Tuesday, October 24, 2006

I've just about had it with the DLR

We have a new excuse today.....  having exhausted "train failure", "signal failure" and "points failure", the excuse for my aborted journey on the DLR this morning was "Train stuck in tunnel". Classic.

I wonder if my email to cservice@dlr.co.uk will receive a reply.

 

Dear Sir,

I have been a regular user of the DLR for several years now and have had nothing but good things to say about it. Its reliability, frequency of service, cleanliness and speed has been exemplary.


However, over the last couple of months, reliability has been appalling.  My journeys have been disrupted by points failures, signal failures, train failures and more. Today was a classic example: I understand one of the trains in front of mine got stuck in the tunnels at Bank. I had to detrain at Shadwell and use the East London Line instead.

Can you let me know what you are doing to remedy this precipitous drop in the quality of the service you offer please?

Thank you,

Richard Brown

[EDIT: 2006-10-25 22:41 - I received a reply from Serco within 24 hours. It didn't answer my points directly but  did acknowledge that there had been problems recently and that they're trying to improve things. Top marks for responsiveness]

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Has the tunnel got smaller or the train larger?! What was that you were saying about docklands being a great place to live?

Richard Brown said...

The pile of unread "Metro" and "City AM" papers probably finally reached critical mass, expanded catastrophically, bulged out of the windows and jammed the train against the wall.

However, as Raymond Chen observed, anything is possible when rails are involved: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/07/28/681474.aspx

Anonymous said...

'Detrain'. Is that like when the people exit the train, in a similar manner to deplaning? Which of course has nothing to do with perturbing a flat surface, but more to do with airline-owned transportation device egressing. The paradigm shift in sentence construction here is elucidating.

Sorry :)

Richard Brown said...

I'm not quite sure what level of response to your post would be appropriate, Andrew!

Anonymous said...

If you wish to say something along the lines of 'Andrew, your reply was rather brutal in picking up on one tiny instance of flowerly language' then I won't object. 'Cos that's probably fair :)

Richard Brown said...

Pah! I was speaking to them in a language they would understand.... train folk say "detrain" all the time :-)

Anonymous said...

Do you not feel an obligation to show them the error of their ways? :)