London Midland have a page on their website titled Improving our services where they describe the steps they are taking to address a number of problem areas.
This is the sixth in a series of blog postings which covers an aspect of the service that London Midland say they are working on.
Shorter queues
London Midland have set themselves the target of reducing queuing. They've focused on queuing for tickets where they are claiming to have more staff on duty during peak periods and to have made it easier to buy a ticket online. They also claim to have made changes at Watford Junction and plans for Milton Keynes.
So what do we think? I use an annual season ticket so probably only use the ticket office at Bletchley 4-5 times a year (usually on a Saturday when it's quiet). I do though walk past people in the queue on my way in/out of the station and rarely see more than 2-3 people in the queue at any one time. I accept though that if you are the third person in the queue and there's only one window open, a wait of 5-10 minutes when you have to get a train isn't great.
The queueing that I do experience on a regular basis is the wait to get off the platform at Euston. Back in June I expressed my frustration at the arrangements on platforms 8-11 where there's 3 trains totalling 24 carriages scheduled to arrive within a few minutes of each other around 07:40 on a weekday (see Platform planning?).
This week the barriers for platforms 8-11 work has started to remodel the barriers. As the saying goes, the 'jury is out' while we wait to see the work completed and then the results, but I have to say that I'm not hopeful.
On the plus side, it looks like the disused information kiosk is being removed in order to provide more gates across a wider length. On the negative side, the manual gate is being replaced by two wider gates, one at each end of the barriers. In theory these will be OK for bikes, pushchairs and people with large luggage, but what about the large number of passengers with tickets that won't work the automatic gates?
I really do hope that I'm wrong, but I reckon that the changes at Euston may make the situation worse. I've been told that the two wide gates will be manned during the rush-hour so that staff can let people with non-working tickets through, but what priority are they going to give when they've got trains arriving and leaving around the same time? Whichever way it is, there's going to be problems for anyone going in the other direction.
I really do hope I'm wrong on this...
Finding myself unable to come up with a definitive opinion on queuing for tickets and unsure what's going to happen at the barriers at Euston, I've got no choice to make the overall opinion on this a large question mark.
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