2016 was a difficult year for rail travellers, with far too
many incidents including infrastructure and train failures, causing major
disruption to family life of the regular commuters to London.
Over the Christmas and New Year holiday, Network Rail started
to remodel the tracks at Shenfield, and replaced the overhead wires in the
Gidea Park area. This is all part of
major works to upgrade the slow (or Metro) lines from Shenfield to London ready
to receive new Crossrail trains that will start to enter service next May. Sharp eyed travellers will have noticed the first
of these new trains has already been delivered to Ilford depot. Unfortunately, the Shenfield works have isolated
the Metro lines north of Gidea Park, meaning that trains are unable to pass a
failed train on the main line. This
caused delays of several hours one evening in November.
The first of 30 refurbished class 321 trains has entered
service. These can be distinguished
externally because they have an red and grey horizontal strip on them below the
windows. Internally, they have new
seats, air conditioning, wi-fi, and power sockets, so are a substantial
improvement on what they were. All the main
line trains have already been refurbished.
New trains will be delivered to replace all the existing
fleet between 2019 and 2021, including all refurbished units. The operator has promised to make the
existing fleet more reliable in the interim; we will be monitoring the
situation to ensure this occurs. There can
be a real temptation to cut back on maintenance of old trains that are shortly
going to be removed from service.
We were expecting the latest fare increase, as this is
government inspired, with the train operator obliged to follow their
instructions. What we were not
expecting was the sharp increase in car parking charges; this is totally
unnecessary, and a real penalty for those already struggling to pay the rail
fare increases. It seems that the
authorities are doing everything possible to discourage rail travel, as
motoring costs are frozen (apart from oil prices) while all costs associated
with rail travel continue to increase disproportionately. We now have train fares that are six times
the European average.