Welling­ton’s Tranz Metro trains have late­ly been known for cer­tain car­riages with bro­ken heat­ing. It’s hor­ri­ble enough being (rel­a­tive­ly) young and only faced with a 30-minute chilly com­mute. I would­n’t want to be a Para­param gran mak­ing the hour-long trip to Welling­ton in an unheat­ed car­riage.

But it seems that while the car­riages are slow­ly being fixed, Trans Metro are also pay­ing atten­tion to, you know, being nice to cus­tomers. This morn­ing when I was wait­ing for my usu­al train, a fel­low came up to me rep­re­sent­ing Tranz Metro and asked me a few sur­vey ques­tions about the cold car­riages.

One ques­tion was the toss-up between remov­ing car­riages with bro­ken heaters from ser­vice and there­fore hav­ing more crowd­ing in the usu­al train serv­cies.

But most inter­est­ing­ly, it seems that Tranz Metro will be offer­ing pas­sen­gers a 5% dis­count on month­ly train tick­ets for July, or else a cou­ple of free Fri­days in July if you use a dai­ly tick­et.

The sur­vey asked if this was ade­quate com­po. Well, for me it might be, but prob­a­bly not for an arthrit­ic senior.

Let’s hope that Tranz Metro gets their heat­ing prob­lems sort­ed out before the end of win­ter.