Northern's Problems in the North West

[peri]

My response was to a poster who said the entire service had collapsed, inferring all Northern's trains had collapsed. Perhaps before shouting your little want it would have been good to read the relevant post clearly.

I fully accept that some routes within Northern have had it a lot worse than others, and as a frequent user of trains both on and off duty, I fully appreciate how mass disruption affects people's lives. That is no reason to distort and take a very liberal interpretation to the facts though.

Regards,your suggestion that Northern lose the franchise with immediate effect. Great, so they will be stripped of it tomorrow. Do you think that by Northern losing the keys overnight, all the drivers will suddenly be route trained and all the other issues in expanding services in a complex railway will also disappear. So come Wednesday morning the 'New Pennine Railway Company' will take over and everything will be absolutely fine. I know it's good to rant and have an person or organisation to rant at, but really.....

Possibly the next company will employ enough drivers so as not to require rest day working, that would be a step in the right direction.

 

[Robertj21a]

So, you can't actually point to any factual errors in what I have said, you just disagree with it for some other reason?

If you can't see that a lot of your rant is a personal view of matters then there's really not much that I can add is there ?

 

[B&I]

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say if the timetable continues like this, particularly west of the Pennines, after today then Northern will go bust. Today was like something from British Rail and why the railways were practically abandoned in the first place. Notrhern's timetable is fundamentally flawed.

The problems as I see them:

1. The new timetable is too heavily weighted towards long distance routes rather than more flexible short distance, commuter routes that allow a degree of flexibility among staff. Most of the delays have stemmed from a shortage of train crew (i.e. them being in the wrong place thanks to delays) and which only proves this problem.

2. It seems more trains are being routed through Piccadilly platform 13/14 is worsening the bottleneck situation. Although you have less trains cutting across the throat of Piccadilly (such as the airport stoppers), it's just pushed the problem back to Oxford Road etc.

3. My train from Crewe to Liverpool pulled in at Piccadilly at 10 o'clock. One Scouser got on it. That was it. If Northern want to drive their bread and butter commuter passengers away then that's their problem - because they'll be ones who lose money as passengers move to cars or bikes. Do it at their peril and if the DfT insist on it then they should tell them where to go or renegotiate the franchise agreement.

I'm claiming a Delay Repay which I've never done before. I was not supportive of these timetables for the above reasons and Northern have to get the message that they have screwed up. This was not teething problems today - this was a timetable that clearly does not suit Northern's operations. They can bring in an emergency timetable but then they'd be in breach of their franchise agreement, TSR etc so what happens after that I don't know. Morale is clearly very low among Northern staff.

I feel sorry for those passengers who needed to get to Manchester Airport today - I have no doubt dozens will have missed their flights thanks to Northern Rail's incompetence and misplaced ambitions.

What has led to these structural problems, apart from obvious defects such as the failure to tackle the Castlefield corridor bottleneck ?

 

[td97]

PPM for day 1 of Northern's new timetable, as of 22:00
Lancashire/Cumbria & North Manchester services absolutely atrocious
I imagine a lot of the other 'on-time' services were short-formed too
For comparison, in 2017-05 they had 91.6% of services in the green, and 90% in 2016-05. 64% today


Source http://trains.im/

 

[Malay States]

The service from Kirkham from 0600 to 2000 today was as follows:

Ran within 10 minutes of time 18
Ran more than 10 minutes late 25
Cancelled 37

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Northern certainly have some self-inflicted problems, but blaming the basic timetable on Northern (frequencies, stopping patterns etc) is misplaced.
This is down to the long-planned DfT Northern Hub specification and Network Rail's implementation of it.
Added to which the timetable is only partially implemented because of the electrification delays and consequent shortage of DMU stock.
But Northern have compounded all the issues with seemingly poor planning and execution.
I will never understand how the railway can be so inflexible when put to the test.

 

[northernchris]

PPM for day 1 of Northern's new timetable, as of 22:00
Lancashire/Cumbria & North Manchester services absolutely atrocious
I imagine a lot of the other 'on-time' services were short-formed too
For comparison, in 2017-05 they had 91.6% of services in the green, and 90% in 2016-05. 64% today

View attachment 47136
Source http://trains.im/

Northern's PPM is appalling, however TPE are even worse at 48% and they get a 10 minute 'window'

 

[Bwlch y Groes]

Fair to say that's not gone well

To give some insight, on the social media desk today we've had 6,500 messages on social media today, and it's still going up at a considerable rate. As a comparison, 1,000 for us is a busy day

It really demonstrates the strength of feeling. I'm not sure we can recover from this reputationally. Amongst many other things that I'm thinking right now, many of which I won't broadcast on a public forum, one that really sticks out is that Grayling in particular might have shot himself in the foot. In stepping in to get rid of VTEC he may have wanted to send a message to the other TOCs that the government is willing to step in and strip a company of its franchise, but ultimately I feel the message people have taken from that is "if the government have stripped one company of its franchise, why don't they do it for all of them?" There's now a growing chorus of people calling for Northern to lose the franchise. Yes, we know it's reactionary, because any nationalised Northern would still have to deal with the same problems - but politicians and the media are going to exploit this. He may have unwittingly opened Pandora's box - by demonstrating he is willing to act, he's invited a lot of pressure on himself to do the same to other TOCs in periods of crisis

The irony is that the Northern brand is meant to be permanent, so even if Arriva are stripped of the franchise tomorrow, Northern will still be Northern. Literally nothing changes on the surface. I do wonder how people would react to that

 

[Dr Hoo]

Southern Region recast circa 1967. The stuffing of too many trains into New Street c1990 that caused gridlock, and had to be undone.

Yes, as a former Provincial/Regional Railways manager I can confirm that we had a few torrid times in many cities where ambitious timetables came up against the rock of delayed rolling stock availability and the hard place of incomplete driver training on extended routes and/or new Sprinters, etc.

 

[AndrewE]

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say if the timetable continues like this, particularly west of the Pennines, after today then Northern will go bust. Today was like something from British Rail

Why the knee-jerk comparison with (i.e. abuse of) British Rail? I don't remember anything like this back then - apart from the change from hourly loco-hauled Liverpool Newcastles to 3 small DMUs an hour across the Pennines when demand shot up and out-stripped capacity. I do remember a shambles when Virgin subsequently doubled the frequency on the NE/SW route with no extra capacity added, deliberately ignoring that earlier BR experience!
I think it's fair to say that while the timetable may be a London Civil Service concoction, the TOC should have been able to work out how many drivers and how much training they would need within a few weeks of seeing it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Why the knee-jerk comparison with (i.e. abuse of) British Rail? I don't remember anything like this back then - apart from the change from hourly loco-hauled Liverpool Newcastles to 3 small DMUs an hour across the Pennines. I do remember a shambles when Virgin doubled the frequency on the NE/SW route with no extra capacity added, deliberately ignoring that earlier BR experience!

Yes, the Virgin XC undercapacity issue was severely incompetent, and we are still paying for it to this day. They provide an improved timetable and new trains, and less capacity than before. What did they *think* was going to happen?

And this was all well before the age of DfT micromanagement.

 

[muz379]

Regards,your suggestion that Northern lose the franchise with immediate effect. Great, so they will be stripped of it tomorrow. Do you think that by Northern losing the keys overnight, all the drivers will suddenly be route trained and all the other issues in expanding services in a complex railway will also disappear. So come Wednesday morning the 'New Pennine Railway Company' will take over and everything will be absolutely fine. I know it's good to rant and have an person or organisation to rant at, but really.....

Quite ,even if the franchise went back into public ownership tomorrow someone would still have to negotiate with ASLEF to reach a new RDW agreement and if the franchise was to be in public ownership for a period before being re-franchised ASLEF may only grant a RDW agreement until a new franchisee takes over with the intention of negotiating with any new franchise owner .. And unless the financial constraints changed that would still be subject to the same limitations as it is today . same with unit allocations . Unless the DFT decided to transfer some DMU's to Northern there is going to be an issue with stock until the December timetable change when hopefully Manchester/Bolton/Preston can run using EMU's and that will be the reality regardless of who is operating the franchise .

Granted there have been some issues like communicating with passengers during this prolonged period of disruption and there have been other planning issues which need addressing at a local level . But this is something that can be addressed in other ways , removing the franchise for that would be quite harsh and unnecessary .

If anything the DFT would be better off renegotiating the subsidy and allowing Northern to continue running the franchise .

Possibly the next company will employ enough drivers so as not to require rest day working, that would be a step in the right direction.

Compliments of staff are controlled by the DFT via the franchise agreement . So unless a new company was given an alternative number in the franchise agreement the staff levels would long term remain the same . If the DFT intended to let the franchise with increased staff compliments , why not just leave Northern in situ and allow them to increase the numbers ?

The irony is that the Northern brand is meant to be permanent, so even if Arriva are stripped of the franchise tomorrow, Northern will still be Northern. Literally nothing changes on the surface. I do wonder how people would react to that

I do wonder what people think would happen if Northern was stripped of the franchise tomorrow , because as an insider you will probably know as well as the rest of the staff that little would change for the foreseeable future because the financial goalposts would remain the same . I appreciate on the face of it passengers are paying Northern for a service so it is legitimate that they would take up a failure to deliver that service with Northern . But the fact is that in some cases the decisions needed to be made to improve things are beyond the remit of Management at Northern . It might be a private operator but it is constrained heavily by the DFT and practically at the behest of network rail .

 

[TrW]

Fair to say that's not gone well
even if Arriva are stripped of the franchise tomorrow, Northern will still be Northern. Literally nothing changes on the surface. I do wonder how people would react to that

I honestly don't think people would care about the branding if the performance was anything near what it is supposed to be.

 

[ajdunlop]

Did anyone see or hear any interview with Grayling yesterday? If not then he has completely failed in his job. Although plenty of blame lies with Northern all of the circumstances that have lead us here are in the control of the DfT therefore he is responsible for sorting it out and communicating how that is going to be done.
When Southern were in a similar situation to Northern he did eventually step in to make some changes. Where is our 15min delay repay for example?

 

[B&I]

Havoc comes to Chat Moss this morning. Not even clear what trains are running, where or when from National Rail.

Is it time to re-name this thread 'Northern's problems with everything, all the time, everywhere' ?

 

[northwichcat]

Yesterday the 06:51 Chester to Manchester was cancelled and the 08:41 Manchester to Chester departed Piccadilly 18 minutes late. Today the 06:51 Chester to Manchester was cancelled and the 08:41 Manchester to Chester departed Piccadilly 18 minutes late. I wonder if this afternoon's cancellations will be the same as yesterday afternoon's cancellations?

 

[M28361M]

Havoc comes to Chat Moss this morning. Not even clear what trains are running, where or when from National Rail.

There was a person hit by a train at Rainhill around 7.30 which explains at least some of the problems this morning.

 

[northwichcat]

You cant keep the numbers of annual leave low artifically.

Its set 12mths in advance and you woulf be robbing peter to pay paul.

Are you saying every train crew member has to book all their annual leave 12 months in advance?

I'm suggesting they should have accepted fewer requests than usual for this week. Then if they sort themselves out by the autumn they can have more crews on holidays than usual without it resulting in cancellations, as they should have more crews on the books ahead of the December timetable changes.

 

[Solent&Wessex]

Are you saying every train crew member has to book all their annual leave 12 months in advance?

.

In the main, yes.

The vast majority of one's annual leave allowance is allocated in weekly blocks which is finalised around September / October of the previous year.
They are allocated on a rotational basis in most cases, especially at large depots, and the staff member get's no real say in the weeks they are allocated.
The weeks cannot be broken up into individual days although you can swap full weeks with colleagues if the ones you are allocated aren't convenient.

 

[LowLevel]

Are you saying every train crew member has to book all their annual leave 12 months in advance?

I'm suggesting they should have accepted fewer requests than usual for this week. Then if they sort themselves out by the autumn they can have more crews on holidays than usual without it resulting in cancellations, as they should have more crews on the books ahead of the December timetable changes.

Annual leave and application leave is dealt with differently on the railway for obvious reasons.

Drivers and guards are allocated 4 block weeks per year that they can swap amongst each other mutually but otherwise they're fixed. These run in a cycle and have to be fit in accordingly otherwise you'd end up with a major crew imbalance. You can't not take these weeks. You don't pick these weeks - you're told when they are.

The remainder of leave is application days which you take off individually. There's an agreed minimum number of people who can be off which isn't excessive - at my depot of over 100 guards it's 4. Anything above that is made up a) from vacancies in block leave weeks (so if say of the 10 number of crew booked on block leave, due to unfilled vacancies only 9 are actually off, an extra day goes in the daily application leave allowance) and b) at the company's discretion if they have additional cover for whatever reason.

Artificially restricting leave to the back end of the year causes further problems because leave doesn't carry over and you can't unreasonably prevent someone from taking their leave entitlement so consequently getting time off in November and December can already be difficult as people use up excess leave.

 

[B&I]

If you can't see that a lot of your rant is a personal view of matters then there's really not much that I can add is there ?

Translation: nothing you are saying is factually inaccurate, but I find your views uncomfortable or embarrasing, so I will look for some other way to try to undermine what you are saying

 

[northwichcat]

Artificially restricting leave to the back end of the year causes further problems because leave doesn't carry over and you can't unreasonably prevent someone from taking their leave entitlement so consequently getting time off in November and December can already be difficult as people use up excess leave.

Leave not carrying over is something which management can change if it causes a problem, even if it's as a one off exception. Where I used to work if you wanted any time off around Christmas/New Year other than the Bank Holidays you had to request it usually by early September, plus anyone with more than a few odd days left to take off at that stage got told to get them booked in now otherwise you risk losing them.

Anyway what I was trying to get at is if Northern have extra drivers on the books ahead of the December timetable change (which they should be doing) they should have quite a lot of drivers not working passenger services just before it and while drivers need training time there's more flexibility in when that can be done than working passenger services.

 

[Eccles1983]

They can have as many drivers as you want.

It means nothing if they are sat around or covering minimal routes because route learning has been kiboshed because the train plan has gone kaput.

 

[Jimmy Foster]

I AM QUITE FRANKLY ENRAGED BY YOUR COMMENT, DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THE MISARY THAT CAUSES TO THE DAILY LIVES OF COMMUTERS caused by an unreliable train service.

Quite frankly the situation in the north west is an absolute disgrace which of course has been going on for weeks before the new timetable. As far as I am concerned Arriva should be stripped of the Franchise with immediate effect, not that will happen of course and no I don't think its an over reaction. The fundamental problem is that the penalties for failure to provide a train service are far too lenient, added to which both this and the TPE timetable should have been suspended until Electrification completion and both Northern and TPE get more stock and more driver training.

However 'enraged' you are and however justifiable that emotion is, your suggestion that Arriva be stripped of the franchise is childish at best when, as you demonstrate in the rest of your comment, you don't understand the issues they have faced. I talked to a member of senior Northern management who told me that they wanted to postpone the timetable change until Network Rail completed the electrification because of the huge problems all those delays would inevitably cause them and passengers but the DfT prevented them from doing so on account of all timetable across the country being linked. Why therefore should Northern be penalised for the problems that they have been forced into? Clearly they have messed up in a big way with some things but they have a contract with the government and will be held to account for their appropriate level of culpability.

Like you I am frustrated by my train journey sometimes but I am trying to understand the problems before ranting about it and there is so much at play here that makes me feel that you are directing your enragement in the wrong places.

 

[muz379]

Are you saying every train crew member has to book all their annual leave 12 months in advance?

I'm suggesting they should have accepted fewer requests than usual for this week. Then if they sort themselves out by the autumn they can have more crews on holidays than usual without it resulting in cancellations, as they should have more crews on the books ahead of the December timetable changes.

I think what he is trying to get at is that people could have booked days this week off upto 12 months ago before Northern knew about any problems that they would have experienced this week . They clearly did not plan to go this long without a new RDW agreement and they have not had that long in context to adapt to the fact that Bolton electrification would not be complete . If people have booked days off in this week months ago they need to be honoured no questions about it .

The way daily leave booking works is as has already been explained , at every depot there is a minimum number of people who are guaranteed the day off so at a larger depot it could be say 6 . So the first 6 drivers who apply are guaranteed the day off , this has to be honoured as it is an agreement between the union and the company and obviously starting to go back on agreements like this wont assist in negotiations for a new RDW agreement .
Anyone else beyond the 6 who apply are subject to train plan . So if their job is not running or if they are not required for other work they can be granted it . Anyone who has a leave request that is subject to train plan will not be granted it this week but that is a fairly common thing especially at the moment with no RDW.

Then as other people have said there will be the drivers who are scheduled to have their block weeks off this week which again need honouring .

Artificially reducing leave entitlements for one week would need to be done 12 months in advance and with agreement of the union . And to be honest there would be so many weeks during the year when the company might benefit from it that you would end up with it being impossible to take leave . Bank holidays would always be another one , weeks during the summer when sickness increases , the world cup this year etc etc .

Leave not carrying over is something which management can change if it causes a problem, even if it's as a one off exception. Where I used to work if you wanted any time off around Christmas/New Year other than the Bank Holidays you had to request it usually by early September, plus anyone with more than a few odd days left to take off at that stage got told to get them booked in now otherwise you risk losing them.

Leave does carry over , however the agreements say any carried over leave has to be taken before (afaik) the end of feb so if too much leave is carried over this can cause issues in the first 2 months of the year as well when the leave then must be authorised . You will always have a handful of people carrying over leave mainly if they have been long term sick during the proceeding year but if a large proportion of drivers had leave that must be taken in Jan or Feb this would be in addition to the booked leave for this time of year and any daily leave requests granted upto 12 months ago .

The agreements say that leave can be carried over so the company could not start warning people that they risk losing them , again this would not help with industrial relations at all .

 

[Bletchleyite]

How much leave do they get? The legal minimum of 28 days including bank holidays cannot be carried over. The employer is by law required to require and ensure that it is taken in the relevant year.

 

[Solent&Wessex]

How much leave do they get? The legal minimum of 28 days including bank holidays cannot be carried over. The employer is by law required to require and ensure that it is taken in the relevant year.

Well we get 30 days per year. We do not get bank holidays, they are normal working days.
This is organised into 5 x weeks which count as 5 days each and are allocated to you in September the previous year, i.e. you get told when your holiday is. We get 5 floating days which you can choose when you have and apply for in the normal manner up to around 72 hours in advance. There is no guarantee of those getting granted though.

There are certain situations when you might get "days back" for whatever reason, and thus it is not uncommon to have the odd day or two left towards the end of the year. Our Ts and Cs state that if, by the end of October, you haven't applied to use all your floating days then you will be allocated them by the company at a time to suit them.

 

[muz379]

How much leave do they get? The legal minimum of 28 days including bank holidays cannot be carried over. The employer is by law required to require and ensure that it is taken in the relevant year.

I believe it is 30 increasing to 31 with 10 years service .

Firstly there is no statutory minimum expressed as days . It is expressed as weeks . 28 days is the statutory maximum allowance . The statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks which depending on contracted days can be less than 28 days . 4 weeks of this which is the minimum requirement under EU law must normally be taken in the year (hence why traincrew have 4 weeks block booked and cannot break it up unless agreed with a manager and the days they wish to use them on are booked at the same time ) but the remaining 1.6 weeks can be carried over if contractually agreed which is the case here .

The 4 weeks can be carried over in situations when someone has not had chance to take their leave because of sickness . The name of the court of appeal case which confirms this escapes me at the moment .

 

[northwichcat]

Well we get 30 days per year. We do not get bank holidays, they are normal working days.
This is organised into 5 x weeks which count as 5 days each and are allocated to you in September the previous year, i.e. you get told when your holiday is. We get 5 floating days which you can choose when you have and apply for in the normal manner up to around 72 hours in advance. There is no guarantee of those getting granted though.

There are certain situations when you might get "days back" for whatever reason, and thus it is not uncommon to have the odd day or two left towards the end of the year. Our Ts and Cs state that if, by the end of October, you haven't applied to use all your floating days then you will be allocated them by the company at a time to suit them.

Don't forget 25 and 26 Dec count towards the legal minimum of 28 and 28 is based on an average of 5 or more working days per week, if it's a 4 day working week the legal min is 22 inc 25 & 26 Dec.

 

[evoluzione]

We work a four day week and get 27 days in total with Christmas and Boxing Day we don’t get any Bank Holidays.

4 days spring leave
8 days summer
4 days winter

These are allocated to us in blocks.

9 lieu days to book, these can be booked 12 months in advance.