Keep our trains: the Maidstone to Cannon St commuter campaign

Malling & District Rail Travellers Association (MDRTA) held its inaugural meeting on Tuesday 16th June near to Cannon Street Station. 

This was well attended and a variety of duties were distributed to committee members in order to support the KOT campaign.

The next meeting will be held w/c 22nd June.

Following on from the success of the West Malling Rail Travellers Association I would like to set up a similar association in Maidstone and Bearsted to help improve the services here. With an active Rail User Group we can find out what Southeastern plan to do with our services well ahead of time and also work with Passenger Focus to improve out services. I have suggested that for now Maidstone and Bearsted form a combined group, but if enough people get involved then we should be able to have two separate groups.

 

The first meeting will be this Thursday, 18th June from 8pm -9pm at the Maidstone Community Support Centre (address below)

 

I know that this is a little late for some people but it allows the many people who travel on the 19.14 service from Cannon street to attend.

 

The aim of the meeting is to set up the Maidstone and Bearsted Rail Travellers Association and to appoint a chair and committee. If anyone is interested in chairing the group do let me know either by e-mail or at the meeting.

 

If you are not able to attend on Thursday but would still like to be involved do let me know

 

The address of the community centre is:

 

Maidstone Community Support Centre

39-48 Marsham Street

Maidstone

Kent
ME14 1HH

 

I look forward to meeting you all on Thursday

 

Laura


Kent@KeepOurTrains.com

30th May Saturday, 11:00 - 14:00. Meet me and co. near Fremlin Walk entrance, next to M&S.


All welcome - we're handing our flyers and raising awareness.

I hope Southeastern won't mind me publishing their event:

Meet the Manager, 28 May, Senior Southeastern managers will be available at Cannon Street station on 28 May between 8am and 10am to answer any questions you may have about our service.

If you would like to talk to them, please make your way to the Southeastern stand located on the main platform concourse.

For details of all future sessions please visit the Meet the Manager section of our website.


Please everyone attend, hassle, make a scene, and shout the name of the campaign loudly. (I partially jest: seriously do attend and ask them questions.)

Southeastern - sadly - isn't a publicly listed company; sadly because it deprives the campaign of a very ready way to protest and demonstrate at any meeting requiring stockholders to attend. Luckily it's Parent - Go Ahead - is a publicly list company. This provides leverage of sorts: if it came to it we could buy stock of the parent company and attend the Annual General Meeting to ask questions. It hasn't come to that yet and I still trust that Southeastern will see the public uproar and suggest - at least - a compromise. If it doesn't, and fails to suggest how they are going to constructively improve the transport links, then we will have to utilise other strategic-ends.

To get an idea of the goals and aims of the Parent company, I recommend reading Go Ahead's website, especially their Environmental and Social Report. One key goal of this is 'Strong Relationships with the Local Communities', where their aims of this is: 

' Understanding and support from stakeholders is a basic requirement for running and expanding our services. We are active participants in local communities. Our devolved company structure helps us to do this. We contribute to and invest in developing an improved transport infrastructure. We seek opportunities to ease congestion by working with partners on local initiatives. Our operating companies offer in-kind support to local charities.'

I would dearly like Southeastern and Go-Ahead to explain - where is your participation, contribution and investment in our area? You are disengaged,u regressive

Matthew

P.S. We're 623 signatures today. 

This blog is from Huw today as he wrote such a long email to the group I thought I'd just use this today. Thank Huw.
 
We have some new members to the campaign so first of all welcome and thank you for helping us all with your contributions. We have had some really great, active members who have been tirelessly handing out flyers on the trains and encouraging people to write letters to your local MP's and to sign the petition. So thank you so much for dedicating your time to that as you will see from the numbers on the petition site, it is really working.
 
Local Councils and Government's Involvement:
I am happy to say that we have a lot of interest from local Gov and Councillors in asking what they can do to contribute towards the campaign. Sir John Stanley will shortly be sending us a statement that we will be putting on the website and his office are starting the Mailling Rail User Group as we do not have one on this line. This will be headed up by Alice Hohler (Conservative KCC Candidate for Malling Central) and the first meeting will on the 5th June for more details please email mallingrailtravellers@hotmail.com
 
Ann Widdecombe's office have managed to arrange a face to face meeting with Lord Adonis (Minister for Transport) where they plan to raise the issue of losing the fast, direct services and to ask why Maidstone and the surrounding towns do not have a better link to the City (second stage of our campaign, to get a couple of fast, direct, peak services into London Bridge and Cannon Street). This will be taking place towards the middle to the end of June, so if you have not yet written a letter to your MP explaining how losing this service will affect you and the local area then do so now, so that it can hold some real sway in the meeting. The more we have the better it will be.
 
The Kent County Council are happy to be listed as one of the campaign supporters.
 
Local Companies Involvement:
 
Towergate Partnership (2nd biggest employer in Maidstone behind the KCC) have been fantastic and have tried to get all of their staff involved in the campaign encouraging them to sign the petition and write to their local MP. They have also been invaluable with sending press releases to local media and TV to try raise the profile of what SE plan to do as there are still a number of people out there that do not know what is going to happen. Thank you for your continued support everyone at Towergate it is appreciated.
 
Maidstone Town Centre Management have become supporters of the Campaign and are willing to give us a small piece in the newsletter that they send out to local businesses and will spread the word to get local businesses involved.
Kent Messenger:
 
Alan Smith from the KM called earlier in the week and did a small interview and thanks to Towergate we have also managed to get some coverage with the Business Editor at the KM, so there should be a story going out next week covering SE's plans and our campaign which is great.
 
Meeting with Vince Lucas, Commercial Director at Southeastern:
 
Southeastern have kindly agreed to meet with us on Tuesday evening at Cannon Street where we will be asking Vince a lot of questions and seeing what we can do to try to reverse the decision. We will let you know how it all goes as soon as we can.
 
New Campaigners:
 
Some of the new supporters have been doing some excellent work drafting letters and sending them to local businesses educating them in what will happen if we lose this service and try to improve it. We are highlighting to them that we will start to become an area that is unattractive for affluent City workers to live and therefore people will not move here or will move away.
 
Maidstone Town Centre Flyer Distribution (poss. Saturday 30th May):
 
We plan to draft a new flyer to hand to people in Maidstone High Street on Saturday 30th May which will be aimed commuters and non-commuters alike. The flyer will encourage them to visit the website and to get involved in regards to the social implications. We are going to try to appeal to their want to preserve and eventually improve their local community. Rather than being train user targetted it will be focussed on real issues that will affect the community, e.g. Local economy, local unemployment, house prices dropping if the area is not desirable to live in, the social demographic level of people living in the area dropping...etc
 
I will try to get local media and a TV camera down there so that we can get as much attention as possible.
 
If anyone could help us with this it would be appreciated as we are going to contact the KCC to see if we can set up a stall etc and try to get as many people as possible to write a letter to their MP and to visit the site and sign the petition. Please email us kent@keepourtrains.com  if you would like to help.
 
I think that is everything for the time being, but if there is anything else then I will send out an update. 
 
Once again thanks to everyone who is contributing, whether it is writing a letter and sending it to your MP, taking time to distribute flyers, spreading the word, getting people involved, writing to local companies it's all really great and is working. I am not sure about anyone else, but it is starting to restore my faith in what we can do together as a community which is great.
 
Thanks,
 
KOT Group

Our campaign has been given a significant boost with the arrival of Laura Cloke. In the week that she's been involved she's already sent several significant letters to people that Huw and Myself would have never thought about. Thank you Laura.

We are actually approaching end game: the final decision on the timetable is June 30th. That's 41 days to gather the support we need and stop this.

Here is our plan:

1. Persuade as many people as to write a letter into their MP
   
2. Meet with Southeastern - argue elegantly and persuasively
   
3. Meet with DfT - argue elegantly and persuasively
   
4. Compose and deliver a letter to Southeastern opposing the changes, citing all our supporters and petition signatures.
   

I'm currently at a road-block in our campaign: I have no way to contact the 564 people that have signed our petition. This is a quirk of the website I used to set our petition site up on – Number10.gov.uk. I used it because it looked official and, importantly, if you get over 200 signatures the Prime Minister office will reply to your petition, guaranteed.

This was fine a month ago, but things have moved on significantly since then. We need physical letter send on-mass to our MPs. At a minimum I only need 10% of the people that have signed the petition to write a physical letter. A modest target, but without any access to contact details this is proving difficult. Ann Widdecombe's office have only received a handful of letters so far. I will continue to pester-and-badger Number10.gov.uk until they respond (I have set up a petition site to force Number10.gov.uk to respond to email's sent to them. The theory being that they'll have to reject it but they'll contact me as a result of having to manually reject the new petition).

In the meantime, please write in yourselves and get others to do so too.

If you decide to set-up a petition yourselves, I can only encourage you to not use this website. The benefit of getting an instant response from the Prime Minister office is outweighed by the loss of ownership of contact details, as basic in campaign (a lesson learnt the hard way). You might want to use the following website which looks a little better: www.petitiononline.com. It gives you the option to the individual signing the petition to make their contact details available or not. A handy option.

In spite of this we are now officially the 197th largest petition on the Number10.gov.uk and the 15th largest transport-related petition.

P.S. We're going to be petitioning in Maidstone on the 30th May – if you want to come along can you tell me?

 It's been an exceptional two-weeks for the campaign: we've got nearly 550 signatures. To add to this we've got Ann Widdecombe on-board – a well-known and respected MP – and Towergate Insurance Partnership the renown – Bearsted-based - Insurance Intermediary. This was my dream a month ago, yet why don't I feel elated.

After chatting with Matthew France on the train home, I think the reason is that, at the moment, all the campaign has are paper-gains: we are all potential and no real change. All we have are a trains-worth of people's names on a website; this number has to be converted into something real.

But those numbers are vital, they are our negotiation point: when ever I have written or spoken to someone at Southeastern about the cancellation of the fast service, they always frame their response to me as an individual, as the only person this cancellation affects. If I can prove that this petition is large that a smattering of people, then Southeastern will have to reconsider their position.

We'll be putting our bargaining chip to the test soon, we have a meeting with Vince Lucas, Commercial Director of Southeastern. I'm looking forward to it, I've only ever had a one-way dialogue on this issue. I realise that many of you want to speak to Vince Lucas, and personally I would prefer a public meeting so he can understand local anger.

>>If you have a burning topic or point you want me to ask Vince Lucas then please email me<<

A few housekeeping points to tell you where we are up to. As you may have noticed despite the whopping increase in numbers our progress in other areas has slowed up, thanks to heavy workloads and illness. Nevertheless, we had a successful second get-together last Friday at the Pitcher & Piano on Cornhill Street in the City. Thank you to everyone new that attended, it was reassuring to know that so many other people are willing to give up their time to help with the campaign.

One of the main points that Huw brought up was the low numbers of letters to our MPs. If we can't send a large enough number of physical letters to our MPs, this campaign will fall flat on it face – Ann Widdecombe is willing to do an awful lot for us (1) but only if she has the backing. Numbers on the petition only show a passive interest in this campaign, we need to prove to the Department for Transport that there is an active and agitated population upset by this move. So get writing! If you have trouble getting started us this tool to help (ab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html). I'll post some tips for writing the letter.

This is a tipping-point for our towns, if this goes ahead it will lead to an eventual degeneration of the town's prosperity.

Get campaigining.


P.S. thank you to Laura Cloke, I will keep the blog upto date.

1. yes I know she is our MP and it's her job, but I'm impressed she retains her infamous energy and fighting spirit given she's retiring.