EMR seem “more sinned against than sinner”, at the mercy of poor government decisions/ Covid etc (for example, nobody seems to want to take a final decision on the splitting/ retaining/ home of the Liverpool-Norwich services)
They’ve increased capacity on a number of services, given the way that 170s have replaced single/ two coach 153/156s, but obviously they’ve been dependent on circumstances around the country for when they could finally take these trains on
Maybe it’d have been better to keep these trains in sidings until they had sufficient matching fabric but they took the decision to introduce longer/better trains instead.
Maybe some passengers are more bothered with getting a seat on a Turbostar than cramming onto a single 153, rather than worrying about the seat being a different colour to the one on yesterday’s train?
If passenger numbers on the Corby line don’t require more than a double up EMU then I’m fine with “just” The right coaches on a route previously operated by four coach 222s
I’d certainly welcome more carriages on the Liverpool-Nottingham section of that service but I’d also welcome clarity over things like whether the service will be run by the same people as do the “other” Liverpool-Sheffield trains (the Cleethorpes route) - the government seem frit though
EMR really stand out as a horrendous operation. The fact they put on this massive promotion of themselves as a strong brand, introducing mascots and big adverts and promos and stuff, without anything to back it up is what gets to me the most
I’m slightly surprised to see such an attempt at a hatchet job on a fairly inoffensive TOC - other than the seat obsessives (who predictably managed to find a way to complain about the seating display at certain stations) and the people who can’t accept the scrapping of the 1970s trains with period features
It just feels like a lot of modern newspaper columnists, trying to be contrary and going against the grain by suggesting that the “real” problem is actually not the huge issue that everyone was talking about but something much more minor
don't get me started on the Acapela Rachel announcements at smaller stations - not that that's a massive issue but if I'm listing all of their disappointments I might as well add it all!
This feels like a mistake to mention
If you’re making a complaint then you should stick to the main points, hammer them home, compare the current situation with either how things were in the past (e.g. if Stagecoach’s EMT provided twelve coach Corby services and at least six coaches on all Liverpool-Norwich trains) or how they are elsewhere (e.g. how much more reliable Avanti are for journeys between the Midlands and London)
Stretching out your list of points to include such minor issues as the “a Capella” voice in certain station announcements just makes this look like a grudge - you’d look a lot better with a small number of well argued points than cobbling together as many trivial things as possible (which just makes it all sounds a bit petty)
Think of a complaint like a pizza. You’re much better off with a handful of ingredients, maybe just a couple if toppings, rather than throwing “one of everything” into the mix.
The “…and another thing” approach just makes it look like you know that your main points aren’t particularly strong so you’re going for Quantity Over Quality
Permanent retention of unreliable, corroding, squeaky and non-standard Adelantes despite promises to replace the entire fleet with brand new 810s is ridiculous. 10-15 years younger is ridiculous
While I'm glad the ancient HSTs have gone, most former 8 carriage diagrams now have 5 carriages and are also very overcrowded
So, given that the HSTs needed scrapping (or, if they were going to be retained, Stagecoach should have been throwing resources at them many years before the EMR franchise started, based on how long and unreliable the “refurbishment” has been at Scotrail - still struggling after four years to run nine or ten HST diagrams with a fleet of twenty five) you’re:
(A) complaining that there’s overcrowding on long distance/ London services
(B) complaining that EMR are keeping more trains to run the long distance/ London services than initially planned
So do you want EMR to retain the additional capacity of the 180s or not?
Surely I'm not the only one frustrated by EMR's constant attempts to make out that they're some iconic, well-established brand when they're so sloppy?
From what I’ve seen at the South Yorkshire end, they’re claiming to be a train company who runs trains and… that’s about it…
From the comments on this thread, it looks like the purple teddy bear has wound a lot of people up, but it seems a fairly uncontroversial idea to introduce a range of adverts that encourage people in the post-Covid world to plan fun days out, lots of people in the East Midlands might have visited London once or twice a year on average but lockdowns meant that they haven’t done recently and need a little encouragement: a family friendly “mascot” to encourage those leisure journeys seems fairly sensible to me
You’re seemingly claiming that they are pretending to be something that they aren’t, but I think that you’re building up a big strawman - what do you expect their adverts to be? A grainy and austere black and white video where a solemn man in a suit apologised for the fact that some different trains have different colours of seats to each other?
TransPennine Express services are entirely operated by either fully refurbished 185s or brand new stock. They’ve recently gone from pretty much everything being 3 cars to mainly 5 or 6 cars
Despite getting all of the additional carriages of loco hauled stock and the 802s (which surely gives them one of the biggest fleet surpluses in the UK?), my local TPE services have gone from a mixture of three/ six cars to either three cars or mainly zero cars (due to their industrial problems)
What’s worse though, a TOC that cancel/ short-form lots of trains a day, or a TOC that have purple teddy bears?
What about Leeds services? I can't recall those very well, did they run on time and were they a viable option from those travelling from Leeds to London?
They weren’t much use at so for Leeds passengers (other than a token number of enthusiasts who put up with the significantly longer journey times just so they could stick their head out of the window)
Really, they were placing journeys from Neville Hill (since Sheffield doesn’t have a proper depot), leaving Leeds far too early in the morning and returning far too late in the evening to suit most passengers - not only are the Leeds - MML - St Pancras trains a lot slower than Leeds - ECML - King’s Cross, but the Midland Mainline/ EMT services generally compounded this by running via Doncaster and/or Nottingham, adding even more time
They seemed a reasonable enough use of stock (given that the trains would be running ECS otherwise), and the morning services were generally on time (given that they’d just come straight from the depot), but they were essentially an irrelevance as far as Leeds passengers were concerned
if MM/EMT had wanted to give them some reason for being then I’d have suggested diverting them via either Barnsley or Rotherham so that at least these towns had some token London service (it wouldn’t have been used by huge numbers, but I’d have been a fairly cheap way of getting good publicity and a token London service would have been more use here than the strange decision to run via Doncaster
). The Meridians do get crowded but are very comfortable and reliable. There are still too many 156s about but those will wind down soon. I like the big Miles at Sheffield, maybe I'm easier to please but it puts a nice face on travel and creates a nicer atmosphere than a gloomy corporate marketing style. I'm all for it (then I've worked in marketing myself so I'm partial to these campaigns).