GB should have a national clockface timetable

[Bertie the bus]

Even if occasional travellers do get converted to regular travellers they still have to buy a ticket each time and therefore will go through exactly the same routine. It will be a miniscule number who think 'When I travelled in the morning my train departed at 11:33 but now I want to travel after lunch my train is 13:35. This is too much faff. I'm going to drive instead'. They'll just turn up at the station by the time they've been told to by the ticketing site.

 

[Shaw S Hunter]

Even if occasional travellers do get converted to regular travellers they still have to buy a ticket each time and therefore will go through exactly the same routine. It will be a miniscule number who think 'When I travelled in the morning my train departed at 11:33 but now I want to travel after lunch my train is 13:35. This is too much faff. I'm going to drive instead'. They'll just turn up at the station by the time they've been told to by the ticketing site.

Regular travellers hopefully are persuaded to use season tickets or a PAYG card: ticketing sites then become superfluous!

 

[bahnause]

I use the train / bus daily on various routes in the area. I don't use a timetable unless I'm travelling on a completely unfamiliar route. The departure times have been the same for years and repeat every 60, 30 or 15 minutes.

 

[HSTEd]

Do many passengers have a clue what the timetable is? Don't most passengers these days just go onto a ticketing site, put their start and end stations in and the time they wish to leave or arrive and are told which services they should catch and where to change? They really aren't going to be that bothered whether the train before leaves at xx:18 but their train departs at xx:20.

By numbers most passengers probably take the same or similar train every day - given that commuting is still a major traffic generator for the railway if not the cash cow it once as.

Indeed a substantial fraction of Network Rail passengers are on turn-up-and-go services at this point (see Crossrail)

 

[Krokodil]

Even if occasional travellers do get converted to regular travellers they still have to buy a ticket each time and therefore will go through exactly the same routine. It will be a miniscule number who think 'When I travelled in the morning my train departed at 11:33 but now I want to travel after lunch my train is 13:35. This is too much faff. I'm going to drive instead'. They'll just turn up at the station by the time they've been told to by the ticketing site.

Trains to A usually leave at 25 past. Except at a particular time where it leaves at 20 past. So you walk onto the platform at 21 minutes past to see the tail lights disappear into the distance. Plenty of passengers don't use a journey planner to buy their tickets. They use seasons or carnets. Others will just turn up at the station and ask when the next train is. Not everyone is travelling to Aberdeen, if you're making a short journey you'll just turn up.

Passengers come up to me, or to the booking office and ask what time trains to Manchester leave. It's a lot easier to say "43 minutes past every hour" than it would be to say "it's some time between 40 and 45 minutes past each other, except at lunchtime where you'll have to change trains and it won’t actually make a convenient connection anyway..."

If there's a genuine reason for having a train out of pattern (such as one train I know that leaves its origin 20 minutes earlier to get the kids to school on time, before waiting for the standard pattern departure time, plus various boat trains) then fine. If there are little discrepancies that exist solely because no one has thought to correct them then it would cost naff-all to sort out.

 

[Bertie the bus]

Trains to A usually leave at 25 past. Except at a particular time where it leaves at 20 past. So you walk onto the platform at 21 minutes past to see the tail lights disappear into the distance. Plenty of passengers don't use a journey planner to buy their tickets. They use seasons or carnets. Others will just turn up at the station and ask when the next train is. Not everyone is travelling to Aberdeen, if you're making a short journey you'll just turn up.

Most passengers don't just turn up and hope. The vast majority do use journey planners and I very rarely make long journeys on the train these days but do make some short journeys and I certainly don't just turn up and neither do most other people.

Even if some people do just turn up and hope the train is at xx:25 when it is actually at xx:20 that hour the question really need to be asked how much expense and effort should be expended to pander to those sort of people? These days there is a vast amount of information the vast majority people can access in seconds. If they can't be bothered then that is their problem.

 

[HSTEd]

Even if some people do just turn up and hope the train is at xx:25 when it is actually at xx:20 that hour the question really need to be asked how much expense and effort should be expended to pander to those sort of people? These days there is a vast amount of information the vast majority people can access in seconds. If they can't be bothered then that is their problem.

Ultimately this sort of attitude to passengers will kill the railway in the long run.

If you make it inconvenient for travellers they won't use the railway.

Taxpayers, and the politicians they elect, will begin to wonder why many billions a year in subsidies are transferred to such an organisation.

 

[zwk500]

Most passengers don't just turn up and hope. The vast majority do use journey planners and I very rarely make long journeys on the train these days but do make some short journeys and I certainly don't just turn up and neither do most other people.

Even if some people do just turn up and hope the train is at xx:25 when it is actually at xx:20 that hour the question really need to be asked how much expense and effort should be expended to pander to those sort of people? These days there is a vast amount of information the vast majority people can access in seconds. If they can't be bothered then that is their problem.

But it's not just about when the trains actually are (After all, we're reminded to check before we travel all the time) but also when you can plan things around them. Knowing the train home leaves at xx.13 and xx.43 is very handy if you're coming to the end of a drink with a friend and xx.10 and the station is 10 minutes' walk away, because you can fit a swift half in.

 

[Bertie the bus]

Ultimately this sort of attitude to passengers will kill the railway in the long run.

If you make it inconvenient for travellers they won't use the railway.

Taxpayers, and the politicians they elect, will begin to wonder why many billions a year in subsidies are transferred to such an organisation.

That is nonsense. I'm not suggesting it should be made inconvenient. What I am saying is these days, with the amount of timetable information readily available to almost everybody, it couldn't be more convenient. Therefore, throwing £billions at some rail enthusiast's slightly strange view of the world and how most people navigate it would be a total waste and make virtually no difference to ordinary passengers.

 

[tbtc]

Of course nobody is going to argue against some well meaning concept like “Takt”, in the way that nobody is going to argue against the concept of “integration” in theory… People seem to like to hold up these ideals as if they are sacred, rather than just nice proposals that might work in other places in completely different circumstances

However I’m struggling to find significant examples of non-clockface services, beyond the obviously very rural examples

You’ll always find some example of what appears to be poor coordination at busy stations like Leeds but it’d be impossible for all of the hourly services to coordinate with each other.

It’s a much bigger issue if connections don’t work at obvious “rural” interchanges (Llandudno Junction has been mentioned), but finding examples of two trains that narrowly miss connecting with each other at a major interchange feels more like point scoring

 

[zwk500]

Of course nobody is going to argue against some well meaning concept like “Takt”, in the way that nobody is going to argue against the concept of “integration” in theory… People seem to like to hold up these ideals as if they are sacred, rather than just nice proposals that might work in other places in completely different circumstances

However I’m struggling to find significant examples of non-clockface services, beyond the obviously very rural examples

I think there's a big difference between what people mean by "Takt"; which is a commonly planned system aligning connections at central hubs and designing the entire system - stock, infrastructure and service - to run to an efficiently optimised pattern and 'Clockface', which is just the trains departing at the same time past each hour. To introduce a true takt system we'd have to arrange a lot of services to operate in different configurations as well as linespeed and signalling improvements to get a much better pattern. The St Ives line and Wrexham-Bidston are obvious examples of this, having to run with zero slack in the turnrounds all day to squeeze the pattern in.

Multi-modal integration is perfectly possible in the UK when the will is there. At the moment politicians are largely apathetic and the companies are commercially unbothered about it. Plenty of opportunities for both to see the scales move.

You’ll always find some example of what appears to be poor coordination at busy stations like Leeds but it’d be impossible for all of the hourly services to coordinate with each other.

Perfectly true. But the bigger connecting flows could certainly be better utilised.

It’s a much bigger issue if connections don’t work at obvious “rural” interchanges (Llandudno Junction has been mentioned), but finding examples of two trains that narrowly miss connecting with each other at a major interchange feels more like point scoring

But part of it depends on how these services are offered - the Llandudno jn example being an obvious one where the branch train absolutely can be timed around the mainline train, because the vast majority of traffic will be heading to Chester so you can arrange to meet those connections sensibly, even if it is less convenient for connections towards Bangor.

 

[Krokodil]

the question really need to be asked how much expense and effort should be expended

How much "effort and expense" would it be to set some principles to be applied as and when timetables get periodically reviewed? Up here Arriva set a standard pattern timetable before it started being broken apart for political reasons.

Therefore, throwing £billions at some rail enthusiast's slightly strange view of the world and how most people navigate it

Excuse me, I'm customer-facing rail staff with a vast amount of experience of using rail services across Europe. I'm not some crank wibbling about how we should reopen the Woodhead Route yesterday. I see first hand what parts of the timetable don't work for my customers, and I want more people to use public transport. The convenience of a memorable timetable is a long-established part of encouraging public transport. Making connections work where practical is also important, because passengers don't like hanging around for 50 minutes. You can't make every connection work, but there are some places where there are key pairs.

I must admit though that it's quite funny when a fare-dodger comes out of the toilet to see his stop flash by.

 

[Brubulus]

How much "effort and expense" would it be to set some principles to be applied as and when timetables get periodically reviewed? Up here Arriva set a standard pattern timetable before it started being broken apart for political reasons.

Holyhead-Cardiff did ruin the timetables for much of North Wales, though with the proposals for a Liverpool-Cardiff service to accompany it, it might allow the region to get a more organised timetable.

Certain services seem to be designed to have terrible connections as a form of capacity management, this seems especially common on services that were once part of Central Trains and the fragmentation means that it's unlikely to be rectified given the amount of work that would be required to do so.

 

[Bertie the bus]

How much "effort and expense" would it be to set some principles to be applied as and when timetables get periodically reviewed? Up here Arriva set a standard pattern timetable before it started being broken apart for political reasons.

Quite a lot I would expect. You have mentioned places like Llandudno Junction and Chester but they're not exactly the busiest of stations. If we take somewhere like Preston for example, a decent proportion of services there are timed based on requirements and constraints on the southern section of the WCML or in the Manchester area. If you retimed Manchester Airport - Blackpool North services to provide more convenient connections at Preston then that would have knock on effects on other services in Manchester, and then those re-timings could affect services around Liverpool, Leeds or Sheffield, and so on.

But it's not just about when the trains actually are (After all, we're reminded to check before we travel all the time) but also when you can plan things around them. Knowing the train home leaves at xx.13 and xx.43 is very handy if you're coming to the end of a drink with a friend and xx.10 and the station is 10 minutes' walk away, because you can fit a swift half in.

Has somebody hacked your account? I'm surprised you of all people have said having standardised departure times can be handy when you are having a drink in the pub as you are usually one of the more level headed ones who says the railway can't be all things to all people and cater for tiny minorities.

 

[zwk500]

Has somebody hacked your account? I'm surprised you of all people have said having standardised departure times can be handy when you are having a drink in the pub as you are usually one of the more level headed ones who says the railway can't be all things to all people and cater for tiny minorities.

But standard departure times aren't all things to each man, they're helpful for the vast majority of passengers. People want to be able to plan days ahead, and know when they will get somewhere - a standard departure time means standardised arrival times and therefore you know which train gets you into London for a 10am and whether or not it will also get you in for a 9.45. I just personally find the most useful to be deciding whether to have one for the road
Standardised departures are especially helpful at lower frequencies, as you get towards 4tph it's more 'turn up and go' and less important the precise time. Another personal example from me is Haggerston (I have family 10 mins walk) to Euston (I used to live in MK). I only had to check the Euston-MK train times, as there were enough trains from Haggerston to Highbury & Islington and then tube to Euston that I just needed to allow 25 minutes, rather than check specific departure times from Haggerston.

 

[bringbackcrouc]

I completely agree, conceptually.

But given the available infrastructure, existing working practices and the political imperative for continuing and expanded freight operations, the capacity simply does not exist.

Separate dedicated freight lines!

 

[Bertie the bus]

But standard departure times aren't all things to each man, they're helpful for the vast majority of passengers. People want to be able to plan days ahead, and know when they will get somewhere - a standard departure time means standardised arrival times and therefore you know which train gets you into London for a 10am and whether or not it will also get you in for a 9.45. I just personally find the most useful to be deciding whether to have one for the road
Standardised departures are especially helpful at lower frequencies, as you get towards 4tph it's more 'turn up and go' and less important the precise time. Another personal example from me is Haggerston (I have family 10 mins walk) to Euston (I used to live in MK). I only had to check the Euston-MK train times, as there were enough trains from Haggerston to Highbury & Islington and then tube to Euston that I just needed to allow 25 minutes, rather than check specific departure times from Haggerston.

People can plan days out. They go onto Google and type in 'train times Barnsley to Wakefield' and it either tells them or gives a link to a website that will. Why are people trying to pretend the internet doesn't exist or the vast majority of people don't have smartphones and do stuff like this all the time for all sorts of things?

 

[zwk500]

People can plan days out. They go onto Google and type in 'train times Barnsley to Wakefield' and it either tells them or gives a link to a website that will. Why are people trying to pretend the internet doesn't exist or the vast majority of people don't have smartphones and do stuff like this all the time for all sorts of things?

The advantage of a standardised departure time is it lets you move things by 30 or 60 minute intervals if it doesn't work for whatever reason. People will still check, but standardised patterns *are* helpful.

 

[Bertie the bus]

So if they can extend their day by 60 minutes they will all go home happy but if they can only extend their day by 57 minutes because it isn't standardised departure times they will all go home miserable? We're getting into silly teritory now.

 

[zwk500]

So if they can extend their day by 60 minutes they will all go home happy but if they can only extend their day by 57 minutes because it isn't standardised departure times they will all go home miserable? We're getting into silly teritory now.

Not at all. But the closer you can get to a single specific time the better.

 

[HSTEd]

People can plan days out. They go onto Google and type in 'train times Barnsley to Wakefield' and it either tells them or gives a link to a website that will. Why are people trying to pretend the internet doesn't exist or the vast majority of people don't have smartphones and do stuff like this all the time for all sorts of things?

By far the most successful rail systems in the UK are the ones where people most certainly don't have to "plan their day out".

Metros utilise simple timetables for a reason - even in this era of smartphones people don't like planning anything, they much prefer doing things subconsciously.
If they have to plan anything they are likely to just give up and take the car instead.

EDIT:

And there is also the operational savings to consider from a clockface timetable simplifying the railway's planning requirements.
Every strange change in the timetable adds labour requirements to the train planning workload which is already creaking.

If we had an hour-clockface timetable for everything we'd only have to plan one hours worth of timetable, and we could have planners be far more responsive to other requirements or to contingency planning.

 

[30907]

I was brought up on BR(S) regular interval timetables (offpeak anyway) were taken for granted and I have been hooked on the Taktfahrplan concept since details were first reported in Modern Railways nearly 50 years ago. However:

Standardised departures are especially helpful at lower frequencies

Once you get down to 2-hourly, though, I am less certain that it matters. I don't mean we should put up with odd 5-minute variations, but where traffic is relatively light it is more important to run trains to fit the actual flows as best you can.
I also suspect that people are less likely to rely on memory for "23 past the odd hour" thoug I can't prove it.

An extreme example is Whitby, where a 3-hourly interval service beyond Nunthorpe fits the infrastructure neatly (NYMR and all) but doesn't fit with the school traffic.
Or the Settle and Carlisle, where the 90-minute intervals in the northbound morning "peak" meet the demand much better than the standard 2-hourly would.
(Yes, you can argue that the service on each should be more frequent, but leave that aside for this thread, please).
The problem arises where there is both a significant local flow and a significant connecting flow to cater for - fortunately this doesn't apply to either example.

 

[Bertie the bus]

By far the most successful rail systems in the UK are the ones where people most certainly don't have to "plan their day out".

Metros utilise simple timetables for a reason - even in this era of smartphones people don't like planning anything, they much prefer doing things subconsciously.
If they have to plan anything they are likely to just give up and take the car instead.

And the relevance of that is what? Are you suggesting the Heart of Wales line should have 6 tph so people can just turn up?

On many Metro lines they don't even show the time of the services. They display next train in 8 minutes rather than next train at 15:45 so you can hardly use that as an example of people needing clockface departures.

 

[HSTEd]

And the relevance of that is what? Are you suggesting the Heart of Wales line should have 6 tph so people can just turn up?

The heart of wales line is irrelevant.

The amount of people who use it is negligible next to the bulk of the railway network and will always be negligible.
It's not really a good argument against fixing the parts of the railway that actually carry people so that they can be more attractive to passengers, carry more passengers and maybe pull the railway out of the huge financial-political pit it is in.

 

[zwk500]

I was brought up on BR(S) regular interval timetables (offpeak anyway) were taken for granted and I have been hooked on the Taktfahrplan concept since details were first reported in Modern Railways nearly 50 years ago. However:

Once you get down to 2-hourly, though, I am less certain that it matters. I don't mean we should put up with odd 5-minute variations, but where traffic is relatively light it is more important to run trains to fit the actual flows as best you can.
I also suspect that people are less likely to rely on memory for "23 past the odd hour" thoug I can't prove it.

An extreme example is Whitby, where a 3-hourly interval service beyond Nunthorpe fits the infrastructure neatly (NYMR and all) but doesn't fit with the school traffic.
Or the Settle and Carlisle, where the 90-minute intervals in the northbound morning "peak" meet the demand much better than the standard 2-hourly would.
(Yes, you can argue that the service on each should be more frequent, but leave that aside for this thread, please).
The problem arises where there is both a significant local flow and a significant connecting flow to cater for - fortunately this doesn't apply to either example.

Once you get beyond hourly then yes, memorable times are less important because the traffic doesn't justify the cost of investing in infrastructure to that level. If it works then brilliant, but if there is a need to shuffle trains about on the quieter lines then yes it's an acceptable compromise.
But then again there's a strong argument that any line that doesn't sustain 1tph minimum should be looked at very carefully for it's value to the network.

 

[Bertie the bus]

The heart of wales line is irrelevant.

The amount of people who use it is negligible next to the bulk of the railway network and will always be negligible.
It's not really a good argument against fixing the parts of the railway that actually carry people so that they can be more attractive to passengers, carry more passengers and maybe pull the railway out of the huge financial-political pit it is in.

Bringing up Metro services is also completely irrelevant to the discussion. So we'll just leave it at that shall we?

 

[Krokodil]

Quite a lot I would expect. You have mentioned places like Llandudno Junction and Chester but they're not exactly the busiest of stations. If we take somewhere like Preston for example, a decent proportion of services there are timed based on requirements and constraints on the southern section of the WCML or in the Manchester area. If you retimed Manchester Airport - Blackpool North services to provide more convenient connections at Preston then that would have knock on effects on other services in Manchester, and then those re-timings could affect services around Liverpool, Leeds or Sheffield, and so on.

I was quite clear that we should concentrate on the cat B and cat C stations where it is practicable to do so. Pick the low-hanging fruit. At Preston you would look at the branch line services to Colne/Ormskirk/Blackpool South and arrange them around the mainline services. Where there is a linear concentration of services (as on the WCML) then it's not going to be practicable, whereas if services arrive from all directions (as at places like Shrewsbury) then you can plan them to coincide.

People can plan days out. They go onto Google and type in 'train times Barnsley to Wakefield' and it either tells them or gives a link to a website that will. Why are people trying to pretend the internet doesn't exist or the vast majority of people don't have smartphones and do stuff like this all the time for all sorts of things?

And then when they see that it now takes an hour and a half to do a 22 mile journey because no thought has been put into the connections since the post-pandemic reopenings they'll either get the bus or drive.

 

[Bertie the bus]

I was quite clear that we should concentrate on the cat B and cat C stations where it is practicable to do so. Pick the low-hanging fruit. At Preston you would look at the branch line services to Colne/Ormskirk/Blackpool South and arrange them around the mainline services. Where there is a linear concentration of services (as on the WCML) then it's not going to be practicable, whereas if services arrive from all directions (as at places like Shrewsbury) then you can plan them to coincide.

I have no idea what a cat b or cat c station is but they are presumably not very important ones. Why should concentrating on the not very important ones be a priority when it will benefit very few people? It just seems like doing something for the sake of it because doing something useful would be too difficult or expensive.

I can't imagine many people doing relatively short journeys requiring a change at a secondary station would even consider using the train regardless of whether they connected or not.

 

[JonathanH]

At Preston you would look at the branch line services to Colne/Ormskirk/Blackpool South and arrange them around the mainline services.

Which mainline service in particular? The fast one from Euston, the train from Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Barrow or Edinburgh? Any of them could have people wanting a connection to Pleasington, and you can't please them all.

Moreover, the operation of those branches seems to be most efficient when they interwork, so they can't all leave at the same time in the hour.

As it is, Colne trains actually miss the connection to and from Euston. Is this a bad thing or is connecting to and from Blackpool North more important?

 

[bahnause]

"Ease of use" is one of the arguments often used against public transport. People check their travel options not because they want to, but because they have to. Regularly scheduled trains with regularly scheduled connections are one of many points that simplify the use of public transport and make it much more attractive.

In addition, a structured timetable is a good way to make the best use of infrastructure once the adjustments have been made.

Moreover, the operation of those branches seems to be most efficient when they interwork, so they can't all leave at the same time in the hour.

From my point of view, it is not the task of the railroad to use its vehicles and personnel as efficiently as possible, but to use them to transport real passengers.