An operational update from Rob Mullen, c2c Managing Director

Dear Customer,

You may have seen over the last couple of weeks that we have unfortunately had to run more short forms – or trains with fewer carriages – for a number of our planned train services.

I wanted to take some time to explain.

Our trains are maintained on a daily basis by a third-party supplier, Alstom, at our East Ham depot. As is common industry practice, they maintain, check and fix our trains. We rely on them to make sure we have enough carriages every day to meet the timetable.

The Alstom Maintenance team at East Ham have been going through their own industrial action for a number of months now. We’ve not openly commented on this before because we wanted to give the team at Alstom a chance to work with the trade union to come to a resolution.

Unfortunately, they haven’t managed that yet, resulting in a very real impact on the service we can deliver to you. As well as the number of carriages we have available, this industrial action is also impacting things like working toilets. In hindsight, we should have been clearer earlier about the position this ongoing situation puts c2c in and for that, I apologise.

The issue is not a quick fix and we are working closely with Alstom to make sure they deliver a clear plan that returns us to the strong level of service that you are rightly used to. In addition we have a plan running in conjunction to deal with the backlog of customer-facing defects that you may have experienced. I hope to see significant improvement over the coming weeks.

I apologise for the service you’ve been receiving recently; rest assured that this is my team’s top priority at the moment and we are doing all we can to improve this situation.

Kind regards,

Rob Mullen
Managing Director, c2c