I've lived around Manchester all my life. I'm building a business here. I'm proud of my city. And TfGM are a huge embarrassment to us all. Today's experience: train up from London late (thanks Avanti West Coast) so missed Northern to Eccles. No problem: go to the undercroft to get tram. Trams not running due to maintenance (how many times have those rails been re-laid since they were put down?) No signs or online information on where to pick up the tram. So I walk the lines as far as St Peter's Square. No Eccles services appear. Dot matrix signs offer information via tfgm.com - but the only news is Andy Burnham boasting about the wonders of TfGM. Ask staff: Eccles service running from Deansgate. I walk to Deansgate. First staff says I need to get the tram from Market Street. Fortunately I know this is impossible. Second staff says trams running only from Cornbrook. I give up and wait for the next hourly train. The only thing TfGM are good for is making Northern look less awful than they really are. This was my experience as a Manc. How bad would this feel to a foreign tourist? So here are my takeaways about TfGM. You're complacent. You think you're awesome but you're awful. You don't hire and train and motivate staff who (with exceptions, god bless'em) consequently don't give a fig for their customers. You make dreadful technical decisions and need to constantly re-engineer the infrastructure. You're unreliable. You can't be bothered even to use your expensive IT systems for even the most basic live communications to your customers. I would love to fire your entire management team. And Andy Burnham, please don't believe your own publicity. You've got work to do at TfGM. Dream about an underground, sure, but today you need to fix the basics of what you've already got.
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