Very encouraging Zoom call today with Matthew Trigg of LNER. For the past year or two, we’ve had no Stakeholder Manager contact at LNER and despite having raised lots of issues, we’ve received very little response, and no action. Hopefully that will all change with Matthew agreeing to take our various issues away. These include resolving timetable anomalies at Morpeth, particularly northbound on Sundays, the need to improve the first-class catering offer for passengers joining the morning southbound trains at Morpeth, the need to sell through tickets to Edinburgh Airport and tickets to “London CIV” for onward Eurostar connections, and tickets to London from Cramlington on the 06:10 northbound service, which permits arrival in London by 10:03 by changing at Morpeth, or by 09:40 by changing at both Morpeth and Newcastle – this being 2 hours before LNER’s own booking software says is possible. On the emergency COVID arrangements, we want better communication of the procedures in place to look after customers who are joining LNER services if their connecting service is late, and what happens if an entire LNER train is cancelled or withdrawn. I also made it clear SENRUG does not support permanent retention of the “reserved seat only” policy. Keeping a turn up and go service is a major advantage rail has over ait travel, so why would LNER be thinking of throwing that advantage away?
