It started in St Albans.

 

The battlefields are the trains and platforms of First Capital Connects’ shambolic empire.

For months passengers have endured terrible services. Over Christmas and through January the service became unbearable – first a work to rule by the drivers saw services cut in half (how could a company be so reliant on overtime working? How many hours were those drivers actually doing?) and then a complete inability to cope with snow (which they were still blaming for delays three weeks after the snow had stopped falling) meant that journeys that should take half an hour were taking two and three hours. For six consecutive working days in January my combined commute time (which should be a little over an hour) was more than four hours.

 

On one particularly wretched day I spent seven and a half hours trying to get to and from work.

 

Even by their own figures (which they fiddled by launching a ludicrously cut back time table for much of the period) FCC reckons that one in four of its trains ran late in January and February. This was when they were running just 3 or 4 trains an hour on what should be one of the busiest commuter lines into London.

 

Trying to get to and from Central London for work was a depressing, distressing and infuriating trial – made worse by the knowledge that every single person on that train was paying handsomely for the privilege of being abused by a company utterly incapable of organising its services.

 

Now it seems that people are starting to crack.

 

There’s already a petition at Number 10’s website and a I Hate First Capital Connect group on Facebook passed 1,000 members in 48 hours and now has almost 2,500 members, but its direct action that’ll bring the buggers down.

 

On 11 February, Debra Schiman (I didn’t know her name but she’s a fairly familiar figure to travellers going in to London from St Albans because she’s generally carrying a teddy bear and promoting her book – Travels With My Teddy Bear – to more or less anyone who’ll listen) refused to get off a train when they announced that because of congestion they were cancelling her train and turning it around. 

 

 

But that wasn’t the end of it. On Friday a train coming North broke down in central London just before 8AM causing 45 minute delays while they tried to move it. To try and get their timetable back on track FCC cancelled a train at Cricklewood but initially 20 passengers refused to get off, even when threatened by staff that the police would be called.

 

Eventually large number of other passengers got back on the train.

 

 

Now I’ve always believed that the English were congenitally incapable of revolution. It’s not that that they don’t get angry enough it’s just that their anger most commonly manifests itself in the stern “tut!” and a bit of a grumble.

 

But taking over trains? That’s just one step away from storming a palace.

 

I’m telling you folks, today it’s FCC management, tomorrow the Queen herself will tremble.