Arriva Trains Fails - A letter of complaint

Hello all

A complaint letter I sent to Arriva after their shambolic service on Monday 13th April. I shall blog about their response when I receive it (probably in about a fortnight):

Dear Arriva

Even by your low standards of customer service over the past couple of years, you really excelled yourselves yesterday afternoon. Just when I thought you couldn’t treat your customers with any more distain, you totally prove me wrong. The treatment of customers yesterday wasn’t so much extreme distain, it bordered on outright contempt. I suppose I should congratulate you on managing to stoop lower than I previously had thought possible, except you’d probably only take it as a compliment and tweet about it.

Anyway, to summarise my experiences of trying to get home – at 1630 I arrived at Cardiff Queen Street station, platform 5, to catch the 1640 train to Treherbert. I had checked online when walking to Queen Street and it showed that, whilst there were well-known problems elsewhere in the ATW network, the Treherbert train was being displayed as having no delays or problems. This was on the National Rail Enquiries website.

The time 1640 came and went. Unlike my train, which was nowhere to be seen. A quick check on the National Rail Enquiries website showed the train as still being on time…. At some point after this the Treherbert train (which had been displayed as being simply “delayed”) just disappeared off the electronic platform displays. A Merthyr train came and went.  

Time ticked onto 1700, then onto 1710 – when the next Treherbert train was supposed to arrive. Well you could have knocked me over with a feather - it didn’t! Finally another Merthyr train arrived at approximately 1725. My colleague and I decided to jump onto this train simply to escape the Millennium Stadium-like crowds gathering on platform five of Queen Street station.

My first major issue: At absolutely no point from arriving on the platform at 1630 to the Merthyr train departing approximately 55 minutes later did we have ANY platform announcements on platform 5 about any trains towards Pontypridd, Aberdare or Treherbert. Zero, zilch, nada, absolutely nothing. They could have been running late, cancelled or hijacked by train-loving aliens for all that we knew on platform five. There were plenty of announcements about trains on other platforms that were also broadcast on our platform. It’s almost as though you were rubbing salt into the wounds deliberately, taunting  us for daring to live in the Rhondda Valleys and wanting to use public transport instead of joining the general motorised traffic jam on the Northern Avenue and A470.

I assume all your members of staff were hiding in the staff room over on platform four as we didn’t see a single ATW staff member during this time either.  God knows where any station managers were either. I’m beginning to rank your Station Managers alongside the Abominable Snowman  and Nigel Farage’s “I love Europe” car stickers in terms of ‘things I have seen with my own eyes’ as they are never seen… well ever really.

My second major issue: Just before my colleague and I jumped on the Merthyr train, someone standing near us announced loudly that her friend was down at Cardiff Central station, where the Treherbert trains were being diverted to Radyr via the City line before continuing on their standard journey. Turns out the last two Treherbert trains had done this. From what I’ve gathered since, at least three Treherbert trains were dealt with like this. I know my friend who arrived at Queen Street at 5pm, should have got home in Tonypandy around 6pm, and eventually walked in her door an hour and a half late.

Was this just down to congestion on the line or Arriva’s desire to keep the timetable? A train arriving in Treherbert a bit late would look better in your results, those same statistics that are used to amend the price when it comes to us renewing our annual season tickets, even if it had missed out probably the busiest station on the route leaving a few hundred passengers stranded and trying to find their own way home.

I could go on about how your timetable allows you to make up any lost time at the end of your train journeys, thus avoiding more trains falling into the “late” category, but suffice to say we know what you do, Lynne Milligan has almost admitted as much to it, but there’s nothing us general punters can do so we have to accept it and pray to the transport gods that the franchise is simply not renewed with your company in two years’ time.

If only a member of your staff or one of your managers had thought about telling all of us on platform five it would have been absolutely fine. We would have quite happily walked down to Central, thus immediately halving the crowd waiting at Queen Street and no doubt saving your complaints team a couple of days work replying to angry emailed complaints such as mine.  Perfect for you, and better than nothing for us paying punters. Sadly either the thought didn’t occur to everyone involved in that decision chain (highly unlikely) or that you simply couldn’t be bothered.

I was running horrifically late for a Platelet Donor session with the Welsh Blood Service, and if I had missed my appointment it would have been another six weeks before I could get another one, so it was vitally important that I was home on time.  Eventually my colleague got her husband to drive from Porth to collect us from Treforrest. It was purely down to his willingness to do this that enabled me to still attend my donor appointment – albeit almost 15 minutes late.

It speaks volumes that the announcer on the Merthyr train explained the delays and sincerely apologised, and then followed it up with “I am also going to complain to the managers, on behalf of the customers, for the service offered today”. That man deserved a medal. You’ll probably threaten him with disciplinary procedures for being so honest.

I genuinely have never felt so abandoned as a customer as I did yesterday on platform five. Whilst we accept that incidents on trains happen, we simply can’t accept the complete and utter contempt your company showed to its customers who pay hundreds, possibly thousands, of pounds a year for a service that, in all honesty, is a complete shambles. I have never worked in Customer Service before, but even I can see the basics include clear communication. It’s not a difficult concept to master – talking to people is taught in school these days amazingly, what will they think of next? How on earth can a company as established and experienced as Arriva Trains Wales get it so completely and utterly wrong time after time after time? We can only assume that you do it on purpose, as no one could produce endless performances like this accidentally.

I would ask for compensation, but due to your well-known policy of not offering compensation to the loyal customers who buy monthly and annual season tickets, as well as your fudging of your performance statistics mentioned above, I won’t be holding my breath.

Yours faithfully

Ian Emery