`We are heading in right direction'

Passenger complaints: Virgin Trains chief defends service as readers highlight their tales of woe on his trains

COMPARED WITH some of his trains, Chris Green was reasonably punctual.

Mr Green, 55-year-old chief executive of Virgin Trains, was just eight minutes late for his interview with The Independent. That compares well with some of the stories of "journeys from hell" told by Independent readers.

The two companies for which Mr Green is responsible - Virgin West Coast and Virgin CrossCountry - have recently made a clean sweep of the industry's least desirable awards.

The passengers' watchdog, the Central Rail Users' Consultative Committee, started the ball rolling when it released figures showing that one in five Virgin trains arrived late - the worst performing train operator. The rail regulator heaped further opprobrium on Richard Branson's companies, declaring that they had received comfortably the most complaints of all 25 main train companies.

And now we can reveal that the hapless Virgin group has been the object of by far the most brickbats from Independent readers who responded to our invitation to write to us with their most memorable "rail fiascos".

Of the 55 complaints that related to a named operator, 30 applied to Mr Branson's group - or some 55 per cent. The nearest "competitors" were a long way behind. They were the Wales & West company with four and Great Western with three. So we decided to give Mr Green the opportunity to explain his company's apparent inability to provide a reliable service.

Mr Green, who has been in the rail industry for most of the past 34 years, but with Virgin only since February, said it did not surprise him that Virgin topped the Independent list.

He insisted, however, that the company was heading in the right direction and on a recent journey around the Virgin network, he had been "pleasantly surprised" by passengers' comments. "We rarely find customers who are continuously having really bad experiences, but I know every now and then we let you down very badly," he said.

"One customer told me the other day that he has an 85 per cent chance of arriving within 10 minutes of the scheduled time on a Virgin train, but that he couldn't predict that on a motorway. What he couldn't forgive us for was the occasional four-hour stoppages."

For those long and sometimes inadequately explained stops in the middle of nowhere, the company is resorting to desperate measures.

All 3,200 of Virgin Trains' employees have been asked to volunteer for "action teams", which are called out when one of the company's trains has shuddered to a halt near their homes.

They are meant to drive to the train, laden with mobile phones, stacks of free rail tickets and armed with the ability to authorise free taxis. Mr Green himself is a member of an action team, but he concedes that it is decidedly easier to help passengers stranded near his home at Berkhamsted, just north of London, than in the Lake District or Highland Scotland where employees might have to drive 50 miles to get to the train.

Perhaps just as desperate is Virgin's answer to the highly troublesome air-conditioning equipment on much of its CrossCountry rolling stock. The answer, courtesy of Brenda Klug, the new customer service director, is ice cream. Passengers who have been near to expiring in the hothouse atmosphere of Virgin trains this summer have latterly been able to enjoy free choc ices by way of compensation.

Part of the problem, said Mr Green, is the age of the rolling stock. "I've got to keep these 30-year-old locos going for another three years. Some of them have done 5 million miles, virtually at full power for 18 hours a day." The ancient iron horses also have to cope with an unforeseen 11 per cent growth in passengers last year and another of the same magnitude this year, says Mr Green. "We've never made the old trains work harder. We are trying to make them run more miles more quickly and infuriating more people when they break down."

Mr Green cited the air- conditioning problem as a reason for frequent closure of buffet facilities this summer. Employees, slaving over hot toasters and grills, have been fainting in the heat and have been advised to regularly shut the buffet and take food round on a trolley instead.

The Virgin executive reckoned that some 70 per cent of the delays and cancellations are the responsibility of Railtrack, the company that owns the track and signalling systems. "And Railtrack can't avoid all delays. They can't stop lorries falling off bridges."

Mr Green promised that things will get better. Virgin is spending pounds 900m on a fleet of 53 tilting trains for the West Coast main line. That, and a radical revamp of on-board services, would, he said, transform it into a "show railway".

The Virgin executive said it was Richard Branson's "dream" to double the number of trains and the number of passengers it carried. "Some pounds 4bn is being invested in Virgin Trains for which we will praise Richard Branson in four years' time. We would have never got that kind of investment in British Rail days."