Oh dear, Mark sounds a touch upset. I hope you're all feeling ashamed of yourselves now...
Dominic
Thank you for your email. I realise I have monopolised our responses and I am sorry . Sue does read all your emails but as MD I feel its the least I can do to personally offer an apology when your journey home has been delayed.
I fully understand your irritation with the delay on Tuesday night, and note your concerns that your readers seem to value your comments more than they value you having a trouble free journey.
I suspect however that what they did not explain in their tweets, was that the delay was due to a particularly nasty fatality at Hayes and Harlington. It did take some time to reopen the line, partly due to the actions needed after any death on the railway, but also due to the driver of the Heathrow Connect service having to be relieved from duty due to the trauma.
I am sure there are always things we could do better, and I expect that this was true last night. However there are times when the circumstances are genuinely outside our control. Clearly last night's incident was not something you could be aware of, nor indeed would our customers have realised quite how difficult the situation was at Hayes. If they had I very much doubt that they would have been quite so pleased at the potential for you to write about it.
We work closely with British Transport Police and Network Rail to prevent suicides, sadly we are not always successful. Line closures at peak time will lead to long delays due to congestion. We took a number of measures to reduce these, but there was a lengthy period where trains were all stopped and this inevitably caused problems for our customers. Delays then knocked on to later services such as the 2148.
I am sorry for the inconvenience this caused.
Mark
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