It's funny isn't it. It reminds me of the traction training and the new trainees. Some depots conducted them so well it's like you can hardly tell there was any pandemic disruption. Others basically stopped and nobody did anything about it whatsoever for months on end. Funny old world.
Wow!! We have loads of it.
In the entirety of 2021 I had a total 5 ‘spare from home shifts’ of which 2 became part jobs, and 3 remained spare.
Very much so. Crazy it’s so different.
It's not even remotely contradictory. It's simply that ensuring that you're maximising value from spares is a much easier thing to implement than changing job roles for train crew or harmonising contract terms. They've got to start somewhere. Or they would have done if it weren't for Omicron.
To be fair to them they may still be very happy with it because it can make things easier for staff. But it's also not their own money and they're required to act.
I'm not coming back!!
Well we've been seriously below complement for some considerable time now (pre-Covid), so there's rather a lot of work to be covered.
I think that this is where you're going wrong. Spare turns aren't intended to provide "protection" on the day - they're there to be used as part of the rostering process to cover for known absences (at the rostering stage) such as annual leave, sickness, training, investigations etc.. The number of spare turns should, through an agreed ratio, be set at a level that just about covers all that on a typical day, so all the spares should be allocated to jobs and no jobs left uncovered. There's no such thing as a typical day, though, so you'll inevitably find that there are bad days where they've got no spares left at all and jobs still uncovered, and good days where they've still got spares left over. I don't think that a day where you've got spares left unused indicates that the spare ratio is wrong - it's just a symptom of the fluctuating nature of absence. It's undoubtedly exacerbated by route knowledge deficiencies (caused by the Covid training backlog or otherwise) and reduced service levels at some depots.
That just about sums it up perfectly.
I think you need to bear in mind that at the start of covid all training basically stopped and operators brought in reduced timetables . That led to a lot more unutilised spare than usual even with what was offset by CV and CEV crew shielding and the people off with covid / self isolating. If the DFT number crunchers are looking at what happened during covid and thinking spare is essentially a good old Jolly they'll wreck the job to the extent that they'll need robust RDE agreements to keep the wheels turning .
Again , absolutely spot on.
Having been caught out by these cancelled trains last Thursday and eventually using the bus instead, I would agree. A reliable shuttle would be far better than the current arrangements. We have a situation where the more local Hull - Scarborough service is better then the so called Express service.
There is a correlation between the amount of services actually run, and staff sat around. As it stands right now, the service level is a lot higher than it was at the start of the covid pandemic. Plenty of staff found themselves staying at home......it wouldn't be the case right now as you state. Removal of rest day working ( and staff with covid ) is now leading to trains cancelled irrespective of how spares are treated. Whether including the wording " where possible, spares not required are to stay at home " in a new agreement would solve the issue I honestly don't know. Of course the the flip side of this particular coin is that it costs the workaholic staff money, and at a drivers rate for overtime, that is no small amount
Could be for multiple reasons such as:
Only a driver and/or guard to work it one way and units would be left out of place
We live on the Hull Scarborough line, and although Northern have had a really bad press in terms of their operation in the Manchester and Leeds area in our corner of the world the service has been reliable. Apart from the occasional problem, compounded by the long single track section from Bridlington to Hunmanby you can plan a journey with confidence as most of the time your train turns up.
Ta. Is the spare ratio set higher in those cases, so that there should be some spares left on a typical day, or is it a conscious decision just not to bother on the basis that the additional resilience doesn't justify the cost of dedicated resources? The latter might well be a sensible approach at some depots anyway, e.g. long distance work where a dedicated standby with fixed hours can't actually do anything useful after a couple of hours. Either way, I'd expect that 'spare from home' would work on the basis of a certain number of spares being nominated to come into work and any others remaining at home.
