Managers throughout the industry are currently only too keen to share their fears about the threat to the very future of the railway as we have known it, due to the current crisis. Yet publicly managers throughout the industry have been resigned to obeying the destructive diktat of the Department for Transport that public transport should be used only as a last resort.
We make no apology for returning to the topic of last month’s ‘Railtalk’. If anything has changed, it is for the worse. There is still no sign of encouragement for passengers to return to rail. As we went to press train operators’ online ticketing websites were still headed ‘Is your journey really necessary?’. On one site, would-be travellers had to tick boxes to show that they understood the ‘rules’. Another had a different set of tick boxes including:
Of course, you can tick the boxes and then buy tickets for a trip to a favourite restaurant in a nearby town, where the Government will happily give you a £10 voucher towards the cost of your meal in an attempt to encourage you to get out and spend to boost the economy. Yet when you arrived at the station you could still have seen a sign saying ‘do not travel for leisure’.
Meanwhile, jol…
