Today I have renewed my annual rail ticket. This will mean that I have been commuting to London for a whole year.
I never intended to become a commuter. It happened by accident. I was looking to move to working for a not for profit organisation and opportunities were limited in my home town, so I started to look further afield.
Before I began commuting, I had certain opinions on what it would be like to be a commuter. I knew a few people who did it before I started and had chatted with them about their experiences. I thought that I would feel important heading into the city every day, I thought that my work would feel much more important and poignant working in the nation’s capital). I imagined that the train would be bustling and lively with a sense of camaraderie as we would all be doing the same march to the Big Smoke each day. I think I had a rose tinted view. I also thought that I would be able to spend the additional travel time reading, learning and generally broadening my horizons.
On the downsides, I thought that the travel would be quite draining and that I would want to go to sleep around 7pm every day (I’ve always been quite a tired person and I imagined getting up earlier would make this much worse) and that a massive chunk of my salary would now be spent getting to work when I had previously been able to stroll 15 minutes to the office.
I thought that one year in is a good time to review what the reality is of my commute and whether it has met my expectations.
At over £6,000 a year, I would have thought I should expect a good service. My annual gold card should allow me certain perks. Such as upon arrival in London, Boris Johnson personally greeting me in a helicopter and taking me to my onward destination. Or if that is too much to ask, perhaps a friendly Network Rail worker to give me a high five and a coffee as I step off the train.
Unfortunately this is not the case. What my gold card does entitle me to is unlimited travel to and from my destination, as well as stopping off at any point along the way. As my destination is broadly defined as London, and there are a number of possible routes in, this actually allows me to travel to almost anywhere within my local vicinity. This is a nice perk. And the fact that I can get to London for free whenever I want has also been nice. I’ve done a bit of sightseeing and it has also reduced the cost of my travel when I’ve gone on holiday, especially as I can get discounts for anyone travelling with me.
The service has worsened since I started. This time last year, my train would be a six carriage train which would combine with another six carriage train for most of the route, meaning that there was almost always enough space for everyone . This has now just become a single six carriage train and so is often standing room only. When there are cancelled or delayed trains, it starts to become much little a chicken coop.
In my head, when a company gets more people travelling, it is getting more revenue and therefore should be able to buy more carriages. I have pointed this out to SouthEastern on several occasions, along with the fact that they made £12m profit last year despite being voted the worst rail operator although it looks unlikely that we’ll get extra carriages any time soon. It is almost enough to make you want to stop travelling by rail and, along with the fact that I am just contributing to London’s overcrowding problem which has pushed rents sky high and started to force people out of the city, has led me to consider finding something else closer to home.
As an operator, SouthEastern tend to be too defensive and not open to suggestion or discussion. They reply to comments on Twitter only when asking from help. If you email them, they send long replies largely missing your point. They have Meet the Manager sessions but largely at inconvenient times and locations for commuters. They appear to have taken the ostrich approach to customer service.
You can easily see why they are the worst if you go on another operator. Even though others may not be amazing, you can still tell the difference with what you are getting for your money. HS1, which I get every day is quite clean (although poorly designed for when it is overcrowded). Any other part of SouthEastern is in comparison, really quite unpleasant. It is different in other parts of the country, Virgin for example, is quite a pleasant experience in comparison. Even our local buses are more pleasant, now including wi-fi and aeroplane style comfortable seats.
First class on a SouthEastern journey – other than HS1 which doesn’t offer this – might cost you over twice as much but basically gets you nothing extra. Having sat in First Class when a train was overcrowded (an onboard manager – ticket inspector for anyone who hasn’t traveled on trains recently – told me to. I wasn’t being naughty), I can confirm that the experience is no better than a regular seat in any discernible way and is definitely not worth splashing out on.
As expected, I have been getting up a lot earlier than previously, and this has had a knock on effect on how tired I have been especially by Friday evening after a week of travelling. My stamina has been increasing slightly but it is still a drain. I find it difficult to sleep while I’m travelling as I’m paranoid that I’ll miss my stop, so I’ve been looking for alternative ways to get a little more sleep. A couple of weeks ago I bought an amazing breakfast caddy which allows me to prepare my breakfast the night before and eat it on the go. This has been getting me 15 minutes extra in bed each morning so far with the plus side of making me eat a little healthier.The camaraderie – which I’m not sure why I expected – doesn’t exist at all. If you’re the first to the platform, you’re almost certainly not going to be the first onto the train. The British appear to no longer be as good at queuing as we once were. Everyone seems to think that they have the right to be the first on the train despite the fact that we all pay the same extortionate price. There was even one occasion when a fellow passenger used his bike to barge me out of the way to get on first. The one exception to this is the chap that always gets on the same carriage as me first thing in the morning. Whichever of us is at the station last will very politely offer to allow the other on first. This sense of politeness seems to dissipate the closer you get to London. From this I conclude that living near to London makes you grumpy and rude.
I did start to feel important for the first few weeks of being a commuter. This wore off quite quickly though. It can still be exciting when you arrive in the city and it is quite bustling and it does give you a bit of a lift but this is only temporary. To increase my feeling of importance, I like to smash my way through both of the double doors as I exit Westfield to make myself feel as strong as the Incredible Hulk (whilst knowing deep down inside that they are intended to swing open quite easily).
Walking through Westfield is fine in the mornings before the shops have opened but I get quite annoying at hometime when it is full of shoppers. Actually, shoppers are fine. It is the dawdlers, the people who don’t pay attention to where they are walking as their head is in their phone, and those that walk in groups taking up all of the pathway or those that stand still and make no allowance for the fact that people might need to get past. Then out comes my inner rage as I mutter inside my head about how bad mannered and impolite they are.
Another poor thing about the service is the communication when there are delays. There is an announcement of the delay with an automated apology along with a vague reason why it has occurred but often no indication of when it will be resolved. There will occasionally be a message advising that you can use your ticket on alternative London stations, although the only time I’ve attempted to do this, the length of the tube journey to the alternative station plus the additional time of the journey meant that I would have been home earlier had I waited for the problem to be resolved. One of the reasons I didn’t wait was due to the fact the announcement and apology of the delay was being repeated every minute and was doing my nut in.
When you are delayed, you do get to claim delay repay if your journey is disrupted by at least 30 minutes. I have managed to accumulate almost £90 of vouchers which will be going towards a discount on my season ticket, which is a shockingly high amount of time that I must have spent waiting for trains, especially when you consider that my standard voucher is £5.50.
The longest I must have been delayed when walking to work would maybe have been a minute attempting to cross a road. I previously walked 15 minutes each way to work. I currently walk 15 minutes to and from the train station each side of my journey. With a train journey of 46 minutes if there are no delays, my total time spent travelling each day is now 152 minutes. Let’s round it up to 160 to include time waiting for the train each way and I’m spending 2 hours 10 minutes longer to get to and from work each day than I was previously. I know I was fortunate to live so close before, but this puts things into perspective and makes me realise that long term, I want to be working closer to home.
Another thing that you soon get to grips with is that as soon as you get outside of central London, connections become much poorer. The company I work for has several offices. The one nearest to me as the crow flies is in Sidcup but the rail network is not designed to allow me to get there easily and it takes me at least twice as long as my regular commute (at the best of times).
Reading has been the main thing I’ve appreciated about being a commuter. I’ve read 66 books in the year that I’ve been commuting. There are downsides. Sometimes it is difficult to get into a book so early in the morning or being so braindead on the way home that it’s too difficult to focus. Or if you have people who decide that talking on public transport before 9am is an acceptable thing to do. Generally, it has been good me time that allows me to relax and plow through the massive pile of unread books that I have accumulated.
Another enjoyable thing is the se_tranes parody account on Twitter (formerly se_raleway) because if you can’t laugh at how much you’re being screwed over, then you’re going to get really rather grumpy about it. To conclude, commuting is alright if you can deal with it, keep your sense of humour and sanity and if the rewards are worthwhile. Otherwise, it can be draining and demoralising and just add more misery to your working day.