jamezpolley.com

After my last post, Rich Buggy men­tioned his own com­plaint, some­thing that I remem­ber from my days as a com­muter — Cityrail, every year, run a Sat­ur­day timetable (with some extra peak-hour ser­vices) for around a week, roughly between Christ­mas and New Years, and usu­ally stretch­ing a few days on at least one side. Despite the reduced level of ser­vice, they still insist on charg­ing full peak fares for any­one try­ing to get to work before 9AM, or buy­ing a weekly ticket. Full details of the reduced ser­vices are still on Cityrail’s web­site.

More inter­est­ingly, an anony­mous com­menter (who I think I’m going to name “Deep Train”) left a com­ment, which got held for mod­er­a­tion. Rather than let­ting it through, I’m going to pub­lish it here, as it’s wor­thy of its own post.

It is worse than you think. If CityRail was in the energy busi­ness it would be called Enron. As I under­stand it, the fig­ures are fudged in var­i­ous ways, but I only have unsub­stan­ti­ated rumours to that effect.

So on-time run­ning is mea­sured only at Cen­tral at the moment. How­ever, I heard today, con­firm­ing unsub­stan­ti­ated rumours, that on-time run­ning is lower than 25% at some stations.

These per­for­mance indi­ca­tors should be mea­sured by an inde­pen­dent organisation.