Guilty until proved innocent: Northern Rail's response

Richard Allan, head of marketing and communications at Northern Rail, has sent this response to my previous post (scroll down to read it)...

"We are aware that some tickets are fading because of the number of times they are removed from wallets or purses to be inserted into ticket gates and this problem is being resolved with the manufacturer of the tickets. There is no problem with the gates at Leeds station.

"Our policy is that when tickets are faded we take customers' details (in order to check that the ticket is valid - fare evasion costs more than £200m per year across the entire rail industry) and ask them to get a replacement issued, free of charge, at Leeds ticket office.

"When Mr Behrens was asked for his details he refused to give them, at which point our conductor withdrew his ticket so that it could be checked.

"We are disappointed that Mr Behrens published his 'blog' before we had a chance to respond.

"For the record, we are running 91% of trains on time, the highest-ever for local services in this region, we are carrying 34% more passengers than when we started five years ago and our average fare is just £2.19.

"You don't have to buy any ticket in advance with Northern unless you want to purchase a season ticket and we don't charge hundreds of pounds for a journey.

"Finally, we have nearly 5,000 employees across the north of England who take great pride in running a vital public service.

"Our trains are older than the industry average but we have improved their reliability by 40% and we have worked very hard to introduce more and newer trains to meet that huge increased in demand."

Rail passengers: Guilty until proved innocent

Years ago I watched an Eric Sykes comedy about people who wear uniforms. Put a peaked cap on someone, said Sykes, and you give him ideas above his station. Even the most ineffectual little chap becomes a parade ground sergeant.

The guard on my train last night certainly had ideas above his station - that station being Leeds. Last year they installed automatic ticket barriers there, which, if you use them often enough, eventually wipe the ink off your ticket. My annual season pass still has six months to run but it's already had to be replaced because the machines wore it out.

Nevertheless, it's still a valid ticket and the machines still read the magnetic strip on the back of it.

But that wasn't good enough for last night's guard. He couldn't read it, he said, so he confiscated it.

That's right - he took my £700 ticket with six months still to run - and kept it.

The guard - let's call him Conductor 3224, since that's how he identified himself - said he'd need to take my name and address. Why, I demanded? The ticket is valid and it's hardly my fault if your machine's rubbed the ink off it.

I had a responsibility to ensure it was readable, he lectured me. Those were the rules. They know all about rules, men in uniform.

But having already been a victim of identity fraud once this year, I wasn't about to shout out my name and address in a crowded train for him to scribble into a tatty notebook and then do goodness-knows-what with. How would that square with my rights under the Data Protection Act? (You see - rules work both ways.)

So I was deprived of my season pass. This morning I had to buy a ticket to get to work, then queue for 20 minutes to apply for a new pass - which they couldn't issue because - guess what? - Conductor 3224 still had my ticket.

I called Northern Rail's press office about this. Why do these jumped up, uniform-wearing little twits persist in criminalising the fare paying public, I asked, in slightly fewer words.

Ah, fare dodging is a big problem - we have to vigilant, said the press officer.

So what? Shoplifting is a big problem, too, but I don't have to run a gauntlet of accusing looks from checkout staff every time I go to Tesco. They know how to handle their customers.

It's a lesson the rail industry, and much of the rest of the public sector, has never learned. As a regular, fare-paying customer of Northern Rail, I expect - and frankly deserve - to be treated better than that. If the ticket machines don't work - and they don't - Northern Rail should acknowledge the problem and take steps to fix it. If the ink has rubbed off (and honestly, is that truly a problem anyway?) customers should be offered replacements without cost or inconvenience.

But that's a side issue anyway. The real problem is this attitude among guards like Conductor 3224 that customers are guilty of something until proved innocent; that passengers are sitting targets, to be lectured and penalised when the mood takes them; that their peaked cap invests them with a status somehow superior to the rest of us. If you're reading this, Eric Sykes, you were right.

Of course, not all guards are as officious as Conductor 3224, but neither is he the only one. So, for all of them, across the entire rail industry - it's my turn for a lecture...

WHEN you and your colleagues can make the trains run on time, all the time...
WHEN you can provide enough seats for everyone to have one...
WHEN you can provide rolling stock that doesn't look like it's been shipped over from a coal yard in Eastern Europe...
WHEN you start to run a Hoover over the carriages now and again...
WHEN you stop charging hundreds of pounds over the odds for tickets that haven't been booked far enough in advance...
WHEN you take an enforced course in customer relations...
THEN, and only then, can you start lecturing ME on how to use the trains.

Record high-def TV without Sky: First review

You don't need to be an economist right now to know that the government doesn't know what it's doing. But buried beneath its more spectacular financial snafus are a few more workaday pieces of misinformation.

Take the announcement last week that you shouldn't buy a new TV unless it has the digital 'tick mark' on the screen, lest it become obsolete after the gradual switchover to digital transmissions.

Let's lay a few myths to rest here. One - you don't need a new TV set to receive digital programmes; just a set-top box underneath your existing telly. And two - even after the old analogue signal has been switched off in your area, you're not guaranteed a full complement of digital channels.

Where I live, for instance, Freeview is inaccessible until autumn 2011 - after which time roughly a third of the channels will come on stream. The rest will, for reasons of geographic transmitter coverage, remain forever hidden.

You might expect, then, that I would qualify for a two-thirds discount on my TV licence. But that's a dialogue the government doesn't want to have right now. It's focus is on selling me a new telly I don't need.

Freeview, as I've mentioned before, is great for those who can get it. But it heralds an era of two-tier TV in Britain: those with all the channels and those with some or none.

That's why there's now Freesat.

Satellite transmission fills in the gaps in Freeview's coverage and provides those of us behind hills an alternative route to multi-channel TV. Until this year, satellite has been synonymous with Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB - but the prospect of having to pay him a subscription to receive any TV at all would have truly made a nonsense of the licence fee. So Freesat, backed by the BBC and ITV, is a subscription-free alternative.

It launched last May, with fewer channels than Freeview (no Dave or UKTV History) but with the added bonus of high-definition reception. Not many programmes are transmitted in high-def yet - despite the abundance of HD-ready TVs in the shops - but those which are look tremendous.

However, until this week there has been no means of conveniently recording Freesat programmes. Sky and Freeview have long benefited from Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), which let you record programmes just by clicking on them in the on-screen guide. With Freesat you've had to resort to pushing old-fashioned discs or cassettes into slots.

I've been using PVRs ever since the first one, TiVo, was launched around eight years ago - and believe me, once you've had one you'll never go back to the fiddly old ways of trying to set timers.

TiVo has become a household verb in the States ("Did you TiVo the match last night?") but over here it lost out to the better-marketed Sky+ and was withdrawn from sale. There were many similarities between the two, not least the need to buy a subscription to make the box active.

Freeview's many PVRs are subscription free and can be had for as little as £100 or so. A Freesat equivalent has been eagerly awaited, and this week the first one, the £299 Humax Foxsat HDR has started to trickle on to the market. I've got my hands on one of the first.

Humax, while not a household name, makes some of the best-regarded boxes for Freeview and was one of Freesat's earliest partners. The Foxsat HDR receives and records programmes in high-definition and, like all good PVRs, lets you select not just individual programmes but entire series, just by selecting them on the electronic programme guide (EPG). You can then pick them off an on-screen list for instant playback from the build-in hard drive.

The Foxsat's EPG is itself high-definition and makes a colourful and attractive alternative to the Sky+ version. But the non technically-minded may find its many options and intricacies less easy to use.

You can't for instance, choose to display only your favourite channels on the EPG; all you can do is filter it by genre. Favourite channels are displayed instead as a simple list which, since it contains no programme information, is next to pointless. This is something of a fiasco.

What's more, you can't rely on the Foxsat to manage your library of recordings for you. Both TiVo and Sky+ took care of this by deleting old recordings automatically so there would always be space for new ones. With the Foxsat you must perform this piece of housekeeping yourself.

Another small annoyance is the cluttered and distractingly bright LCD display on the front of the unit, which is impossible to turn off. It's hard to imagine Humax did much user testing in this area.

Picture quality in high definition is superb; in standard definition (arguably more important since nearly all programmes are standard-def only) slightly less so. On my subjective test, these pictures were less sharp on an LCD TV via digital HDMI cable than from a Sky box connected with an RGB Scart lead. But they're good enough.

Setting up the Foxsat is easy; just plug in your existing satellite cables (you ideally need two, to record two programmes at once) and switch on. A wizard prompts you for your postcode and the rest is done automatically.

The Foxasat will receive all Freeaat's TV and digital radio channels and can also be switched into non-Freesat mode, in which it scans the hundreds of free channels available from the cultural dustbin that is the Astra satellite. You don't have the convenience of one-click recording from these, however. (There's also an annoying bug which deletes your scheduled recordings when you manually scan for channels).

The Foxsat has many tricks up its sleeve for recording and playback. On many channels it will accurately track the start and end times of programmes so as not to miss the beginning or end, even if the schedule has overrun. This doesn't seem to work on Channel 4 yet, though.

It will also let you instantly jump forward two minutes at a time - ideal for skipping commercial breaks. And like all PVRs it will let you pause and rewind the live programme you're currently watching.

Unlike Sky+, it will record radio programmes from the EPG as well as TV shows. And you can use it to play music tracks and photos you load into it from a USB stick or external hard drive. It will not, however, play downloaded video files from such a device.

The supplied remote control feels cheap, frankly, but is certainly functional - you can use it to control your TV, DVD and Hi-Fi as well as the Foxsat. But its range seems unusually limited: you have to point it straight ahead before it will work

As with all Freesat boxes, the Foxsat has an Ethernet port at the rear. This does nothing at the moment, but it's the BBC's intention to make its iPlayer catch-up service available in this way in the next few months.

The 320gb hard disc is claimed to store around 160 hours of standard definition programmes or 45 hours in high definition. The on-screen indicators suggest rather less, but as some programmes take more space than others, it's hard to be precise.

Whether you choose to record in high-def or standard is up to you, but the Foxsat will helpfully flag up HD alternatives if it finds them. It doesn't have to look far at the moment because there's really only one full-time HD channel, from the BBC. ITV has a few HD programmes but not enough to justify an entire channel; while Channel 4's high-def programmes are not available on Freesat at all. To receive those you must opt for a Sky subscription - but with C4 petitioning the government for a cut of the licence fee, that's an embarrassing anomaly that must end soon.

Is the Foxsat HDR a good buy? Well, despite my plunge in at the deep end, early adoption of this sort of kit is never a good idea. Prices fall; alternatives become available. In a few months' time there should be at least one other Freesat PVR
on the market.

However, £299 is not unreasonable for a high-def hard disc recorder and I wouldn't expect significant price falls in the short-term, VAT cuts notwithstanding. It's also worth bearing in mind that the specification is subject to change, even after purchase. Automatic over-the-air software updates are perfectly capable of adding and extending functionality - and it's to be hoped that the favourite channels debacle is addressed quickly by one of these.

So if like me you can't receive Freeview and you've been waiting for a recorder that doesn't require a monthly injection of cash into Mr Murdoch's back pocket - go ahead and buy.

If you have any questions about Freesat or the Foxsat, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer.