Get Set: AwayDay With Arriva
This is part three of #numberunspecified. If you’re joining at this point, you may wish to backtrack slightly to parts one and two. Equally, you may not. Bear in mind, though, that there may be a quiz.
One of the advantages of living here in deepest Wales is that our local train service is unencumbered by that blight on urban travel: the morning peak. Back in Norfolk, one would be left with the conundrum of whether to pay extra for the privilege of travelling up the Fen Line nice and early, or else lose a great big chunk of the morning waiting for the cheap seats to come along. Not so here at the end of the Cambrian Line, as we tend to have mercifully few commuters this side of Newtown. And so it was that I caught the 0514 Arriva Trains Wales service from Aberystwyth that delightful, soggy Saturday morning to begin my rather circuitous route to Newcastle-under-Lyme.
I’m rather fond of the 0514 service, all told. I got rather familiar with the 0530, as then was, back in 2009, when my secondment to the new store in Oswestry saw me setting off at this charmingly-unsociable hour at least a couple of times a week for four months. Peace and quiet is usually guaranteed at least as far as Welshpool, if not Shrewsbury and on-board announcements tend to be kept to a minimum, affording one the opportunity to catch up on work, sleep, or a spot of reading.
This particular 0514 was even more sparsely-populated than usual, owing to the rare luxury of four carriages all the way from Aber (usually, we’ll start off with one two-car unit and gain another at Machynlleth or, occasionally, Shrewsbury). What’s more, on this particular morning, with its trains Arriva Trains Wales was really spoiling us, as both units were of the newly-refurbished variety (and given that, at the time of my journey, only six of the company’s 24 Class 158 units had been refurbished, the odds were surely stacked against my getting such a grand start to my journeys: I chose to take this as a sign that my travels would go well this week).
At this point, it’s just possible that some may be wondering if I’m focussing a little too heavily on the travel part of this holiday, rather than getting to, as it were, the meat of the trip. Thing is, with so many disparate locations to visit over the course of the week, travel was as much a part of this holiday as the bits in between. Indeed, one of the aspects of the trip to which I was very much looking forward was the opportunity to bash the tracks of several new-to-me rail lines, sampling both the many and varied vistas and the wide variety of travelling experiences afforded by the fractured nature of our current rail network. All of which is just something of an admittedly belated warning that these forthcoming posts will be devoted as much to the journey as the destination.
Arriva’s refurbished 158s are undoubtedly a massive improvement on those still awaiting conversion, both in appearance and in comfort. Prior to this refurbishment package, the units had seen little in the way of investment since privatisation (indeed, in some units it is still possible to see the metal plate in-between carriages where the once-innovative payphones were installed when the units were built at the beginning of the nineties). The spruced up units now boast improved lighting (dodgy lights, combined with grey walls, made the original interiors look so drab), power sockets at table seats and - rather significantly for a lanky bugger like me - improved seating and a little more leg room, meaning that I can now actually fit in the airline-style seats, which is nice. Outwardly, the units have also benefitted from a shiny new livery that only serves to make the “old” units look even more of a disgrace. Rather shockingly, given that they’ve held the franchise since 2003, Arriva had never got round to repainting the entire fleet in its own colours, meaning that we have a mish-mash of units in either Arriva teal or the silver Alphaline livery (sans logo, natch) of Arriva’s predecessors, Wales & Borders. Cynics may suggest that they were waiting for something akin to the current refurbishment programme, the cost of which is being met by the Welsh Assembly Government. And so would I.
It must be said, in defence of Arriva, that they do seem to be putting in a bit more of an effort these days than was the case at the start of the franchise, some eight years ago. The extension of services to Birmingham International, as opposed to Birmingham New Street, has indeed cut down on the compound delays often witnessed in years gone by - or worse still, the increasing habit, before this change, of terminating trains short, at Wolverhampton, in order to get things back on schedule. Some areas, however, seem to have seen little or no improvement: there is still overcrowding on some services owing to year-on-year increases in passenger numbers, something unfortunately not predicted when the franchise was drawn up in the early 2000s. Funding for some extra units was found, but not, if we’re honest, nearly enough for the extreme peaks, especially around holiday season and the beginning and end of university term time. Still, this is not a problem in any way unique to the Cambrian Line - or, for that matter, Arriva.
All of the above tends to float through my mind whenever I use the Cambrian Line, although pondering on these matters was restricted to the part of the journey west of Machynlleth, as soon after this my decision to stay up for the train, rather than risk oversleeping, finally caught up with me and I fell into a deep sleep until Shrewsbury, at which point the large influx of passengers made it a bit noisy for a kip.
Scheduled time of arrival in Wolverhampton was 0808 and we hit it pretty much on the dot, which is always nice. After a 33-minute wait at this somewhat-ugly station, it was time to catch the 0841 CrossCountry service to Bournemouth, from which I would be alighting at Oxford for the first stop-off point of my holiday.
Now, I don’t know what it is about CrossCountry, but I’ve never been much of a fan. There’s nothing technically wrong with their services, from my experience, but they do seem to be lacking something or other - and not just the shop, although that’s probably symptomatic of the larger problem. CrossCountry runs rather a lot of routes inherited from all sorts of companies, but the ex-Virgin ones all seem to be a shadow of their former selves.
I was minded to disapprove of CrossCountry before they’d so much as run a single service, quite possibly because they were another Arriva company - and they weren’t exactly working wonders with the Cambrian Line at that point. There’s also something about the interior of their ex-Virgin Trains rolling stock that just seems a little tired. It may be the incredibly half-hearted efforts at rebranding, or the mish-mash between Virgin and CrossCountry colours. Equally, it may be that someone made them a perfectly serviceable logo and, clearly not understanding what it was supposed to represent (a stylised “XC”), they insist on using it the wrong way round. These things matter. Still, the journeys I’ve taken with them have, technically, always been pleasant enough. And on this occasion we also had a rather attractive train manager with an even more attractive Scottish accent. These things matter, also.
Anyway, one somewhat-overlong pre-amble later, at 1014, I was in Oxford, which is probably this ‘blog’s cue to start typing things of some interest to someone. In a bit, anyway.