Many of the proposals seek to allow more flexible crew diagramming & rostering.
Ah yes, 24hr movement of spares etc. How much do you think that this will actually save in practice, compared with how much it will cost to replace the staff who are moving elsewhere because the pay isn't worth the disruption to family life? Rolling rest day patterns allow staff to have some degree of certainty in their lives, while still providing 24/7 cover. Staff are humans, not robots, they'd like to see their kids grow up, even only on every third weekend. Virgin had many of these conditions, but because they paid well so it worked. Poor conditions with Northern rates of pay will only worsen the exodus out from the DfT TOCs.
In what way will removing the LDCs from rostering save money? Someone will still have to compile rosters and check diagrams for howlers.
Anybody that thinks Train Planning (in particular Train Crew) has anything that remotely resembles an “all singing all dancing” system
That's certainly the gist of how the new system was trumpeted when it was introduced. Plenty of back-slapping upstairs. Of course you then need staff to introduce some intelligent thought into the process...
Something that may appear completely barking mad on 1 diagram may allow 5 other diagrams to work and make sense.
Do tell me why several diagrams having staff travelling Pass, to work a train that someone else is Pass on "makes sense". And before you ask, it's all well within the maximum hours between breaks, there's no separate "continuous time in the seat" rule here or anything. Some of those silly diagrams have cost a fortune in taxis, or in spare crews being needlessly tied up when things have gone wrong.
It’s great to have vast route cards, but that also means you have to maintain it.
At Plymouth, the LDC came up with workable diagrams so that the HSS link could retain Bristol-Taunton on their cards. This was rejected by management (for political reasons). It really didn't take long before the Berks & Hants became blocked and trains ended up stuck at Taunton waiting for a relief driver to arrive by road (yet another taxi).
If the DfT really wanted to improve productivity, they'd reverse the fragmentation of the railway. So much duplication involved in having four different depots at one terminus. Not forgetting ECS moves running in opposite directions at the start and end of the day. Diversionary route knowledge wasn't an issue either when the same company operated services on both routes.
If, particularly on long distance services, you don’t have any crew reliefs then you also lose any opportunity to “roll over” a service and restart it from an intermediate location (assuming stock is available).
And that the crew are in the right place. How many trains did TPE dump in Manchester Victoria and Leeds with no onward crew before Network Rail put its foot down and insisted that unless a train was covered throughout it should be cancelled throughout? I think that at one point three out of the four through platforms at MCV were blocked by stranded units, while a signaller elsewhere entered "THX TPE" into the train describer. Key thing of course is to only plan reliefs at locations where you actually have a traincrew depot.
On the other hand, I was at a station recently just after a fatality had happened down line. Even without the afflicted train having a booked relief, it was restarted using a spare crew and a . The service on the rest of the network was maintained with a combination of spare staff/units, and redeploying those displaced by disruption.
