KEEPING a cool head in a crisis is an art that Arriva Trains failed to display at the weekend.
I had a bit of a dig about trains last week and this week I heard of a horror story about a group of 70-plus passengers just dumped in the middle of nowhere in the dark and cold.
Well not quite in the middle of nowhere as that would be an insult to the quiet place of Billbrook.
With a derailment north of Wolverhampton, people travelling on the train to Aberystwyth on Sunday afternoon knew they were facing some delays but ended up being needlessly shunted from pillar to post.
With the train to Aber cancelled, passengers were told to take a train to Wolverhampton where they would be taken by bus to catch a train elsewhere.
At Wolverhampton at least one full coachload of people were taken to the platform station at Billbrook and it seems they were forgotten.
As it got dark and many of the passengers were getting very cold on a platform that was clearly not meant for such a large number of passengers, several of them tried to contact Arriva Trains who were less than helpful.
After waiting half an hour, a very patient lady passenger rang the “help line” to be told a train would be along within ten minutes.
When that train did not materialise she rang again, and was again very polite. But she was simply told she must have “missed the train”.
After nearly an hour and a half and with some people obviously getting very cold, another bus arrived to drop some more passengers off at the Billbrook station.
The bus driver, Stan, of Hills Coaches, was an absolute star. He was horrified that so many people had been left for so long. He got in touch with his fellow drivers and offered the passengers who were cold the chance to warm up on his bus.
He rang a colleague at Wolverhampton Station who made sure the passengers would be picked up by the next train and then waited until that train arrived and even waved everybody off.
Top marks to Stan and his mates who came in on their Sunday off and absolutely no marks for Arriva Trains who never even apologised when they finally picked everyone up on a train that came, wait for it, from Wolverhampton Station from where they’d originally taken that coachload of passengers – madness!
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IT WAS a great shame to see so many of the S4C channel’s programmes receive an official audience figure of zero this week.
Questions must surely hang over the service’s future after such bleak news.
The dilemma must be to sort out whether it is the type of programmes, nearly 200 of which received the zero viewers rating over a 20-day period, or whether the service is actually wanted by viewers.
At a time when our language seems to be going through such a great revival it would be a great shame if we were to lose our Welsh language channel.
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AMERICAN historian Ed Ferguson of Portland, Oregan, has expressed his appreciation in an email to reporter Barry Jones in a postscript to last week’s tale of how the County Times reaches around the world.
Mr Ferguson had written to Barry in a wildcard bid to re-establish contact with British historian Basil Davidson and his wife Marion.
He had lost contact with the Davidsons about 12 years ago and thought they were now in their 90s and living in Somerset but they had told him they had a son called Keir who was a landscape designer in New York State.
Mr Ferguson had failed to find him too but emailed Barry after reading his What’s On page online and noting that a Keir Davidson was to speak about a Japanese garden at a meeting of the North Powys Decorative and Fine Arts Society at the Royal Oak Hotel in Welshpool.
Barry showed the message to Society member and town councillor Tony Harvey who spoke to Mr Davidson and all were amazed that he was the man Mr Ferguson had been looking for.
He said his parents are still alive and evidently contact was re-establish all round as Barry has now received another email from Mr Ferguson saying: “I am now in touch with the Davidson family, to the surprise of all of us. Many thanks to you for forwarding my message to Keir.” Glad to be of service.