Philip Haigh examines two incidents which highlight the need for excellent customer service to go hand-in-hand with reliable services
Two stories broke on social media as August wended its warm way towards September.
In one, LNER left Paralympic legend Tanni Grey-Thompson on a train at King’s Cross, highlighting how difficult rail travel can be for passengers using wheelchairs.
In another, Gareth Dennis (an occasional RAIL contributor) laid bare the story of his sacking by SYSTRA after complaints from then-NR Chairman Peter Hendy about his comment in a newspaper about Euston crowding.
Grey-Thompson managed to crawl from her train - and not for the first time. Her ordeal and the publicity it generated prompted many more stories of the problems that disabled passengers face.
She told the BBC: “We’re at a point now - and I’ve never been quite in this place before - where there needs to be severe penalties on the train companies for failure, because that might be the only thing that changes it.”
The failure occurred because there was nobody to meet the train when it arrived at King’s Cross, and to deploy a ramp to bridge the gap between train and platform.
This gap is something I quizzed Grey-Thompson about back in 2019, for an article for RAIL’s business publication RailReview. She told me her anecdotal evidence suggested that booked assistance failed 30%-50% of the time.
She added: “Network Rail has been very positive and supportive. In many cases the train operating companies I’ve spoken to didn’t realise the scale of the problem. One of the stations that was pretty bad started measuring it and put something in place. They were really shocked that they were missing so many customers, but it was just that they hadn’t thought to measure - and that’s when you feel a bit forgotten.”
That Grey-Thompson is now calling for severe penalties suggests that she has lost patience with NR and train operating companies. Any benefit of the doubt has now disappeared.
There is still no explicit commitment from governments towards level boarding, where the height of a train’s floor matches the UK standard platform height of 915mm. Whenever I mention this standard on social media, I can guarantee several replies claiming there is no standard platform height in Britain – or if there is, too few platforms meet it.
The strong implication from this is that level boarding is simply too difficult and so we should not even bother.
I find that hugely depressing. Sure, too many platforms might not meet the standard. But if the rail industry doesn’t start addressing this, and order suitable trains, then it will never deliver the freedom that passengers such as Baroness Grey-Thompson yearn for.
I can’t see that much has changed since I wrote in 2019: “What’s missing from much of Britain’s railway is any drive towards improving wheelchair access. Rather than insisting that Network Rail’s 915mm platform is the standard and that trains should match it, Britain’s funders and service specifiers have opted for indifference followed by frantic compromises.”
There are some pockets of improvements. Merseyrail is deliberately delivering an integrated package of platform alterations that match its new Class 777 trains. Wales is taking delivery of low-floor trains and is making infrastructure changes. Greater Anglia also has low-floor trains in service, but I’ve yet to see matching work to make sure that platforms comply.
Rolling out level boarding will not happen overnight. But that’s no reason not to start.
New fleets must come with low floors. And when NR knows such fleets are coming, it should check platforms for compliance with national standards. Those that comply can deliver level boarding as soon as the trains start work, and there should be a programme to alter others to suit.
Maps should show where level boarding is available. It will not initially be at every station, but it will extend as compliance work takes place - hopefully prioritising the stations where it can deliver best effect.
By coincidence, one of the stronger voices in the campaign for level boarding is Gareth Dennis, a track engineer who was most recently working for SYSTRA until Lord Peter Hendy’s intervention last spring.
His downfall came after he said of Euston in the Independent newspaper in April: “It’s not just uncomfortable, it’s not just unpleasant, it’s unsafe.”
This clearly riled Hendy, now the Department for Transport’s Rail Minister, who wrote on May 14 to SYSTRA UK Chief Executive Nick Salt and said: “The allegation that Network Rail is running an unsafe operation is a serious one for a safety-critical business… Gareth Dennis is a SYSTRA employee, so he must write with your authority.”
Hendy finished his letter by saying: “Finding a potential supplier criticising a possible client reflects adversely on your likelihood of doing business with us or our supply chain.”
Salt’s reply didn’t mollify Hendy, who emails back on May 19: “I’d be happy to take it up with your head office and shareholders.”
Hendy’s involvement stretches the duties of a non-executive office holder. He first became involved on April 15 (the day after the Independent published its article), saying that NR should stop employing Dennis if he was still engaged as a consultant.
In an email the next day, Hendy wanted an apology from SYSTRA and disciplinary action by SYSTRA against Dennis. On April 24, he emailed an NR colleague to ask: “How did we deal with him?”
SYSTRA suspended Dennis on May 20 and later sacked him. I suspect very few readers of the Independent knew Dennis worked for SYSTRA. Which suggests to me that Hendy over-reacted. It would have been better to leave the matter in the hands of NR’s executives, who might have simply warned SYSTRA, but who may also have prompted the press team to actively explain what was being done at Euston.
What of Dennis? His employment deal with SYSTRA allowed him to speak about rail matters. A press release from the company in March 2024 about a Young Rail Professional award praised his “passion and enthusiasm for all things rail” and acknowledged him as a national press rail commentator.
He told me that he has lectured on the subjects of circulation and flow modelling, which gives him credibility to speak about Euston.
The whole incident followed an improvement notice from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) to Network Rail in September 2023, in which ORR Inspector Natalie Widdrington-May said to NR: “You have failed to implement, so far as is reasonably practicable, effective measures to prevent risks to health and safety of passengers (and other persons at the station) during passenger surges and overcrowding events at London Euston station.”
So, without doubt, there have been problems at Euston with overcrowding. But ORR closed the notice in December 2023, accepting that NR had complied with its demand.
So, what is unsafe? The Independent usefully quoted a professor of operations management, David Bamford from Manchester Metropolitan University. He noted that when people get frustrated, their perception of an environment changes. He went on to suggest that Euston’s poor signage and its way of announcing platforms at the last minute contributed to this frustration.
There’s psychology at work. Perhaps since COVID we’ve become less tolerant of crowded spaces. They might make individuals feel unsafe, although that’s not the same as saying the station is unsafe.
As the row became public, former Charing Cross Station Manager Mark Smith noted: “The size of the concourse does not in itself render the station safe or unsafe during disruption. It depends on the ‘overcrowding procedure’ where staff take control of entrances, allow egress but prevent access. Done promptly and effectively, this should work.”
What the Independent didn’t explain was what NR had done between September and December to allay ORR’s concerns. NR told me that the newspaper didn’t ask.
It’s this that left Dennis out on a limb. There was no balance to his comment that Euston was unsafe. Dennis told me that he’d asked NR via Freedom of Information Requests and received nothing.
That shows the perils of being an independent voice. You need to understand both sides of an argument in order to give a reasoned view. Nevertheless, Dennis can rightly feel aggrieved to have been sacked. That reaction far outweighs his words, flawed as they were.
NR has since said that it has improved the way it co-ordinates passenger boarding to minimise crowding and contraflows, by making sure a ramp from a platform is clear before boarding the next service using that ramp.
It says it better uses staff to stop passengers going to the wrong platform and impeding flow when they’re redirected. NR says it has installed more signs urging passengers not to run on the concourse. It has pledged to install more information screens.
Let’s hope it’s enough, because even ORR told me: “The challenge now is for Network Rail to maintain these control measures.”
As it closed the improvement notice, ORR told NR that the company must ensure that the improvements made a practical difference, saying: “This is important because the control measures are newly implemented and have yet to be fully tested.”
And let’s hope the train operators play their part, because they control aspects such as ticket checks and say when trains can be boarded.
Euston will always be a busy station. It’s handling more passengers than travelled back in the 1960s when the current station opened.
Yet overcrowding is usually the result of disrupted services. Crowding is simply a symptom and must be treated in conjunction with the cause.
In this way, the answer is the same as for stranded trains (RAIL 1016): run a boringly reliable railway.
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