Thameslink Services/Timetable from May 20th 2018

[jon0844]

Yesterday the 1636 was hilarious.

The driver was delayed on an inbound service (fair enough) and didn't arrive until 1650.

The train had been on the platform since 1610 but some bright spark decided to keep the doors closed, so everyone had to stand waiting for 40 minutes.

Probably logical as it is easier to keep people off than board people and then deliver the good news that it's caped and the train has to be shut down.

 

[MML]

There was I questioning why Railplan was called 2020 a few weeks ago. I think it'll take that long to sort this mess out.
Has poor Richard the Texan from the Thameslink PR announcements left the country yet ?

At least nobody is complaining about the ironing board seats on the 700's anymore. We're just grateful to have a train nowadays.

 

[sbec4]

I am sorry but what I do not understand that after £5.5 billion of public investment (National Audit Office) we hand the running of this investment over to a private company, who, from all the comments are not giving the return on the investment we need. Where was the simulation of the paths and patterns before set up? Where were the what if scenarios? Most manufacturing projects simulate and prepare, over support for the start? One word - unprofessional?

Interesting observations in here:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Update-on-the-Thameslink-programme.pdf

 

[Steve Harris]

I am sorry but what I do not understand that after £5.5 of public investment (National Audit Office) we hand the running of this investment over to a private company, who, from all the comments are not giving the return on the investment we need. Where was the simulation of the paths and patterns before set up? Where were the what if scenarios? Most manufacturing projects simulate and prepare, over support for the start? One word - unprofessional?

What else did you expect for five pounds fifty pence.

I'll get my coat !!

 

[sbec4]

What else did you expect for five pounds fifty pence.

I'll get my coat !!

..Ok..£5.5 billion, might as well have £5.50....

 

[carriageline]

They are two very different routes. Thameslink drivers will have had less time to train on the London Bridge-Blackfriars direct route, given that it opened recently, in comparison to the through route via Herne Hill, which they were all trained on for some time as a long-term diversion. Therefore, some drivers may only be competent to drive via Herne Hill to get to London, and if there is no pilot driver available, they can only use that route.

Obviously there are other issues with speed of training / readiness of the training programme / driver scheduling, as are being discussed in other posts on this thread.

How comes GTR didn’t do any training before Christmas when lines 4 + 5 were commissioned? South Eastern have done a (pretty) good job at every commissioning of training their drivers before hand. Ok, they didn’t really have a choice, but it obviously works?

 

[bramling]

Given that there doesn't seem to be any quick fix for the driver training issues the obvious (layman's) short term answer is just to go back to the previous timetable. Obviously this is going to have a knock on effect on VTEC & EMT but I'm interested to know people's opinions on how bad it would be for the other operators if the TSGN franchise went back to the previous timetable while everyone else carried on with the current one - are we just taking about some trains being a few minutes late or complete meltdown? My thinking is 1) the intercity diagrams seem to mostly have reasonably long dwell times at each end and 2) the current timetable isn't exactly being followed at all closely which can't be great for other operators anyway.

Otherwise - would it be possible to just use the current "Thameslink" paths on the GN route but terminate them all/mostly at Kings Cross instead of going through the core? That's obviously not great for people wanting to use them south of London - not sure what happens there...

I think there would be minimal impact on VTEC if just GN reverted, as changes to their timings are very minimal. There would be issues at Peterborough and Cambridge with GA and others, and in all honesty I have no idea how feasible it would be for them to adjust.

Other issues are what happens south of the core (a good demonstration of why Thamealink is a *bad thing* - in this case the linkages with the southern are a major problem) where reversion is not an option, and on the GN side that the old diagrams have 4-car services, again there would likely have to be some adjustment to mesh in undesiros onto the diagrams.

Then you have the issue of having to adjust crew arrangements and duties, and give the relevant notice to drivers. Unfortunately GTR isn’t a company which seems to foster goodwill with staff, and bear in mind summer is fast approaching, but in desperate times desperate measures could be appropriate - I’m sure many drivers would be flexible if the price was right!

In all honesty I’m completely blown out of the water with the scale of this shambles - this has to be one of the worst self-inflicted mess-ups ever on the railway. It can’t continue, it’s already having a wider effect, for example causing cancellations on London Underground because drivers and other staff are having trouble getting to work. A lot of what are nowadays called key workers live on the GN route.

 

[bramling]

Balderdash - it's nothing to do with accountability. And forcing somebody to resign means they have precisely no accountability moving forward.

It also shows the usual, monumental, ignorance of so many on these boards in assuming that the CEO is responsible for the minutiae of detail in any job they do - they aren't. That's why large companies aren't run by one person. And a large change was never going to be trouble-free. If in 6 months they are still having the same issues, then there may be a case for claiming there's an endemic problem - but if the CEO is fired, I'd also like to see a number of other managers and employees also publicly held to account for their actions in this.

I can’t speak for GTR, however you might be surprised just how much detail does go to director level in some rail operations. There are certainly rail operations where individual cancellations do come up at director level, perhaps not quite the CEO, but not far below.

As for Horton, yes it’s up to others to manage the detail, however he appoints and manages the top teams. What seems rather concerning is the way Horton seems completely unaware of reality, which to me rings alarm bells. Either lies are being told, or he’s genuinely detached from reality - in either case this points to a serious structural weakness with GTR’s setup.

Quite frankly there should be multiple people out of a job over this shambles. It’s quite obvious that a bunch of people who simply don’t know what they’re doing have tried to play trains, and have been found out in spectacular style. “It will work” simply isn’t working. The attitude of one particular poster, who no longer posts here, sums it all up perfectly. I’m not sure if he was posting for himself or repeating views which percolate further into Thameslink Programme, when it was said that the GN is “simple”. So simple that they can’t avoid gaps of several hours to some stations?

 

[Steve Harris]

..Ok..£5.5 billion, might as well have £5.50....

Totally agree.

 

[FOH]

this must be how Southern customers felt a couple of years ago.

Except it was in the middle of winter and the halfwits at London Bridge decided the best they could do was to kettle the passengers (I purposely avoided the word ‘customer’ in case anyone from GTR happens to read this and they become confused as to its meaning).

 

[GoatSarah]

So I have no special knowledge, but I presume a railway timetable, relying as it does on drivers being at a certain place at a certain time to take the next train out, has some resilience.

But if you pass the point of resilience, you get spectacular collapse.

So here's what I think is happening at Cambridge after my observations travelling on Great Northern for the last few weeks. Our semi fasts became Brighton services, which would have been great (especially for me), only they basically don't run.

The semi fasts were the main service from places like Royston, Letchworth, etc. They're also served by the slows, but because of the switch to class 700 for the slow trains a lot of those are getting cancelled too.

Which means the only service left on the GN Cambridge route that was, at least in the first week, still reliable was the express.

But the express has been pressed into service to replace the non-existent Brighton semi fast, which means it gets late.

And the sheer number of cancelled trains (all the semi fasts and quite a lot of the slows) means drivers aren't there to take them out on time, so they get later, so the driver isn't at the other end in time to take the next train out.

So you have trains sitting on platforms waiting drivers who are stuck elsewhere on the system who can't get to their service because the trains are all late or cancelled.

As more trains get late or cancelled, the driver shortage gets worse, which means more trains get late or cancelled. It's a feedback loop, a death spiral, if you will.

The service today was truly dire. Not really worthy of the name. I dread to think what will happen next week, but given the way out of this requires driver training, and you can't train drivers if there are no trains running to train them on, there's no way to interrupt the death spiral.

At some point in the coming weeks, or even days, the service between Cambridge and London on the East Coast Mainline, be it called Great Northern or Thameslink, will simply cease to exist. It's the inexorable result of a service that's entered this "delay/cancel, no drivers, delay/cancel, fewer drivers, delay/cancel, even fewer drivers" feedback loop.

Unless there's something I'm missing or there is some sort of stable floor where the service is so massively reduced that the driver logistics become trivial to manage (say one train every 3 hours or something - you could get them between KGX and CBG by taxi in that time if you needed to).

At least those us who live in Cambridge itself can fall back on Greater Anglia, which is now what I'm resigned to doing after seeing how badly GN deteriorated today. It's the poor sods in the surrounding villages I feel really sorry for.

 

[sbec4]

Nissan has a rich history of car production in the UK. With 6,700 team members and in excess of 7.9 million cars produced since the first Nissan Bluebird rolled off the line in 1986, more than £3.7bn has been invested in its development.

...so considerably less than the £5.5 billion in Thameslink..I don't remember Nissan saying sorry, we can only manufacture half the cars we planned because we don't have the teams to do this...my point is it is fine to talk about the detail - that impacts us all - but as a return on investment this is an absolute shambles

 

[OwenB]

The communication sounds like it's awful within the company. The driver of the 17.06 KGX-WGC, which I was on, was late because the driver was told she was picking up the train from WGC. When she was then told her train was starting at KGX, she had to wait ages for the next WGC-KGX train and arrived at around 17.10.

Internal chaos?

 

[sefton]

Probably logical as it is easier to keep people off than board people and then deliver the good news that it's caped and the train has to be shut down.

But utter crap for your customers.

 

[urpert]

SE running Gillingham -CST stoppers this weekend

There’s all sorts of odd stuff happening this weekend. TL Sevenoaks services are running via Penge East to Victoria while the Orpington SE stoppers are going via Catford.

 

[physics34]

The Horsham to Peterborough route seems to have been a complete disaster, and is only getting worse. It's now at the stage where I'm avoiding the train unless I really have to, and am not using it at the weekends at all. If I knew that I was going to have to change at Stevenage or Hitchin for a shuttle-type service in off peak hours I could at least plan around that, but at the moment it's just a case of showing up at a London station and hoping for the best. Yesterday was bearable, but today was a bit of a shambles.

I got to St Pancras around 1430 and asked when the next Peterborough train was as the 1445 and 1515 were both cancelled - one of the staff said the 1545 would be running, even though NRE said it hadn't left Horsham yet, and it was just getting later and later. I wasn't convinced the 1615 would run either. The next train that looked like it would actually run was the 1636 from Kings Cross (over two hours after the last one).

I went back to Kings Cross and asked at the barriers how to best get to St Neots and if I could get a replacement bus from Hitchin or Stevenage. Very helpful member of staff gets on the radio and arranges for the next Cambridge service to stop at Finsbury Park, Stevenage, Hitchin and Letchworth in addition - I assume he'd had other people asking. I hung around on the platform long enough to see someone else give the driver the stop order and boarded.

Bus at Hitchin was already waiting when the train got there around 1540 and was much more comfortable than I imagine the 1636 was. It took a while (around 90 minutes) in the Friday traffic, but I still got back to St Neots more quickly than waiting at KGX. I honestly can't remember the last time before today I had to catch a replacement bus that wasn't due to planned engineering works or a major infrastructure fault (the last one of those was a tree blocking the line on the Liverpool Street to Cambridge route) - this must be how Southern customers felt a couple of years ago.

Only 2 of 26 thameslink horsham drivers sign the complete route to Peterborough

 

[bramling]

The communication sounds like it's awful within the company. The driver of the 17.06 KGX-WGC, which I was on, was late because the driver was told she was picking up the train from WGC. When she was then told her train was starting at KGX, she had to wait ages for the next WGC-KGX train and arrived at around 17.10.

Internal chaos?

It really does sound like the GN has gone into full meltdown.

More than likely the whole operation has got weary of several weeks of turmoil, staff like drivers controllers station staff and signallers are doubtlessly thoroughly fed up and worn down being left to try and deal with a mess created by others.

I remember predicting the word Thameslink would become a swear word in Herts, Beds and Cambs - well it certainly is. It’s all very well saying that we need sit back and let the industry sort this, but how on earth can we have any shred of confidence in the people who have already got us in this unbelievable mess? Why should we trust them that the timetable will hold up when they can’t sort out the crewing arrangements?

To think that this shower were planning to implement a lot *more* this year. What we see is the already-descoped version.

 

[otomous]

But utter crap for your customers.

A classic example of how the railways are damned whatever they do!

1) train full cancelled and everyone has to be told in person - “why did they let us get on if they didn’t know it would run”

2) train kept locked until driver arrived but does leave on time etc - “why did they keep the doors closed til the driver arrived?”

Which is it to be?

There may be a more practical reason anyway. Only a driver can open the doors from “cold” on most modern stock and he may not have even been nearby until the last minute.

 

[jon0844]

A classic example of how the railways are damned whatever they do!

1) train full cancelled and everyone has to be told in person - “why did they let us get on if they didn’t know it would run”

2) train kept locked until driver arrived but does leave on time etc - “why did they keep the doors closed til the driver arrived?”

Which is it to be?

There may be a more practical reason anyway. Only a driver can open the doors from “cold” on most modern stock and he may not have even been nearby until the last minute.

At King's Cross 365s could be opened by platform staff, but they didn't do 387s. No idea about 700s.

Of course that doesn't mean they can't physically release the doors, but perhaps they're not allowed to?

387s go into power saving mode after a while so it could get pretty dark.

 

[bramling]

A classic example of how the railways are damned whatever they do!

1) train full cancelled and everyone has to be told in person - “why did they let us get on if they didn’t know it would run”

2) train kept locked until driver arrived but does leave on time etc - “why did they keep the doors closed til the driver arrived?”

Which is it to be?

There may be a more practical reason anyway. Only a driver can open the doors from “cold” on most modern stock and he may not have even been nearby until the last minute.

From a passenger point of view it’s definitely better to let people on where possible. It’s a pain in the arse being kept on the platform, especially at 0500 on a winter morning at KX!

 

[ComUtoR]

But utter crap for your customers.

Why is it crap for passengers ?

Your on a platform where you can access facilities easier and have more direct communication with staff. Your train may or may not run so you are waiting on a train with no destination so why would you be on it ? If you need to get passengers off it creates more disruption. The unit has no key on so air con/heating etc may not be working.

 

[sefton]

A classic example of how the railways are damned whatever they do!

1) train full cancelled and everyone has to be told in person - “why did they let us get on if they didn’t know it would run”

2) train kept locked until driver arrived but does leave on time etc - “why did they keep the doors closed til the driver arrived?”

Which is it to be?

There may be a more practical reason anyway. Only a driver can open the doors from “cold” on most modern stock and he may not have even been nearby until the last minute.

If they didn't think it would run, then they ought to have told the hundreds of customers waiting for the train so they could have got on the 1706 which was waiting...with the doors open.

So no, not damned if they do or damned if they don't, just the usual sort of rubbish that their customers have to put up with.

Just the same as the shocking service this evening with the secret 1616 which left from KGX empty because nobody could be bothered to put it on the departure boards and the two staff who I asked if it was the Peterborough train (which all the websites showed it was) couldn't be bothered to check.

 

[bramling]

Why is it crap for passengers ?

Your on a platform where you can access facilities easier and have more direct communication with staff. Your train may or may not run so you are waiting on a train with no destination so why would you be on it ? If you need to get passengers off it creates more disruption. The unit has no key on so air con/heating etc may not be working.

It’s crap because it means standing around for ages, potentially in cold conditions, and unable to do anything like work. I know operationally it can be small pain at times letting people on early, but it’s one of those little things the railway can do that really does make life easier for passengers. Using a real-life example, it’s not pleasant having just done seven night shifts and then being stuck standing on a cold platform for 45 minutes just because someone hasn’t bothered to come and open up the unit.

 

[sefton]

Why is it crap for passengers ?

Your on a platform where you can access facilities easier and have more direct communication with staff. Your train may or may not run so you are waiting on a train with no destination so why would you be on it ? If you need to get passengers off it creates more disruption. The unit has no key on so air con/heating etc may not be working.

Because you have more customers (customers not passengers, we are not simply freight) on the platform than seats on the train or even standing space due to all the previous cancelled trains, so everybody is eging about.

Because being sat down for 40 minutes, even if in the dark, is more comfortable than standing on a platform for 40 minutes.

 

[ComUtoR]

I know operationally it can be small pain at times letting people on early,

You aren't letting them on early. The unit is locked out because it may or may not run.

but it’s one of those little things the railway can do that really does make life easier for passengers.

Often you are making it worse.

just because someone hasn’t bothered to come and open up the unit.

It really isn't because someone couldn't be bothered to open up the unit.

 

[ComUtoR]

(customers not passengers, we are not simply freight)

Who is suggesting passengers are freight ?

Because being sat down for 40 minutes, even if in the dark, is more comfortable than standing on a platform for 40 minutes.

The other problem here is that the TOC is unwilling to let passengers sit in the dark on an unlit unit. What if someone had an accident ? The TOC would be liable. Passenegers would raise merry hell if they were forced to sit on an unlit, unheated train.

 

[jon0844]

And it will have no air con and may have emergency lighting at most. And if it needs to be shut down, platform staff now have to stop what they're doing and try to get a train load of angry passengers off and back onto the concourse.

Did I mention that they'll be angry?! And take up staff time. As a 700 is shut down in one hit, it could take ages if some people refuse to get off. Given recent protests with people refusing to budge, I fully support NOT releasing the doors until it is clear the train can run.

 

[sefton]

Who is suggesting passengers are freight ?

People who have paid for a service should be referred to as customers.

A passenger is simply someone who is being moved from one place to another.

The other problem here is that the TOC is unwilling to let passengers sit in the dark on an unlit unit. What if someone had an accident ? The TOC would be liable. Passenegrs would raise merry hell if they were forced to sit on an unlit, unheated train.

Well they didn't seem to care when on the 16.36 the previous Friday that was exactly what they did to their customers. Perhaps I should report them to H&S?

 

[ComUtoR]

People who have paid for a service should be referred to as customers.

A passenger is simply someone who is being moved from one place to another.

*https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/passenger-vs-customer.131313/
*https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/passenger-or-customer.48771/
*https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/customers-or-passengers.51949/

Well they didn't seem to care when on the 16.36 the previous Friday that was exactly what they did to their customers. Perhaps I should report them to H&S?

Please report anything you feel that is unsafe.

 

[otomous]

At King's Cross 365s could be opened by platform staff, but they didn't do 387s. No idea about 700s.

Of course that doesn't mean they can't physically release the doors, but perhaps they're not allowed to?

387s go into power saving mode after a while so it could get pretty dark.

More likely because the environmental systems (including SDO) are part of the computer logon on modern stock and only a driver can log on.