionally been encouraged by loyalty schemes from Green Shield Stamps in the 1960s to Air Miles and airline loyalty schemes now. Their companies pay the travel expenses, but they get the rewards. I know people who live in East Anglia and when they go to Scotland drive to a London Airport to fly with their favourite airline to collect the points, when perhaps driving to Peterborough and taking the train will be quicker and cheaper. The points are more important to them, than their company’s money.
There should be a nationwide rail and possibly tram and bus too, loyalty scheme. Perhaps it should be linked to a credit card, that also doubles as your Railcard, so it will work in London as your Oystercard and in Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham on the trams. And of course everywhere on the buses!
I know I’d have one like a shot, as it would mean only carrying one card instead of three; credit card, Freedom Pass and Railcard. It would also make accounting for your expenses a lot easier, if you needed to account for everything.
So this move would benefit both rail companies and passengers.
A lot of passengers don’t like the hassle of buying a ticket. Turn up at a station as I did recently at Weybridge at eleven at night and if you are unfamiliar with the line, or if there is no-one around, you may struggle to buy a ticket, when it should be a welcoming experience. Touch-in and touch-out systems like Oyster or Freedom Pass should be the norm all over the country and this will happen almost universally when bank and credit cards can be used.
I also like the idea of bulk buying of tickets in advance. I live in London and have a season ticket at Portman Road to see Ipswich Town. I usually travel First Class these days and on Saturday I always use the same trains and tickets. Since my Freedom Pass arrived, it’s a Second Class Off-Peak Return from Harold Wood to Ipswich and an Upgrade to First Class for the whole journey. I usually buy them from the ticket office, as this cheapest fare is probably a bit complicated for me to buy from a machine. So why can’t I buy these tickets in batches of ten or so and then validate them before I get on the train? I would save time, even if I didn’t get a discount and the rail company would save expenses in the booking office. They’d also have my money in advance and f Town had a bad season, they might even find I didn’t use all the tickets. After all when we buy stamps, we buy them in books of 12 or so and rarely as singles. So why not rail tickets?
Years ago, I ran a company in Ipswich and we sometimes had to send people to London for the day. Inevitably we’d give people a cash advance for the ticket, but it would have been so much easier to give them a ticket, that they validated before travelling.
Bulk buying in advance would benefit a large number of passengers from commuters, who only did a journey perhaps three times a week, to businesses, who needed to send staff at short notice to clients in say London.
The rail industry now has the technology to do all sorts of things for the benefit of both rail companies and passengers alike.
Lakeside by Train
Jerry never spent any excess time choosing anything when he built this house. Every room is illuminated with a series of cheap wall lights, where you play a game of chance to see which switch is used to turn them on and off.
I had thought I had found a suitable replacement and the company that sells them had an outlet at Lakeside. Or rather in one of the related retail parks within walking distance of the centre.
Fenchurch Street Station
The picture shows the station where I started my journey, Fenchurch Street. I took a train to Chafford Hundred, which is linked directly to the centre by an eclosed bridge.
Lakeside Shopping Centre
This picture is the view from that bridge.
THe bridge led me into the centre into a rather run-down House of Fraser store and it took me a couple of minutes to find my way out and then find a toilet, which seemed to have to be accessed by a lift. And when I got there, the toilet paper was so thin, I almost forced my finger up my backside when I wiped it. But at least I had some decent tissues in my back-pack.
I have a feeling that Lakeside is losing market share and they seemed to be doing a lot to cut costs.
I didn’t enter any shops at the centre and made my getaway as fast as I could to the lighting shop I had intended to visit in the first place.
Escaping from the Lakeside Shopping Centre
As you can see it is not a very good walk on a narrow path alongside the road. I suppose it is designed to keep punters in the centre, when there is quite an attractive lake that might be worth a walk past on the way to the other shops, where I was going. But then if punters walked, they couldn’t be shopping, could they?
Was the walk worth it?
No! The shop didn’t have the lights I wanted and they didn’t even have the Internet, so that I could show them what I wanted. But I don’t think I’ll be spending just short of a hundred pounds on a fitting I’ve never seen!
But at least there was some weak sunshine, as I walked to IKEA to have some lunch and check out a few things. I did buy another couple of racks and jars before I walked back to the station.
And what a walk that was, involving several crossings of a busy dual carriageway without any pedestrian lights. There is plenty of space and surely a few signs to the station would have helped. But then Lakeside is for people with cars and people like me are the enemy, so if I get run over and killed, that’s one less stupid pedestrian.
Was there anything positive about my visit?
Yes! The trains were comfortable, clean and warm! But the station though was bleak, cold and there were few places to sit.
It did think about complaining to Thurrock Council about how pedestrian and cycling-unfriendly and downright dangerous the area was, but they don’t give a direct e-mail address, just a complicated form, which wants all of your details down to the inside leg measurement, so you won’t fill it in fully and they can put it straight in the Deleted Items folder.
The Battle for HS2
I listened with interest to the debate on Radio 5 yesterday morning about the London to Birmingham route of the High Speed Rail route called HS2.
On the one side were a few people who feel the line should be built and extended to the north, but the vast majority, including the respected rail commentator, Christian Walmar, were against the proposal. Many on both sides preferred emotive arguments instead of facts.
A classic selfish comment was from a man with a Range Rover, who said that to turn up and use the train cost him much more than the fuel for his gas-guzzler.
He may have a point about costs and I suspect he’s one of those who wouldn’t really wants to be seen dead on a train and say if he had an appointment in the West End of London, he’d drive. He’s probably one of those who rants against fuel, parking and clamping charges too.
I am sceptical about the need for HS2, although I do concede that we need extra capacity to the Midlands, North and Scotland. But a lot of this is to get freight up and down the country. You’d think this was a no-brainer, but any freight developments like the Radlett freight terminal, will get the Nimbys, who are worried more about their house prices than the ecomony of the country out in force.
To be fair to the government, they are trying to get a coherent strategy together on HS2 and the essential freight developments, and realise that if they don’t the problems in the economy will mean they are a one-term government. But if the strategy is accepted by those of sense, the Nimbys will still vote against it, when the election comes.
After all a good rail strategy would mean that people will have to give up some of the things that they consider essential to their life, like the cottage in the country.
So what we see on HS2 is just a small skirmish in the long war against climate change. Many people will never change their selfish lifestyles and will fight and of course voteto keep their large car affordable.
So what would I do?
I did lay out a ladder strategy in Relections on My Journey to Scotland, with better West and East Coast routes. Whether or not we build HS2, some of that strategy needs to be done anyway.
- Higher capacity on the West and East Coast routes.
- Electrify Glasgow-Edinburgh, TransPennine and create a fast Birmingham to Peterborough route via Leicester or Derby.
- Create proper interchange stations, so that changing is easy and quick. We need stations to be proud of that are destinations in their own right at Birmingham and many other places. How many stations are places where you could meet someone special for lunch or a business meeting? It is a list of two; St. Pancras and Liverpool Street. Although to be fair, some could be there fairly easily with vision and a small investment.
- Scrap all of the dreadful rolling stock like Pacers, used in the North, East Anglia, the West and Wales that connect a large part of the country to the fast network and replace them with modern comfortable trains.
- Whether HS2 is built on not, Euston should be rebuilt and be properly connected to King’s Cross and St. Pancras.
- Safeguard the proposed route of HS2.
The Noise of a High Speed Train
There is quite a reasoned article on the BBC today about the sort of noise you might get from a high speed train on HS2 and how you could reduce it.
The article doesn’t mention a technology that by 2020 will probably be available to quieten the train and that is the use of anti-noise, where an equal and opposite noise is generated to cancel the sound of the train. I dabbled in this twenty years ago and even then the technology had been successfully applied in a few applications. But even if anti-noise itself is not used, in ten years or so how trains create noise will be better understood and better design will be used to cut the noise.
I may be generally against the building of HS2, but I do think that noise will not be one of its biggest problems.
Ticket Madness?
I add the question mark because sometimes I end up with train tickets that surprise me. But if they benefit me financially, why should I bother?
When I travel to Ipswich to see the football, I generally go First Class, as I can be guaranteed a comfortable seat and a table, where I can spread myself out. If I don’t deserve some of life’s hedonistic pleasures then who does?
The Standard Class Off-Peak Return to Ipswich from Liverpool Street is £22.60, if I use my Senior Railcard. And I can upgrade it to First for £14.00. So effectively a First Class Off-Peak Return is 36.60.
Yesterday though, was my first trip after receiving my Freedom Pass and after a few questions when I bought the ticket at Liverpool Street I ended up with a Standard Class return from Harold Wood to Ipswich and a First Class Upgrade for the whole journey. The total cost was £33.45.
So you can see why Which has reported that people don’t always get sold the cheapest tickets on trains. The staff must ask all the right questions and the passengers must bring all the correct documentation.
I would assume in this example, that Harold Wood must be the limit of travel with a Freedom Pass. But who’d want to travel there anyway?
The Anonymous Widower 