South Eastern Trains… Lets Have Your Answer!

I’ve written a rather scathing email, copying in Members of Parliament, rail officials, and others that might have an influence to deal with the appalling nature of the service that this lot operate.  Here is the email.

The context of the email is that I had spoken to the press office of the rail company, and got very short shrift… so they got this as a response;

As I mentioned on the phone, I’m not one to be fobbed off with pre-prepared statements.

You’ve just insulted me by clearly copying and pasting an earlier statement (the formatting is different) which I do not accept. I expected an official statement based on our conversation.

I’m obviously as much as a concern to your company as your passengers are… an overhead, and something that is in your way.

I now demand that I speak to someone at director level or similar before I am forced to publish that your company is in breach on multiple British and EU laws, counts of which include customer rights and the Human Rights Act, which will examine the differences between the Animal Welfare Act 2016 against your carriage of fee-paying passengers on your trains.

Animals under the said above act are entitled to transportation to their demise (slaughter), in an ethical and lawful way. The law directly quotes that an “animal MUST NOT have suffered unnecessarily”. Your passengers are clearly NOT afforded these most basic of animal rights, let alone human rights.

Human Rights are much more substantive than this, however your customers continue to, as the law clearly states for animals, “Suffer Unnecessarily”.

That is before we come onto ticketing and cost. Your customers are paying to “suffer unnecessarily”.

I also now determine your company to be in breach of laws surrounding customer liaison, and furthermore, that your company now do not possess the ability to operate a train service.

I accept that you offered to dispel the “tweets” from the customers that you have blocked/banned/deleted etc from Twitter and other social media platforms, but that does not in itself make your company the giver of rights on what anyone can decide is a poor service, nor does it make you the arbiter of freedom of speech.

So on that basis, can you provide statistics on the number of Social Media accounts that you have blocked for your claimed “abuse”?

I also note that you asked me for the details of tweets that I have issues with in terms of your responses to. I would like to direct your attention to the fact that you operate a service on behalf of the public, to the public, and my above questions and the reasoning therein is clearly enough evidence as to why I request this information. After all, as a private company, you are not liable under the Freedom of Information Act as British Rail would have been should the system still be state owned.

I do remain impartial in anything I write, and anything I do make a comment about. I want to hear from both sides and make a judgement, just as our legal system does.

I can now determine however, that South Eastern as an operator (as Southern and Thameslink are), you are now putting both your staff, and customers in a position where they will either a) commit a crime or b) be a victim of crime.

I look forward to your response.

CC: Kenny Walker – Office for Rail and Road

You see, I have nothing to hide, so I WILL go on the record!!