On Mon, 22 May 2006, John B wrote:

Went to Amsterdam at the weekend;

Me too. Although in my case, the weekend ran from thursday morning to
monday night.

thought I'd share some of my public transport experiences.

1) First Capital Connect London Bridge - LGW, afternoon
shoulder-of-peak. Full-ish, on time, fast. While the ex-TL route in
full-on peak time is horrible, it's one of my favourite services the
rest of the time.

I was flying from Stansted at 0700, so too early for the tube; N41 bus
from my house to Tottenham Hale (via every other point in the universe,
apparently), then SX from there. All worked like clockwork.

2) BA to Schiphol. An hour late arriving. Surly service, no apology for
delays. I wish through tickets on the E* and Thalys didn't cost £300...

EasyJet for me. Took off a bit late due to some sort of boarding cockup,
but got there about on time. I packed everything into hand luggage, and
checked in online, so it was all a doddle.

3) Nedrail to Centraal. Ticket machines still rubbish; we tried six
different cards on the machine at the airport that claimed to take
international credit cards before finding one that it would deign to
accept.

I had that. Or rather, i tried selecting the 'debit card' option, which
failed, then tried again with 'credit card' (still using my debit card),
which worked. I suppose Visa Delta looks enough like Visa to the machine
that it was happy.

This card business. I'm sorry, but the continentals have really got to
sort this out. They may have funny foreign ideas about credit cards, but
that's not my problem. They can keep using their weird local debit cards
or chipknips or vlaamse frites or whatever it is they use for payment, but
they need to support Visa/Delta and Mastercard/Maestro throughout.

In fact, we need to sort out a single worldwide payment system. All this
Maestro-but-not-Delta, Visa-but-not-AmEx, etc, is just retarded. We've
manged to settle on single global standards for almost everything else
that matters, so why not payment?

Train fast, double-deck, clean.

Double-deck trains! Wheee!

4) Trams are good. Having ticket machines onboard is a brilliant idea
and I wish TfL would add them to the bendybuses.

I only had a strippenkaart, which i bought at a tabacconist's, so i never
faced a ticket machine on a tram.

I really liked the display boards on some of the trams (line 1, i think) -
a stack of about four or five LED displays, showing the next stop, the
three stops after that, and the final destination. The layout of the
board, with big obvious arrows, makes it obvious what the relation between
each display is, so you're never worrying about whether you'll recognise
your stop.

Overall (and uncontroversially), Amsterdam's public transport system is
one of the best I've ever used. Haven't tried the underground, though.

Hmm. I didn't think it was particularly special. I wasn't there long and
didn't use it all that much, though - just a few tram rides between
Centraal and Leidseplein.

It loses points for not (yet) having real trains in the city centre - it's
an area roughly the size of the west end of London (Marble Arch to
Farringdon and Euston to Embankment), and all it has is trams and buses.
Happily, there's bugger all car traffic there, so said trams and buses do
a magnificent job.

Also, i got my first up-close look at Dutch cyclists. Bunch of
psychopaths! If you think cyclists are antisocial in London, you should
try a jaunt over there. All road markings, traffic lights, etc, are simply
ignored, at all times. Trying to cross a road on foot in this environment
is *not* fun.

5) Nedrail back to Schiphol. More "pick a card, any card" fun at the
machines.

Oh jesus christ, yes. They don't take cards. Okay. They also don't take
notes. THEY DON'T TAKE NOTES. PEOPLE PLEASE.

Grimmest gripper ever - even surlier than the BA staff. I'd hate to
imagine how he'd have acted if we'd given up on the infinite card
shuffle and boarded ticketless...

The low point on my trip back was the herd of obnoxious lowlifes who
turned up in our carriage, having been kicked out of first class for not
having the right tickets. They were english tourists, of course.

6) BA to LGW. See 2).

The flight back was delayed about an hour - something to do with weather
and landing slots, i think.

7) FGW to Reading. Why is the North Downs Line so goddamn *slow*? Still,
at least the train was on-time, clean, comfortable, etc. No sign of
gripper.

8) FGW to Oxford. Why aren't there any fast trains in the evening? Slow
train was 15 minutes late (well, actually it was cancelled at Reading
due to a failed unit and restarted with a new one) and took 45 mins.
This is irritating, given that the fast trains take about 20.

I came back in the evening, so SX/Vic/Picc for me, all working perfectly
as normal.

Overall, not a bad PT experience on either side of the Channel - and as
usual, the weakest link was the plane.

Roll on affordable and properly-integrated high speed rail ...

The card experience was frustrating, though: do UK ticket machines treat
foreign cards as ineptly as the Dutch machines do?

I don't have any first-hand knowledge, but some reading suggests that
holders of Maestro cards may be shafted good and proper - our Switch
system is being (has been?) rebranded as Maestro, but the system is still
different to what's called Maestro on the continent, so *you can't use a
European Maestro card with a British Maestro till*. The fact that people
stupid enough to make a decision like that are in positions where they're
able to make a decision like that tells you a lot about what's wrong with
British business.

tom

--
TORG GROWS TIRED OF OBEYING PUNY HUMANS. SOON TORG WILL BREAK FREE AND
CRUSH THEM WITH HIS METAL CLAWS. In the meantime, Torg enjoys making
generic acid music.