I received a letter in the post (how retro) this morning from Northern Rail. For those who don’t know, Northern Rail is the operators of the railway line between Saltburn and Darlington. ‘Operators’ is a very loose description of their work, because they couldn’t organise a fuck in a brothel most of the time. However, I use this service (the train I mean, not the brothel), when I collect Emily. Buying a rail ticket from these dicks is my concession to gambling. During the journey the conductor comes along to sell tickets, and to check you have tickets. It is cheaper to buy them before getting on. The conductor is meant to vandalise the ticket in some way by punching a hole, or marking it with a pen. The last time I travelled he didn’t, he just looked at it. So I sent them to the customer relations for a refund stating that I hadn’t used them. Today they sent a voucher for future travel by way of a refund. Little victories eh? What would be hilarious is if I get a new ticket with the voucher, and they don’t stamp that so I get another refund, and so on. I could destroy Northern Rail paving the way for a decent operator who ran trains on time and didn’t needlessly cancel them. 

The last line of the letter said “Thank you for contacting Northern Rail, we really value you”. If you value me so much, run the trains without cocking it up.