Arcticterntalk.org

The blog of a travelling psychiatrist and football lover. Who happens to be a halfway decent photographer. Takes a cynical view of the world

Archive for the tag “train chaos”

08 Aug 2012

New Malden man falls under train


Chaos at Waterloo station tonight around 6.30 with trains not able to stop at New Malden . The reason. Well a complicated story that I have pieced together from the Surrey Comet website and Twitter. Who knows the accuracy but here we go. It seems that on the northbound platform a man dropped his mobile phone down between train and track. He tried to retrieve it and was advised strongly by the guard that this was not the best idea, death and all that. He was told that when the train moved off it might be possible. This did not fill him with joy and he argued with the guard, maybe even punched the guard as the train began to move off and fell down between train and platform. He was airlifted to hospital by an air ambulance but it seems does not have life threatening injuries. If half of this is factually correct the moral of the story is do not risk your life for a phone but just go to Carphone Warehouse the next day. Crazy behaviour.

For me it meant that having queued to get a train at Waterloo heading to Motspur Park for 25 minutes, and then not being able to get on, and seeing the same happen on another platform, went home on the Northern line to Morden. Despite most trains being cancelled and the rest severely delayed, other than we kept being informed that this incident had happened at New Malden ( A man has been hit by a train was the rhetoric used), there were no SouthWest Train staff on the platform at all to offer either assistance nor advice. The simplest thing to do would have been to stop folks getting onto the platform. The queue was five deep and a lot of pushing from angry commuter types was going on and raised voices. I remain unimpressed. Two photos. One from Surrey Comet and the other from my I Phone showing a little of the chaos at Waterloo.

Lastly well worth going to this blog to see more photos of the New Malden adventures

 

http://oddpupil.org/photos/airambulance/

 

And the Surrey Comet where the news hounds will sniff out more intrigue and adventure and chaos in New Malden

http://www.surreycomet.co.uk/news/9862966.Passenger_trapped_under_train_after__assaulting_guard__to_retrieve_mobile_phone/?ref=rss&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Platform 1. Waterloo. Around 6.30. Crowds building

Air Ambulance arrives in New Malden

 

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04 May 2012

East Midlands Railway. A service from Stagecoach to be avoided. Stuck in the Broken Toilet


East Midlands Trains are on my mind right now. Scenario is this. Happy for them to take 56£ for a single first class ticket from Sheffield to London. Happy to check all tickets. But not happy to actually provide a train that has the right amount of carriages . End result train is packed and luggage is obstructing the aisles. Have I mentioned the broken toilets also? None working that I can find. I will never travel on this awful railway again. The staff are doing their bit but what really can they do. Little in the way of food or drink either free or to buy. The free wi-fi managed to hijack all my top sites and I can assure you that East Midlands railway are bottom in more ways than one. They also apparently are having industrial action next tuesday to thursday, but with this awful level of non-customer service, how will we know the difference? But as I repeat happy to take our money.

now you could not make this up but someone has got stuck in the broken toilets! they have also lost the passenger who was sitting in the seat in front of me and are worried he too has got stuck in the toilet! 

The guard has just announced that the train has toilet trouble.  Questions to the managers are these:

  1. Are you going to refund a significant part of my fare?
  2. What did you think when you started a train without functioning toilets?
  3. Do you care at all about your coal face staff?
  4. Why provide a ” different set”, your words not mine that describes providing 4 carriages when you have taken money for and sold seats for 5?
  5. Why did your wi-fi service hijack all my topsides meaning that I had to find these all over again?
  6. Why are the phone signals so awful? Virgin trains managed to have an enhanced phone signal service all the way from Glasgow to Birmingham yesterday.

    Luggage all over the train. Reminds me of a train from Florence to Milan in the Ash Cloud Debacle 2 years ago

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