The railway is either open or its shut. It'll make it painless should there be an overrun. The engineers will still have to hand it back, regardless of whether there's any trains running or not
I only said C.Jcn to give a better travel experience for its customers. Anyhow it is what it is so i least hope Southerns planners are able to come up with a revised Vic service from the following week when more people will be travelling even with reduced numbers as this is going to an ongoing problem for weeks.
There's a plan in the pipeline for a shuttle service using the Gatwick Express stock and drivers from Victoria to Gatwick calling at Clapham and Croydon
Thats a good response.
I laughed out loud reading this. SWR’s permanent timetable is a reduced one - a heavily reduced one - with Dorking slashed to hourly, Guildford via Epsom slashed to hourly, Shepperton slashed to hourly and Hounslow loop services cut apart from the peaks and according to SWR’s consultation - they want to keep it this way as part of the December 2022 change next year! Reduce it anymore, considering remaining trains are already heavily short formed due to the stock crisis, and they’ll be riots
Edit: Hang on, I’ve possibly misunderstood. I thought by “holding their current service levels” you meant retaining the full service, hence my amusement, but if you mean retaining the reduced service, indeed you are right and I apologise for my misunderstanding.
I meant the latter in that they've held there current service levels but your entitled to laugh out loud . Also to be fair to Southern they were much closer to pre covid service levels at Dec timetable change anyhow but this outcome was so inevitable anyhow but guess timing was lousy for TOC Southern planners with Xmas engineering works leaving no spare resource to plan a contingency timetable.
There's not a spare resource to plan a contingency timetable anyway. Planners are busy preparing for future blockades and timetable changes. There aren't planners sat around doing nothing in case a pandemic comes along.
But a plan put together years ago wouldn't be able to simply drop straight in to the current situation, as there are dependencies on other operators whose timetables have changed, different stock etc.
There's a link to their website with their suggestions on what people should do in the first post of this thread.
Have a look at today and tomorrow's timetable. That's what will be running.
It gives very little really practical information, once again the traveller is treated as an inconvenience. I fail to understand how a rail company can justify removing all their services from their main London terminus with only a couple of days notice.
What would you suggest they do? Go ahead with a full timetable that within a couple of hours has descended into chaos?
Streatham is same platform interchange, of course!
I’d suggest that they provide at least some service to their main terminus and the biggest interchange on the network (Clapham).
It has been suggested that they will provide a shuttle service from Victoria to Clapham Junction and East Croydon, but that this is in planning so not possible to be announced.
Who's going to arrange for that service to be provided? There is no-one.
The Gatwick Express drivers at home twiddling thumbs? I predict the shuttle won't happen, I doubt they'd run it at a frequency which prevented it being completely overrun. Perhaps I'm too cynical, and I won't be annoyed if I'm proved wrong!
Train drivers aren't planners. They won't have the equipment, training or knowledge of how to arrange for a service to run.
www.southernrailway.com