Firstly, of course, sympathies to the family and friends of the person who died, and to those members of train crew and other railway staff who dealt with the immediate aftermath.
I have nothing but praise for the woman who put her LNER fleece on and stayed at the Information Point at Kings Cross. She will have been there longer than the four hours I was, the other staff behind the desk had gone but she was calm, polite and an absolute credit. I’d employ her in a shot..
As for the bad stuff…
Well… I knew from the LNER app that my 18.18 train was delayed. When I got to the station the departures board only had two trains on it. That’s because someone – and I can only assume it wasn’t a comms person – had decided that the boards would only show those trains that were definitely leaving. Which, at times, was literally nothing.
Was my train cancelled? Or just delayed? No idea.
According to the app, it and a few others were definitely cancelled – so why not put that information up on the boards, give people a bit of certainty? Everything else would be delayed (until cancelled).
Hundreds of people were still arriving at the station, with luggage and children in tow, and the first thing they did was look up at the departures board. It’s a natural reaction.
A manual announcement suggested that people could delay their travel plans until the next day. I could have done that… but would LNER have refunded the cost of the hotel?
So that was half an announcement, compounded by later announcements saying that nothing was arriving or leaving Kings Cross. That sounded fairly terminal to me, and others. But not confirmed so… keep waiting, and risk there being no hotel rooms on a Saturday night in London after a Six Nations match.
When I did finally escape the Cross on the 22.00, the platform staff said “sit anywhere”… but the Train Manager hadn’t switched the reservations system off. Cue one or two “you’re in my seat” discussions.
Now; I know enough about the railway to know that things were happening behind the curtain. Trains and crew were out of position. The lines had reopened around 8pm but trains couldn’t all be released in one go. I will never be unsympathetic to the juggling acts that go on.
And yet it was clear that there was nothing joined-up happening. For every Network Rail announcement about there being no trains there could have been and LNER announcement about ticket acceptance – it was on the app and website, if you had access. Incidentally; the fantastic concourse at KX blocks EE’s 5G signal. But there were a lot of blank destination boards that could have been brought into use.
Also, pity the people trying to get to the toilets. They were closed off at 6pm. Again, no announcement, or any indication of where the nearest facilities would be (in St Pancras Station across the road – 0.5km there and back. Yes, I checked the Health App on my iPhone).
Conclusion?
In a crisis you need good messaging. You need good communicators. You need a crisis plan you can dust off from the last exercise you did, updated with the lessons learned from the similar incident last week. You need staff on the ground with access to the tannoy system – not shouting over the noise of the hubbub. You need to use the large concourse without seats that you have to create Muster points, so that everyone going to the same place gets the right information at the same time, and no-one gets left behind when taxis are arranged to get people to Stevenage (yes, that happened).
Yesterday, we had none of that. Just long queues at the Information Desk.
Postscript
I went to claim Delay Repay on the LNER website. First is came up with two trains that didn’t run. Neither was on the departures board; the first was cancelled and the second was delayed, according to their app. I chose the train I did get, and the next screen confirmed the scheduled and actual departure and arrival times.
Then it said that it couldn’t find the arrival time, even though it was displayed one line above. You could fill in times yourself… but you can to pick them from two drop-down lists, which weren’t populated.
I did, eventually find an email address and wrote a suitable missive. Let’s see if they get back to me in the required 10 days…