Third world UK train service!

knightstyle · 3 July 2014 at 11:51AM

So I wanted to go from York to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, 60 miles, 1hr 15mins by car, over 2 hours by train.
Took the train, change at Doncaster, 3 mins to find correct train, some people didn't make it!
Then the train we were on was the oldest noisiest train I have seen for a long time. Smokey diesel with worn out seats,like sitting on a bag of cement, too noisy to hear the announcements all open through 3 compartments so draughty. What a disgrace, even the Graffiti was 20 years old!
There were some German tourists on the train, York to Lincoln, and they couldn't believe a train connecting two county towns could be so bad. Spoke to a couple of regular travellers who said it was always like this and last month a group were complaining as they had first class tickets but there are no first class seats on this route!
I'll use the car and Yorks excellent park and ride next time.

geerex · 3 July 2014 at 11:55AM

3 mins for a change was your first mistake....

Anyway, what were you expecting for a journey between two provincial backwaters, an 11 car pendolino?

Also, you'd think that people buying 1st class tickets would *check* about route availability before travelling, common sense really.

agrinnall · 3 July 2014 at 12:13PM

knightstyle wrote: »

So I wanted to go from York to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, 60 miles, 1hr 15mins by car, over 2 hours by train.

...

I'll use the car and Yorks excellent park and ride next time.

I'm not sure how using park and ride at York would help you get to Gainsborough.

giraffe69 · 3 July 2014 at 2:19PM

Also, you'd think that people buying 1st class tickets would *check* about route availability before travelling, common sense really.

Common sense by the operators might mean they don't sell them if the service is not available. I think I would assume that if I could buy 1st class then that would, under normal circumstances, be a travelling option.

knightstyle · 3 July 2014 at 2:28PM

The change over was meant to be 7 mins but we waited just outside Doncaster for several minutes making us arrive late.
So travelling between two county towns, York and Lincoln is a backwater??? Well its not London but I think we should get better than this.

whatmichaelsays · 3 July 2014 at 3:18PM

Re the 'first class' issue, I'm going to make an assumption that the first leg of your journey was with either East Coast or Grand Central, with the second leg being with Northern Fail?

Northern is primarily a commuter service and as such, they don't have any first class carriages. The ticket price would reflect that first class travel was only applicable for part of the journey.

The issues with rolling stock are well known with Northern. Unfortunately, there is nothing in their franchise agreement that compels them to update it.

bap98189 · 3 July 2014 at 3:38PM

If you think that was a third world train service you have clearly never taken a train in India. Now that's an experience.

Bollotom · 3 July 2014 at 3:39PM

"Third world train service?" I've travelled through India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Cambodia, Korea, the US, Canada, Iceland, Tunisia and others and I can confidently state that our rail services are as good as any other. I know Yorks/Lincs/Tyne and Wear can be a pain in the butt on provincial services but I'm afraid they don't spend too much on those like they do on ECML and WCML. As an aside. They are also a group of privatised companies so hardly "UK". :cool:

abacab · 3 July 2014 at 3:41PM

We used Northern rail on Leeds-Carlisle the other week.
A very pleasant route of course,and rolling stock was ok.
However ,did notice a lot of terrible "leyland national" carriages on other services.
The Bus equivalent was put out to grass many moons ago.

The_ICT_Engineer · 3 July 2014 at 5:05PM

This is rail travel in the 3rd World.

giraffe69 · 3 July 2014 at 5:46PM

And "Third World" is desperately non-pc

Third world UK train service!

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