Train travel in this country can be pretty awful, especially on the weekends. But it is still shocking to read Andrew Gilligan’s account in today’s Evening Standard of his journey from Birmingham to London:
“I was physically assaulted, called a f***ing c*** and a prick, and left stranded after the last train back to London had gone. The person who did all this was not a mugger or a hooligan, or even one of my political enemies, but a member of staff of Virgin Trains.”
Gilligan had caused such a ruckus by trying to take his bike on the train without a specific reservation, hardly a hanging offence and something that could have been accommodated without any inconvenience being caused to any other passenger. It is this unwillingness to help, the total lack of either a customer or public service ethos that makes travelling so much more painful than it need be.
Ultimately, Gilligan took a cab back to London. In a further indictment of our rail system, the fare was only a little bit more than the cost of a standard ticket on Virgin Trains.
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