Money-saving expert, Martin Lewis hit out at East Midland Railway after his experience on a train from London to Sheffield that had only one working toilet. Tweeting his dissatisfaction with the train carriage on Monday, the tweet soon went viral with passangers sharing similar experiences.
taking to X (formerly known as Twitter), he wrote: “Dear @EastMidRailway this train (Ldn – Sheffield) is disgraceful. Every seat taken, every standing space taken, scores sitting in mid train corridors so I guess 500 people on it and ONLY ONE WORKING TOILET at one end, so people must crawl over each 100s to reach it.
“It’s degrading, like something from the 19th century. PS and as I walked to the loo, apologising profusely, a number of people asked me to say something publicly about it. One of the reasons for this tweet.”
Adding later: “PS it seems I may owe an apology to the 19th century – many saying trains then were efficient, on time, and luxury.”
The post has since being liked over 17k times with three thousand retweets and comments of others having similar experiences. One person wrote: “I’ve had similar with @TPExpressTrains. Getting on the Manchester to Hull or Saltburn at Huddersfield is nigh on impossible some evenings with random cancellations & running with only 3 carriages for example. The conductors understand & usually give amusing announcements though!”
Lewis later retweeted EMR’s response apologising, which read: “Hi Martin, we are really sorry about your experience this afternoon. Vital infrastructure upgrades on the East Coast Mainline have resulted in a very large number of customers trying to travel with us rather than using the available rail replacement bus connections.
“We have strengthened services as much as possible and increased the number of staff to help manage this situation but clearly it has not worked as well as we would have liked, and we will work hard with the wider industry to learn from this.”
The EMR service in question from London St Pancras to Sheffield is a two hours and 15 minute journey with a return journey setting commuters back around £170.
An East Midlands Railway spokesperson said: “Vital infrastructure upgrades are taking place on the East Coast Mainline and affecting LNER services until Wednesday. Some customers have chosen to travel via EMR services rather than using the planned alternative route.
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Feature Image Credit: ITV
