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One of our Directors, Ian Brown, took out a camera to see if people were returning to rail for off peak shopping and leisure travel in East London on Wednesday 26 August. This is what he saw. Photo by Getty Images / Rail Delivery Group.
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Better value fares, new ticketing options and aggressive marketing initiatives are needed to attract passengers back to rail after COVID-19. South Western Railway passenger won £5,500 in Touch Smartcard prize draw. Image by South Western Railway.
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Jane Ann Liston, Secretary, Railfuture Scotland explains why we must attract people back to rail after COVID-19. ScotRail covers train faces to encourage passengers to do the same.
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Have our railways suffered another collective nervous breakdown with such strong messages so openly discouraging sustainable travel - by train? Since the DfT is funding all the franchises, has it lost all faith in its own services? The messaging is negative and inconsistent, even contradictory, not conditional encouragement – in sharp contrast to all other modes. Passengers may feel unwelcome or unsafe, and may be unable to travel. The comparison with air travel is stark.
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A Railfuture scheme to encourage further investment in making stations user friendly for all, initiated by our East Anglia branch. The new waiting room at Audley End station, our category 1 winner.
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On Wednesday 7 August 2019 Britain’s Rail Delivery Group (RDG) announced that it would be withdrawing from membership of the highly-valued and long-standing Interrail Europe-wide rail passes for European residents, along with the Eurail equivalent for non-European residents. Protests were loud and clear, many on Twitter. A day later the RDG backed down. Railfuture looks at what happened and why. |
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New ticket gates cause a furore in Portsmouth. Portsmouth Harbour gateline: pass down to the end and turn left to access the ferry terminal.
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Toby Hart was a Network Rail train planner based at Leeds. This letter is his submission to the Rail Delivery Group and the Office of Rail and Road inquiry into the disruption following the May 2018 timetable changes. It backs up Railfuture’s contention that Network Rail’s reorganisation of the timetable planning function to reduce costs (at DfT’s direction) and centralise at Milton Keynes contributed to the failure of the timetable through a loss of expertise and insufficient iterations of the timetable process to resolve conflicts in the proposed timetable. Image: Official TfGM Twitter announcement on 19 May 2018.
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Railfuture briefing by Ian Brown, Railfuture Policy Director, on the December timetable ‘cutbacks’ announced by the Rail Delivery Group today, 10 July 2018. Image by About Manchester
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In the last 11 years passengers travelling between London and York, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh have been carried by five different train operators as the above image shows. Virgin Trains East Coast was the third east coast mainline intercity franchised train operator to “fail” in that time. On 24 June 2018 the government replaced it with an outsourced operator under its control. The question for the government, rail industry, staff and, most importantly, passengers, is can a fourth be prevented? Photo montage of tweets and logos by Jerry Alderson |
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Help us design an App to reduce passenger crowding on trains - fill in our survey to let us know what information you need to find empty carriages.
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