Leeds Disruption - 26/07/25

[ole17]

Since the WY Metro hasn't fully brought bus services in-house like the Bee network, if the same scenario were to happen in manchester ROC, is the mutual ticket acceptance from TOC for local bus trips happening or happened already? This is an area where DfT policy in light of GBR should look to simplify emergency backup transport options (for major network problems).

 

[Falcon1200]

I truly believe that you and others do care, and I appreciate your efforts on here.

Thanks.

However, for those, who can see the industry doing nothing wrong.

Those of us who work, or worked, for the railway know only too well that things go wrong, far too often! And a catastrophic failure such as that at Leeds simply should not happen, ever. Hopefully whatever inquiry is taking place now will establish methods of preventing any repeat... but I won't hold my breath.

 

[muz379]

Since the WY Metro hasn't fully brought bus services in-house like the Bee network, if the same scenario were to happen in manchester ROC, is the mutual ticket acceptance from TOC for local bus trips happening or happened already? This is an area where DfT policy in light of GBR should look to simplify emergency backup transport options (for major network problems).

I dont know about busses but I know it has been fairly standard now for some time if there are issues effecting routes with metrolink like Ashton/Stalybridge , Rochdale or Manchester airport that people are directed towards trams with tickeet acceptance in place . With regards busses I have been at picadilly before when the airport line has gone down and ticket acceptance on the 43 bus is advertised .

Of course the problem on saturday was that it was such a widespread area that it impacted people getting to places beyond those covered by just local bus serivces .

It would be like losing the manchester central ,oxford road ,wavertree and lime street workstations all at once .

Local ticket acceptance on busses would be fine for someone trying to get to say urmston , but if someone was trying to get to south parkway or somewhere in merseyside from manchester there isnt a local bus that would get them there .


Ultimately TOC'S can send all their front facing staff on as many customer service courses as they want , pressurise them into making as many announcements as they can or being as visible as possible . But without meaningful information to give to customers it is futule , and you cant train those staff to be able to predict the future to know how long the signalling system is going to be knackered for , or how messed up the train plan is going to be once the infastructure is back available to use .

 

[noddingdonkey]

The problem of "how am I getting home" quite literally is the passenger's problem. What it's not is *just* the passenger's problem.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that the railway has an absolute duty of care to every single passenger at all times, and that there should be standby armies of buses, drivers, health workers (for those passengers with specific needs), etc. on retainer 24/7 so that they can meet that obligation under every conceivable eventuality. Unfortunately, no-one knows how that'd work or who'd pay for it.

I think that's the underlying point - if the railway can't provide all of those things (understandably) then it has to make sure the infrastructure is sufficiently resilient that it won't be called upon to do so. A fault taking out one workstation is unfortunate, but diversion routes would likely stay open and the directly affected area requiring RRBs would be smaller. A fault (or series of faults) taking out a huge patch of the north of England should just not be allowed to happen.

 

[43066]

I think that's the underlying point - if the railway can't provide all of those things (understandably) then it has to make sure the infrastructure is sufficiently resilient that it won't be called upon to do so. A fault taking out one workstation is unfortunate, but diversion routes would likely stay open and the directly affected area requiring RRBs would be smaller. A fault (or series of faults) taking out a huge patch of the north of England should just not be allowed to happen.

But this is simply unrealistic. Infrastructure failures can and will happen - you can expect more of them as Network Rail is being expected to cut costs further.

In the current climate you can expect higher fares, less resilience, and less assistance when things go wrong. Certainly not armies of replacement buses etc. on permanent’s standby which seems to be the (unrealistic, uncosted) expectation of some on here.

 

[Cell2025]

There is a bus - the former Leeds Free City Bus is now part of the number 5 route but with a flat £1 fare. Arguably ticket acceptance on that during disruption would be a useful step, along with better promotion of it.

I live in Leeds and well remember the City Circulars that started for free and then were £1 but they were withdrawn pre Covid. The 5 service seems to be a circular, but not a city circular like you have in Manchester. It does seem to fulfil the service you say it does, but it doesn't run late and its frequency isn't that of a 'runablout circular'.

https://www.wymetro.com/buses/timetables/5/pdf

Sorry - I would, because I know the difference. I know lots of people use apps now, but a lot of us still do the old-fashioned thing of finding the taxi rank and queuing. Both should be catered for, we need to get over this idea that everyone can easily get on online (see also disruption information).

It doesn't help that Leeds City Station is a bombsite and has what must be the most disorganised, cramped and poorly marshalled taxi 'ranks' at a major station. Basically it's everyone for themselves.

I was due on the 20.30 from KX on Saturday and was fortunate enough to find the 22.00 working, though for perhaps obvious reason there was no first or standard class catering and no driver for 20 minutes as no doubt the whole driver cohort was in the wrong place!

Leeds was chaos when we got in approaching 1am and Ubers wouldn't even talk to our apps. Those familiar with Leeds will know that access to the station is bottlenecked further adding to the chaos and delays for traffic getting in. It was so much simpler before the pedestrianisation of City Square and the effective closure of the station frontage to vehicular traffic.

We'd set off from Brussels at 4.50pm so were a bit frazzled.

On the way out French Border control systems unilaterally failed, so I'm a bit touchy about computer systems full stop at the moment!

It will be interesting to know what happened. Presumably it will just be 'computer says no', but a bit of details wouldn't go amiss.

 

[growse]

I think that's the underlying point - if the railway can't provide all of those things (understandably) then it has to make sure the infrastructure is sufficiently resilient that it won't be called upon to do so. A fault taking out one workstation is unfortunate, but diversion routes would likely stay open and the directly affected area requiring RRBs would be smaller. A fault (or series of faults) taking out a huge patch of the north of England should just not be allowed to happen.

One of the main purposes of doing competent risk management is to work out all the things that might go wrong, their impact and likelihood, and then thinking about how you might design your overall system to either lessen the likelihood or the impact. It's about deploying your limited resources most effectively to control the risks that'll have the biggest cumulative impact over time.

It's entirely possible to have entire classes of risk where you may say "it's too expensive to do anything meaningful about this, but it's only projected to happen once every 50 years"*. I've no idea if the signalling system design process was competently risk-managed (can't imagine it wouldn't have been) and that a 5-panel outage was considered as a possibility. It's also possible that it was decided that "this is so infrequent, any resources we spend trying to mitigate this is taking resources away from mitigating more frequent risks".

As for:

taking out a huge patch of the north of England should just not be allowed to happen.

Failures happen. The public can't afford a failure-free network. Humanity is arguably incapable of designing one. If you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of reasoning about failures in complex systems, then the 1998 R Cook paper referenced at https://how.complexsystems.fail/ is a great (and not long) read. Specifically relevant here is point 11: "Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity.". A fun thing to do is to read that paper before settling down with the next RAIB report and a glass of something suitable.

*What's funny about probabilities is that the 1-in-50-year even might happen within a week of commissioning - that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not a 1-in-50-year event or that anything should be changed!

 

[duffield]

...
Failures happen. The public can't afford a failure-free network.
...

The company I used to work for (IT, railway related) was supposed to have a robust dual power supply for its critical computer systems. It was unfortunately discovered that actually the expensive dual power supply had then been funnelled through a single point of failure, possibly due to some fairly petty penny-pinching.

The ROCs should have similar arrangements for power and comms. There was a suggestion earlier in the thread that this incident was due to a comms failure; if it turns out (speculating alert!) that an expensive dual comms setup was compromised by some petty penny-pinching, that would be something that *should* have been afforded.

In other words, there are two possible categories of failure here: One due to extraordinary circumstances which could not be affordably avoided, and another due to the intended expensive robustness arrangements for the ROCs failing *possibly* due to penny pinching.

 

[noddingdonkey]

Sure, failures happen, but I'm sorry - if putting 5 panels into one building creates a greater than 0 probability of them all failing at the same time, then you simply don't put them all in the same building.

There are still savings to be had compared with the 5 separate PSBs that it replaced even if all of the infrastructure for each one is totally segregated and duplicated.

 

[TUC]

Since the WY Metro hasn't fully brought bus services in-house like the Bee network, if the same scenario were to happen in manchester ROC, is the mutual ticket acceptance from TOC for local bus trips happening or happened already? This is an area where DfT policy in light of GBR should look to simplify emergency backup transport options (for major network problems).

It doesn't need bus services to be in-house, just an ongoing commercial agreement with the bus companies on the circumstances when ticket acceptable should be declared at short notice and the reimbursement arrangements.

 

[growse]

The company I used to work for (IT, railway related) was supposed to have a robust dual power supply for its critical computer systems. It was unfortunately discovered that actually the expensive dual power supply had then been funnelled through a single point of failure, possibly due to some fairly petty penny-pinching.

The ROCs should have similar arrangements for power and comms. There was a suggestion earlier in the thread that this incident was due to a comms failure; if it turns out (speculating alert!) that an expensive dual comms setup was compromised by some petty penny-pinching, that would be something that *should* have been afforded.

In other words, there are two possible categories of failure here: One due to extraordinary circumstances which could not be affordably avoided, and another due to the intended expensive robustness arrangements for the ROCs failing *possibly* due to penny pinching.

Oh agree. Having the implementation match the design is part of the fun challenge.

Sure, failures happen, but I'm sorry - if putting 5 panels into one building creates a greater than 0 probability of them all failing at the same time, then you simply don't put them all in the same building.

There are still savings to be had compared with the 5 separate PSBs that it replaced even if all of the infrastructure for each one is totally segregated and duplicated.

I'm sure you know better than the professionals whose job this is, and you're not in any way biased by hindsight.

 

[jamiearmley]

It doesn't need bus services to be in-house, just an ongoing commercial agreement with the bus companies on the circumstances when ticket acceptable should be declared at short notice and the reimbursement arrangements.

The only time in the last 8 years that I've known ticket acceptance on local buses at Leeds was during strike action in Arriva days - ("Keep the Guard on the Train")- and that was only on Arriva buses so useless to many.

Happy to be corrected however.

 

[noddingdonkey]

What I do know is that it is a simple matter of fact that this failure would not have happened on this scale before all the eggs were put in too few baskets. One PSB failing would not have taken out the entire north of England.

For the replacement facility to not have been implemented with sufficient resillience that enables this failure to have happened on such a scale is unacceptable.

 

[MadMac]

Time was, in the days of Signalling Centres/Power Boxes, the facility existed to “override“ the panel in the event of a loss of control and set “straight through“ routes and in some cases, choose which way trains went at key junctions. There were also Local Control Panels that could be brought into use by local staff to keep things moving to some extent. What seems to have happened here is a catastrophic single-point failure with no way to get around it to any appreciable degree. Questions will be asked, and answers expected…..

 

[JamesT]

It wasn't me who was delayed but I'd also have assumed that, but the quotation seems to come from some form of official manual. Maybe they don't work strictly to that rule.

I’m wondering if the mention of the Consumer Rights Act is the key here. Delay Repay would be a simple refund on that basis with no need to determine liability. But if they’re claiming under the CRA, presumably because they want more than just the price of their ticket back, then different rules apply where it does need to be something under the control of the organisation you’re claiming from.

 

[Parham Wood]

With big disruptions like this you can't expect much help it is just a fact of life. However there should be ways passengers with special needs can get some assistance (easier said than done with a failure of this scale but there should be planning to enable this to be facilitated.) I do support the call for an enquiry into this and similar failures. We are living in unstable times where terrorist or fanatical activities, electric supply failures etc. are a potential threat which could have short term (12+ hrs) or long term (many days/months in the event of major infrastructure damage) disruptions to people getting to work and freight transport. How strategically important are the railways, is the current system robust enough, should there be more contingency, does the money saved in operating cost justify the cost to trade, commerce, industry, health service etc?

 

[1D53]

What I do know is that it is a simple matter of fact that this failure would not have happened on this scale before all the eggs were put in too few baskets. One PSB failing would not have taken out the entire north of England.

For the replacement facility to not have been implemented with sufficient resillience that enables this failure to have happened on such a scale is unacceptable.

If you lost 'Leeds East PSB' which controlled Leeds station you'd have lost still 90% of the same service groups. The only thing you'd have been able to run that you couldn't in this scenario would be Skipton - Bradford and Bradford - Ilkley.

 

[muz379]

Time was, in the days of Signalling Centres/Power Boxes, the facility existed to “override“ the panel in the event of a loss of control and set “straight through“ routes and in some cases, choose which way trains went at key junctions. There were also Local Control Panels that could be brought into use by local staff to keep things moving to some extent. What seems to have happened here is a catastrophic single-point failure with no way to get around it to any appreciable degree. Questions will be asked, and answers expected…..

That would still only work with certain types of failure , unless points can be detected (or secured by response staff on the ground) you cant have any routes "set" or any trains proceeding past protecting signals . Of course somewhere as busy as the leeds station area that just isn't going to feasible , the workload on signaller / person setting routes would be far too high to be safe/ efficient .

Emergency panels are in still in place and kept operational in some PSB areas at key junctions which are used during times when there is a comms failure between the interlocking and the PSB , the problem however with them is they require suitably qualified and familiarised response staff to operate them during times of failure . Great if its one junction thats gone down on a panel and the MOM that covers the patch can operate the panel. Not so great if its an area covered by 5 workstations and the MOM's that cover the patch's are securing points somewhere else to allow a train to proceed into a platform so it isn't stranded .

 

[northernchris]

I'm not sure you can blame a full TOC's incident response on one poor incident with one conductor.

Fair point, but it does demonstrate Northern have low standards of customer service if staff find this behaviour acceptable, and it's clear Northern's response on Saturday wasn't up to the standards of the other operators impacted. I really hope Northern do investigate what they could learn from this incident, LNER were in the same situation but had better comms and their frontline staff were visible.

 

[Killingworth]

What I do know is that it is a simple matter of fact that this failure would not have happened on this scale before all the eggs were put in too few baskets. One PSB failing would not have taken out the entire north of England.

For the replacement facility to not have been implemented with sufficient resillience that enables this failure to have happened on such a scale is unacceptable.

Steady on, I know Leeds is important but as far as I can tell in most parts of the north most trains ran, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, York, Hull, Doncaster, Sheffield.

However it's fairly obvious there's insufficient resilience if we can experience a wipe out like this. What we don't yet know is if it could have been worse by wiping out a much bigger area for days.

 

[43066]

It doesn't need bus services to be in-house, just an ongoing commercial agreement with the bus companies on the circumstances when ticket acceptable should be declared at short notice and the reimbursement arrangements.

Is any such agreement commercially viable from the railway’s perspective? As a taxpayer I’m not at all sure I want to be on the hook for a “cradle to grave” service for railway passengers with cheap advances. In fact I’d much rather people were left to make their own arrangements.

 

[Belperpete]

I seem to recall that on the day of the 7/7 attacks, London's transport network was completely shut down, including the buses, and passengers were left to their own devices, with stations shut and locked. I don't seem to recall such an outcry about how unacceptable that was. But then perhaps Londoners are more resilient than soft Northerners.

I am certainly glad that I wasn't one of the controllers or signallers on duty during the Leeds incident, they must have felt totally overwhelmed. Their priority would surely have been getting the dozens of stranded trains to the next station so that people could be detrained. Combined with all the calls that they would have been receiving asking what was going on, and them making trying to find out, I doubt that they would have had much time for anything else.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 29 Jul 2025 ==

What seems to be consistently clear from posts is that the ordinary public weren't receiving much or clear "what do I do next" information. I imagine this can't be generated bespoke between every impacted station pair in the moment as the resource won't exist, but a software solution does seem possible. LNER already uses pre-prepared alternative journey maps, which seem like a basic implementation, but I wonder if something more advanced is possible. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility for you to tell a system that area X or stations Y are unavailable and for it then to be able to generate a "next steps" plan between any given station pair - be that "take alternative train to X then change" or "take taxi from this station to train at Y" or "take taxi from this station to destination".

Something like Google Maps do you mean? All that anyone had to do in this incident was untick the "by train" option, and it would have found the alternatives.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 29 Jul 2025 ==

Time was, in the days of Signalling Centres/Power Boxes, the facility existed to “override“ the panel in the event of a loss of control and set “straight through“ routes and in some cases, choose which way trains went at key junctions. There were also Local Control Panels that could be brought into use by local staff to keep things moving to some extent.

Both those arrangements had single point failure modes, for example if you lost power at the panel or the interlocking.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 29 Jul 2025 ==

What I do know is that it is a simple matter of fact that this failure would not have happened on this scale before all the eggs were put in too few baskets. One PSB failing would not have taken out the entire north of England.

The question is, do the everyday day-in and day-out advantages of controllers and signallers having the big picture available, rather than working in their own tiny isolated bubbles, outweigh the disadvantages of what should be an incredibly rare total outage?

I would certainly expect NR to be investigating what went wrong, and how to avoid it happening again, but I very much doubt that will involve moving away from the ROC concept.

 

[Benjwri]

Something like Google Maps do you mean? All that anyone had to do in this incident was untick the "by train" option, and it would have found the alternatives.

All well and good if they’re going somewhere served by bus and local, but it doesn’t surface options that involve a bus then a train that is still running, any rail replacement services or what does and doesn’t have ticket acceptance.

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 29 Jul 2025 ==

London's transport network was completely shut down, including the buses

This is untrue, the bus network was halted after the attacks but then restarted in the afternoon and run free of charge to get people home.

While it was disrupted they also had the mainline rail network.

 

[MichaelTrains]

Fair point, but it does demonstrate Northern have low standards of customer service if staff find this behaviour acceptable, and it's clear Northern's response on Saturday wasn't up to the standards of the other operators impacted. I really hope Northern do investigate what they could learn from this incident, LNER were in the same situation but had better comms and their frontline staff were visible.

The primary concern I have with Northern is the lack of communication and the absence of visible frontline staff.

It’s frustrating to encounter just a barrier blocking the automatic gates with a sign that simply says "no trains running, signalling fault.”

How on earth is that acceptable behaviour when passengers with medical conditions and young families were in effect left stranded for hours.

Hopefully this inquiry gets to the bottom of Northern’s shoddy management processes which put customers at risk.

 

[DarloRich]

Hopefully this inquiry gets to the bottom of Northern’s shoddy management processes which put customers at risk.

You have expressed your position, which perhaps betrays a surfeit of emotion, but have not set out any solutions. Could you do so now?