>>2722 All of them. People are bound to pick on their own pet hates, so let's just get it out of the way and say they're all shit.
Arriva Trains Fails Wales (or in Welsh, Trenau Arafa Arriva Cymru - holy cawl, a bilingual pun!): Stitch together long-distance services needlessly, resulting in widespread disruption whenever a sheep strays onto the line. Not helped by their "interesting" recovery strategy. Today, yet again everything was fucked up at Cardiff as a result of an incident in North Wales.
c2c, aka City2CuntCoast: Frequently boast about how they regularly reach the standard 92% punctuality target, which must be such a difficult task when you have over 0 other TOCs in your way to fuck it up for you.
Chiltern Railways: Smug as fuck. Like c2c, have two routes to run pretty much to themselves.
CrossCountry: Interesting ideas about train routing. Apparently the logical thing to do when running a train from Cheltenham to Cardiff via Bristol is Yate-Parkway-Temple Meads-Patchway-Tunnel.
East Coast: Surprisingly not shit, but then they are publicly-run. Therefore doing a shit job of promoting the idea that our trains are supposedly better in private hands.
Eurostar: Wait, you want us to check in how long before departure?
Worst Crapital Cunt First Capital Connect: Expensive, full, rarely on time. A good choice if you fancy season ticket discounts and being stuck in tunnels for three hours.
Worst Late First Great Western: Utter fucking cunts. For some reason don't want to adopt Delay Repay. Surely has nothing to do with trains regularly arriving 30+ minutes late, which would trigger cash compensation for DR, or the fact that their Welsh commuters never get anything because their tickets are covered by ATW's figures, which somehow always come in above 92%. If they hit someone, they'll happily take the delay money from Notwork Fail, but unlike most TOCs won't pay out to passengers.
Worst Hell First Hull Trains: Five trains a day. How can you fuck that up? Quite easily, as it turns out.
Worst TransPenis Excess First TransPennine Express: The reason for the one-way ghost train at Stockport, though can't really blame them for diverting from Piccadilly into Victoria. For some reason have first class. Not surprisingly for a fleet composed entirely of small DMUs, it's shit.
Grand Cuentral: Actually pretty decent. Unfortunately, you can't experience it without involving Sunderland.
Greater Anglia: New on the scene. Plenty of time to fuck up yet.
Heathrow Excess Express. Fancy travelling to the airport for just a single Zone 1-6 fare? Then fuck off and use the Tube instead.
London Midland: Drivers? We don't need no steenkeeng drivers!
London Overground: Yet another example of a publicly-owned operator competently running a train service. This shall not do.
Merseyrail: Here's a cool idea. How about we run trains from Liverpool only halfway to Preston and Wigan?
Northern Rail: Here's a cool idea. How about we run trains from Preston and Wigan only halfway to Liverpool? Also, let's get call ourselves .org and see if that makes us look nicer.
ScotFRail: Scotland. Enough said.
Southern: Boring. Not much to say about them. Evidently can't even fail properly.
Southeastern: Cuntbags. Keep insisting that you have to pay a supplement to use HS1 and harass people travelling on tickets routed ANY PERMITTED (or indeed any other routeing) when it is in fact a permitted route for ticket not explicitly routed NOT HS1.
South West Trains: Let down by their network area. Seem intent on operating the odd train to Bristol seemingly for no reason other than to grab some of the ticket revenue.
Virgin Trains: Cunts. Utter fucking cunts. Pulled the Holyhead boat train due to a "lack of demand" - rightly met with a "WTF" from Stena and Irish Ferries, who were seeing a rise in custom at the time. Eye-wateringly expensive tickets for travel on trains that smell like shit (and I'm not being hyperbolic - Pendos have a known problem with the toilets). Will honour other operators' tickets during disruption, but only on a like-for-like basis. TPE leave you stranded with your first-class advance? Don't worry, Virgin will let you on, but don't expect anything from the trolley - TPE would only have given you tea, so that's all you're getting. More or less abused their franchise constantly up until recently, through demanding a massive subsidy payment on their profitable franchise, and demanding that no other company operate on their patch. Worst of all, they have the sheer fucking cheek to do all of this while portraying themselves as the nice guys.
The Pendolinos smell too, they have the same design defect, albeit slightly mitigated by a retrofitted intake cowl. Smelly toilets have been an industry-wide problem since the introduction of holding tank systems.
Red Dot Day? Really? Who the fuck wants to go to Corby? Also, if one of your major stations is closed, you probably want to hire replacement buses driven by people who know where they're going, and aren't going to drive an hour out of town the wrong way before a passenger has to point out their mistake.
I actually quite like the railways, but not as much as a good moan.
>>2733 I accidentally got first class with Northern Rail and was happy to receive a full cooked breakfast and unlimited tea. This was minutes after I'd chugged a coffee and forcefed myself a panini on the platform at Doncaster because I had no idea when I was next going to eat.
>>2734 >I accidentally got first class with Northern Rail
1. How do Northern Rail manage to offer first class?
2. How do you "accidentally" travel first class?
Have you ever rubbed off the stamp off of a ticket and gotten away with it?
I've got an anytime ticket which only shows the indentations of the stamp when tilted at an angle. I'm only considering this because I'm being ripped off for a £60 return.
>>2902 I tried that, and have been called on it. Wanted to get a train from York to Nottingham that set off 15 minutes earlier than what I planned to get, but got me there about an hour before the one I should have got. Train conductor saw, threw me off in Doncaster. Had to wait for about 40 minutes, so had a wander around Donny. Proper shithole.
>>2903 Did he not offer an excess? Certainly on my morning train (not passing through a Yorkshire shithole) I've seen passengers on off-peak tickets offered an excess for the difference, even when starting out at a staffed station.
>>2724 >London Midland: Drivers? We don't need no steenkeeng drivers!
To be fair, London Midland was putting whole crapload of money into training new drivers, who were then being systematically poached by other operators who could afford to pay higher wages because they weren't paying for training.
On top of that their Birmingham line is the model of how a cross-city line should be run. The only frequent problems with delays are caused by having to share the lines with other operators.
>>2724 Eurostar is a much smoother journey than flying, if you're close enough to the capital.
On the whole the UK has decent rail infrastructure, it's mostly just horribly overpriced. In Belgium I've bought a €50 pass valid for 10 journeys anywhere in the country - potentially hundreds of miles for under a fiver. £seventysomething to stand cramped in the vestibule London-Bristol is a joke.
But to answer the OPs question, Virgin are the worst - their trains invariably fucking stink.
>>3000 >To be fair, London Midland was putting whole crapload of money into training new drivers, who were then being systematically poached by other operators who could afford to pay higher wages because they weren't paying for training.
That's not quite right. The new drivers were retained by way of repayment clauses. It was the more experienced drivers who were leaving because LM ended up at the bottom of the pay and conditions league table by a margin that would see a Premier League team relegated in March.
They went through a phase of an almost-complete weekday service, followed by severe disruption on Saturday, followed by almost total cancellation on Sunday. They had a limited capacity to train new drivers, and each required six months to pass out. At the same time, their drivers were on three-month notice contracts, but enough of them were leaving to create a squeeze. LM operate a six-day week - drivers work four out of six, and Sundays are voluntary cover. Usually, because they're at substantial overtime rates, Sundays are over-subscribed. Since the drivers wanted a pay rise, and voluntary means voluntary, they effectively instituted an overtime ban which LM had no hope of retaliating for. Saturdays took the hit as they shifted their roster balance so that they got more drivers on weekdays but at the cost of more of them getting rest days on Saturdays.
The worst part of all this was that there wasn't really an underlying financial reason for it. LM weren't particularly tightly squeezed, they were just tight.
>>3024 Their reputation is mostly external. The reality is that German railways suffer delays just like any other network. One of the running jokes is that these days DB stands for "daheimbleiben" (literally "staying at home", though I suspect the implication is "going nowhere").
British railway passengers have the second-highest satisfaction ratings in Europe, second only to Finland. Our services are expensive (partly due to low subsidies, partly due to the inherently high cost of maintenance in a crowded country), but they work fantastically well.
