Chiltern Railways’ services became the latest to transition into public ownership on Sunday, marking the sixth train operator to be nationalised by the Government.
The UK’s largest train operator, Govia Thameslink Railway, alongside c2c, Greater Anglia, South Western Railway, and West Midlands Trains, have already been brought into public ownership by the Government.
From December, the Department for Transport (DfT) confirmed that 25 additional daily Chiltern Railways services will be introduced to help tackle “overcrowding”, delivering 10,000 extra seats during each weekday. This plan incorporates half-hourly weekday trains running along the Chiltern main line between London and Birmingham, as well as an increase in weekend journeys.
Just got back from Cordoba, Spain, a journey of 1800km. The first 1700km took 6 hours on a combination of Spainish light rail, high speed rail and a flight. The remaining 100km took 5 hours on a combination of three British trains, with a total of 3.5 hours of delays.
Our trains are now easily the worst and most expensive trains I have travelled on anywhere in the world.
Amtrak has entered the chat.
Partner and I took Amtrak from Seattle to San Diego (roughly 2,000km apart)
The Amtrak trip took over 40hours and was easily 5x the price of flying.
I strongly support trains and travel options aside from driving and flying but goddamn has the US implemented rail travel in the worst way.
This was a while back, over a decade ago and I’d love to hear if its improved any.)
All told, the views of the west coast were spectacular and relaxing but still not enough to make up for the time/cost.
It hasn’t. As a method of commuting or travel to get somewhere it’s terrible. As a relaxing journey where the destination isn’t the point, it’s rather nice… assuming you have a room. And can afford it.
I took the train from Seattle to Philly via Chicago, and it was a really great trip. The food on the Empire Builder was actually good and included, and the observation car was the perfect place to hang out, play cards, and just watch the scenery go by.
You should visit Germany then… I’m willing to bet our DB train service is worse!
I never understood the complain of DB (and overall German trains), but I only use them once a year. Now for the ticket selling machines… Wtf designed these, they are easily the worst customer experience I’ve ever got on a ticket machine ever! Also the app. Why??
The fucking app is a perfect demonstration of what happens when a company has way too many middle managers who have to justify their existence somehow. So instead of helping to efficiently get people from A to B, they just keep “developing” features for like 0.01% of users.
I regularly use both. British trains are much worse than DB. Thats not to say DB as great, but there is at least a high speed network. The UK has… St Pancras to Folkestone, about 100km. Oh, and large parts of it aren’t high speed at all.
DB is also much clearer about engineering work (of which there is a lot at the moment…), recent experience landing at Stanstead suggest its a pot luck whether there will be a train or a chaotic bus replaceme service. The fractured nature of the British system really doesn’t help - where do I even go to check the status when there are so many operators. Who even operates that line?
Service notices for the whole network can be found at nationalrail.co.uk
Okay, that actually sounds worse. As someone who’s had to put up with DB’s unspeakable delays quite often lately, I wouldn’t have thought it could get any worse.
It just occurred to me that Italia is set to join us soon as another private operator on the prime routes. Hopefully, we won’t have to deal with the same operational chaos as you do (on top of the crumbling infrastructure).
In any case, have a great day (and a smooth trip next time)!
I have taken the train in many countries, and Germany was one of the weirdest experiences because I expected deutsche Gründlichkeit and got one of the shittiest ticketing machines imaginable, then boarded a train after over an hour of waiting because all trains were delayed, but was told off for having the wrong ticket because it was a direct train and I bought a ticket for the snail train, which I didn’t know was a thing. The train stations were clean though.
bro, you have double decker trains.
Lets hope it improves, though I’m not holding my breath.