You make a point, but it's not enough to just throw your hands in the air and say "sh*t happens" because if we all took that attitude we would have no objective way of assessing whether a service was adequate or not.
Let me tell you my story, it has some similarities.
I work in an investment bank supporting the infrastructure of trading systems. Yes things go wrong, but do you suppose that when a trader cannot trade his way out of a bad position, or when payments to counterparties cannot be made, everyone just throws their hands in the air and says "that's life".
No we do not operate like that - because we are professionals.
Every outage that occurs is supported by root cause analysis. We put in a huge amount of effort into proactive maintenance to avoid problems before they occur. The bank pays upfront to secure the best staff with the best technical knowledge and the best attitude and professionalism to ensure that outages are kept to a minumum.
I suspect much of this is true on the railways. There are many engineering components which can go wrong, and I'm sure (or at least I hope) that there are proactive procedures in place to avoid failures.
I would also guess that when problems occur - they are investigated to avoid repeat incidents.
However, how do we actually judge this ? They say "the proof of the pudding is in the eating". Many passengers would be suspicious of whether ToC and NR are leading organisations with leading people. Do other european countries with rail systems of similar complexity and volume suffer the same kind of dreadful statistics as our railway suffers ?
So with respect to the poster - I think passengers know things will go wrong and things break, but passengers are not stupid, and many of them will work in professions where they have to solve problems and fix broken things. They will undoubtedly think to themselves "In my job if things broke this much I would get the sack - so what kind of ship are ToC and NR operating" ?
That kind of attitude may be fair or it may not, but it is understandable.
Well, first off, given the current global financial crisis, I'm not sure that banking is in the position to teach anybody else about risk analysis (or much else). I'm sure your comments about hiring the most expensive staff is true. However, calling them the best? - as you say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
In this case, diverting the train was a solution to the problem.
Do you want to quote a few of those "dreadful statistics"? And compare them to the statistics for the Banking sector.
My TOC runs a variety of commuter and intercity services across a very large geographic area, with differing requirements from passengers on the same trains. Regarding punctuality, we are at the mercy of the weather, vandalism, cable theft, and the vagaries of Network Rail, as well as things going wrong and breaking - don't forget, a large proportion of the trains are over 30 years old.
However, despite this, we managed in the last 12 months:
High Speed: Punctuality 88.8% Reliability 99.3%
London - Thames Valley: Punctuality 88.8% Reliability 99.4%
Bristol Suburban: Punctuality 90.5% Reliability 99.3%
Devon: Punctuality 95.0% Reliability 99.5%
Plymouth & Cornwall: Punctuality 96.7% Reliability 98.9%
South Wales - South Coast: Punctuality 91.6% Reliability 99.4%
Try to achieve similar in the banking sector, with 30 year-old computers and an equivalent level of disruption from external sources, and then come back and tell us how to do our job.
