Seriously, how can anyone use the railway for long distance commuting?

[VItraveller]

I decided to go to London and for being a random Thursday so many things went wrong.
I was booked on the 08:58 Birmingham international to euston but was delayed by half an hour when arriving at 10:36 instead.
And then on the way back I was booked on the 17:38 but this didn’t leave until around 18:12 because the driver for the train had been delayed getting into London, and it reached Birmingham International 50 minutes late.
I kept thinking at least I don’t have anywhere important to be or anything I need to do On Time but for people who regularly do long distance commutes like this how do you manage?

 

[VP185]

The same way someone can use the road network for long distance commuting.

 

[DarloRich]

I kept thinking at least I don’t have anywhere important to be or anything I need to do On Time but for people who regularly do long distance commutes like this how do you manage?

it is amazing how I never run into delays on the M1 when driving. Runs like clockwork. Every time.

 

[Spartacus]

I think you have to look at the alternative, doing it by road. Just looking at the southbound journey and that'd take you longer than the delayed train even on clear roads, on roads typical of that time of day it'd take you an hour longer than the delayed train, and that's without any unusual delays which could set you back further. You'd always be at least an hour slower than the train if it was on time.

Everyone I know who does this sort of of commuting builds in an extra half hour for delays, whether they're travelling by road or rail, but those travelling by rail have a quicker journey to begin with, often significantly so.

 

[WirralLine]

To be honest I dont think its the commuters that would be most affected by this. They (presumably) make the journey often enough to know how long it takes on average, how often theyre usually delayed, and factor this in when deciding which train they need to catch to be there in good time.

For example, I drive to work and my commute on average takes 20 minutes. I set off 45 minutes before I need to arrive just incase. Most days I arrive early and get time to grab some food or coffee etc. Occasionally I arrive with minutes to spare because I know it occasionally can take 40minutes if theres roadworks or a crash etc.

Most of the customers I deal with who have been caught out by delays and not allowing any delay margin are infrequent leisure travellers, the commuters seem to know the score!

 

[Russel]

it is amazing how I never run into delays on the M1 when driving. Runs like clockwork. Every time.

But saying "The roads are just as bad", isn't exactly a good advertisement is it?

My twice weekly Trent Valley commute, for the last two weeks, has had a 50% success rate...

 

[sh24]

It's very simple. Even with some awful reliability (hello GWML Paddington-Reading) I would still rather be on a train/in a cafe with laptop and headphones getting work done that trapped in a car unable to do anything useful.

 

[gallafent]

To be honest I dont think its the commuters that would be most affected by this. They (presumably) make the journey often enough to know how long it takes on average, how often theyre usually delayed, and factor this in when deciding which train they need to catch to be there in good time.

Indeed, and even noncommuters could use the excellent Recent Train Times service to determine whichever statistically determined likely and likely-worst arrival time for their chosen journey fits their needs, allowing a more informed choice of departure time!

 

[DarloRich]

But saying "The roads are just as bad", isn't exactly a good advertisement is it?

My twice weekly Trent Valley commute, for the last two weeks, has had a 50% success rate...

ok - but stuff happens. Maybe I should open a post about my daily commute on the WCML and see how often I am complaining about delays! Personally I feel less stressed if delayed on a train. No pointless clutch/ brake 2 inch movements needed!

yesterday would have been the first time for a while i would have complained i suspect as the train that broke down at Northampton is the one i get from Bletchley to Euston .

 

[Snow1964]

The railway has created part of this mess, until few years ago, just got on first train, they were not booked on a specific train. Didn't get penalty for travelling on wrong train if intended train wasn't on time.

Now there are penalties, you get people building in contingency time to arrive at departure station, so places like Euston find concourse is regularly busy, rather than people going straight to next available train.

The other part of the mess is called Avanti, I have looked up (link) their performance, and it is terrible. For the West Midlands services a whopping 8.3% are cancelled, only 30.8% run on time. Even using the laid back time +3 minutes metric they only manage to achieve a feeble 52.3%.

Punctuality & Performance | Avanti West Coast

Discover Avanti West Coast’s performance insights. Travel by train and explore how we enhance UK rail journeys with reliability and service excellence.

www.avantiwestcoast.co.uk

So Op is fair in assessment, shouldn't need to factor in so much contingency time, due to (very) low reliability.

 

[gallafent]

But saying "The roads are just as bad", isn't exactly a good advertisement is it?

No, and when there is disruption on the roads one's satnav can generally route around it straightforwardly, which generally seems to help enormously in reducing the delay caused by congestion (because the road network is such a large graph compared to the railway network, and one is in control of one's own car, without other passengers and required stops, etc.). When the baseline (no disruption) times are also substantially faster by car than by public transport, as for many cases which do not involve London (or one of a few other conurbations I guess), then that raises the bar even further for acceptable reliability of the public transport option!

Working on the train (or in a station cafe) is also fine, as long as there's enough space and one can get a seat with a big enough table to do so, often not the case when disruption has occurred.

... and then there's the relative cost, even with one person in the car, shifted yet further with car-sharing.

For context: I'm a long-distance commuter (for some definition of long) between home and two places that aren't London

 

[Russel]

ok - but stuff happens. Maybe I should open a post about my daily commute on the WCML and see how often I am complaining about delays! Personally I feel less stressed if delayed on a train. No pointless clutch/ brake 2 inch movements needed!

yesterday would have been the first time for a while i would have complained i suspect as the train that broke down at Northampton is the one i get from Bletchley to Euston .

I get things happen, but they keep happening, over the last couple of weeks there has been multiple serious failures on the WCML, at what point do we stop pretending everything is perfect?

 

[pokemonsuper9]

until few years ago, just got on first train, they were not booked on a specific train. Didn't get penalty for travelling on wrong train if intended train wasn't on time.

Now there are penalties, you get people building in contingency time to arrive at departure station, so places like Euston find concourse is regularly busy, rather than people going straight to next available train.

Advanced tickets have been a thing long before Avanti, as has arriving at Euston with plenty of time to spare. I almost always use off-peak returns for leisure travel now, but when I was younger we'd often use Advanced tickets on Virgin for trips to London, with waiting a while at Euston being normal.

 

[DarloRich]

I get things happen, but they keep happening, over the last couple of weeks there has been multiple serious failures on the WCML, at what point do we stop pretending everything is perfect?

same point but swapping WCML for M1. It is the same discussion.

However we are still not comparing like with like though as the nature of a limited/define route like the WCML means that a failure in Tebay will cause delays in Milton Keynes in the way that a blockage on the M6 at Tebay wont block the M1 at Milton Keynes.

I maintain - as a daily user of the WCML I rarely see the problems others report. Personally I don't travel, say, north of Preston often so don't really care if that service breaks down more than mine in exactly the same way that I don't care about blockages on the M62 unless I am in that area.

Also: I might just be lucky to live on a bit of the line considered important.

 

[3141]

It depends on your attitude. Mine is that nothing can be expected to work perfectly, especially when both railways and roads have the maximum or higher amount of traffic.

I'm not a commuter, nor a frequent leisure traveller. Most of my journeys are between Whitchurch (Hampshire) and Waterloo, about an hour. I recall two occasions with serious delays which were the result of suicides on the line, and another when a class 159 unit had defective brakes. Most journeys are on time, but I do think about whether there would be problems if I was late and, if so, I may travel earlier.

Thinking back to the late 1950s/early 1960s and I travelled between home in London and university in Manchester at the beginning and end of each term, trains were rarely absolutely on time, and the standout was a journey that took eight hours.

 

[Bantamzen]

I decided to go to London and for being a random Thursday so many things went wrong.
I was booked on the 08:58 Birmingham international to euston but was delayed by half an hour when arriving at 10:36 instead.
And then on the way back I was booked on the 17:38 but this didn’t leave until around 18:12 because the driver for the train had been delayed getting into London, and it reached Birmingham International 50 minutes late.
I kept thinking at least I don’t have anywhere important to be or anything I need to do On Time but for people who regularly do long distance commutes like this how do you manage?

It's not just long distance commuting. Dare to regularly from outside any of the main metropolitan areas, and it can at time be like practicing the Dark Arts. These days one of the first things I do when waking up on commute day is check RTT to see if the Mid-Cheshire trains are where they should be (in my case on their way as an ECS to Chester to form the first two services into Manchester), and if not turn the light off and have an extra hour in bed because I'm working from home!! And thanks to my local council's complete inability to even consider lining subsidised bus routes up with incoming commuter trains, delays on the way home can often leave me waiting for close to an hour for the next bus to my little hamlet.

And before anyone suggests driving, on the M56 / M6 / M60 barely a day goes by without someone parking their car into others at high speed, or someone is digging multiple holes everywhere because they can, or maybe it's a hobby. Literally around my way, it only takes someone sneezing to create gridlock everywhere. Of course if Cheshire had even the semblance of a joined up public transport network.... Well that's for another thread....

 

[speedy1]

Good thing long-distance commuting is both

a) not necessary because companies and opportunities are so evenly spread out across England and not massively concentrated in the capital
b) is very good value given the poor service

... LOL

Don't complain / could be worse .. typical British attitude to everything.

 

[Russel]

same point but swapping WCML for M1. It is the same discussion.

However we are still not comparing like with like though as the nature of a limited/define route like the WCML means that a failure in Tebay will cause delays in Milton Keynes in the way that a blockage on the M6 at Tebay wont block the M1 at Milton Keynes.

I maintain - as a daily user of the WCML I rarely see the problems others report. Personally I don't travel, say, north of Preston often so don't really care if that service breaks down more than mine in exactly the same way that I don't care about blockages on the M62 unless I am in that area.

Also: I might just be lucky to live on a bit of the line considered important.

Living on the southern part of the WCML may shield you somewhat, but try relying on the Trent Valley when LNWR decide to rip out the local stops on a service that already only runs hourly in an attempt to make up time, suddenly you have a two hour gap between services, it gets tiresome rather quickly.

 

[DarloRich]

Living on the southern part of the WCML may shield you somewhat, but try relying on the Trent Valley when LNWR decide to rip out the local stops on a service that already only runs hourly in an attempt to make up time, suddenly you have a two hour gap between services, it gets tiresome rather quickly.

I bet! But I only want to get to Crewe so............

In honesty the least reliable part of my journey is the Marston Vale section!

 

[norbitonflyer]

A colleague used to commute from Chippenham to the City. She was almost always in before me, and indeed GWR seemed to be more likely to get her there without delays or instant surprise cancellations than my own commute from SW London - i don't think they ever skip stopped Chippenham, despite it being far less busy than my local station (40% of the footfall according to the latest ORR stats).

The opne time she was spactacularly late was on the very first day of IEPs - you recall the one with the instant surprise showers.

Many many years ago another colleague commuted from Shanklin.

 

[Unobrow]

I decided to go to London and for being a random Thursday so many things went wrong.
I was booked on the 08:58 Birmingham international to euston but was delayed by half an hour when arriving at 10:36 instead.
And then on the way back I was booked on the 17:38 but this didn’t leave until around 18:12 because the driver for the train had been delayed getting into London, and it reached Birmingham International 50 minutes late.
I kept thinking at least I don’t have anywhere important to be or anything I need to do On Time but for people who regularly do long distance commutes like this how do you manage?

There were issues yesterday morning which had a huge knock affect on for the rest of the day. First a London bound LNW came to a stand in the Northampton Gateway area with a locked axle warning. A rescue unit was sent which after fitters couldn’t resolve the problem, performed a train to train evacuation on the down line. At the same time, some Herbert decided to pull the pass com on 1A16 (0843 Liverpool-Euston) just after passing Weedon. The driver couldn’t reset the unit and fault and they were getting ready to declare that a failure and set up a train to train evacuation too, when the crew managed to isolate the issue and get on the move. Making the service 70 late by that point, the service was terminated at Milton Keynes (hopefully causing much grief for the aforementioned Herbert, if the other passengers didn’t get to them first!!). So for over an hour, no Southbound services could get past Rugby, and Northbound via Northampton were also disrupted, meaning trains and crews were all out of their slots making for the subsequent delays. Incidentally, the original issue with the unit seems to have been an unseen bird caught in the coupler causing the units to not communicated properly.

At 7pm, some services were still suffering the backlash running up to an hour late.

 

[Oxfordblues]

I've often wondered how punctual cars, coaches and lorries really are. Of those regular road users who have set themselves a schedule what proportion are usually "on time"? Coach operators publish schedules and truckers have, at least, estimates for journey times but we are never told the percentages of on-time journeys. Most motorists probably assume that a trip will take "as long as it takes" and will accept delays as the inevitable consequence of a congested road network. Nobody seems to complain about the late arrival of cars. If only there were a road version of Realtimetrains!

 

[urbophile]

it is amazing how I never run into delays on the M1 when driving. Runs like clockwork. Every time.

I don't drive any longer, and when I did I avoided motorways as much as possible. But of those few such journeys in the last five or so years nearly half of them were delayed for well over an hour owing to unavoidable (and possibly tragic) incidents on the road ahead. Once you are stuck in a line of traffic you can't escape. I'm not suggesting that my experience is typical, but there is no way of guaranteeing that you run to schedule whatever mode of transport you choose.

 

[D1537]

My current commute is by train on the northern ECML
My previous commute was by car, part of which was the M6 in the West Midlands.

I don't think I need to expand on which one is/was more reliable for getting me to work on time!

Admittedly I have the advantage now that I can look at RTT in the morning and if there's some sort of major ECML meltdown (or TPE have cancelled 9E05 again) then I can drive instead, but even accounting for that the experience is definitely better now.

 

[Elecman]

I decided to go to London and for being a random Thursday so many things went wrong.
I was booked on the 08:58 Birmingham international to euston but was delayed by half an hour when arriving at 10:36 instead.
And then on the way back I was booked on the 17:38 but this didn’t leave until around 18:12 because the driver for the train had been delayed getting into London, and it reached Birmingham International 50 minutes late.
I kept thinking at least I don’t have anywhere important to be or anything I need to do On Time but for people who regularly do long distance commutes like this how do you manage?

So you qualified for half your money back in delay repay om both journeys, not something you can claim when delayed driving

 

[Magdalia]

I kept thinking at least I don’t have anywhere important to be or anything I need to do On Time but for people who regularly do long distance commutes like this how do you manage?

I commuted for 25 years between the Fens and London. That was in the era of Network SouthEast, WAGN and FCC, so no live updates on smartphones or laptops. It included the aftermath of the Kings Cross fire and the Hatfield and Potters Bar derailments.

Disrupted services are part of commuting, and coping with it is a learning experience with plenty of practice. There are a few simple rules that most commuters learn quite quickly:

• always have a plan B, and know when to stick and when to twist
• always have something to read
• don't get angry
• don't get stressed

 

[Tetragon213]

So you qualified for half your money back in delay repay om both journeys, not something you can claim when delayed driving

I'm sure claiming back half the money on the ticket is really going to soften the blow of the consequent bollocking from the boss. "My bus/train/tram was delayed", in my experience, works about as well as "my dog ate my homework" as reason for being late into the office.

I will say, I used to commute into Salisbury for college every day for ab out 3 years, and in that time (probably over 500 journeys in and out), I can count on 3 sets of appendages how many times I had problems, and I can count on one hand how many times it was a crippling one. Granted, South West Trains ran a much tighter ship in my experience than the MTR/FG South Western Railway did, but I very rarely had any problems that weren't at least partially self inflicted.

 

[dk1]

I'm sure claiming back half the money on the ticket is really going to soften the blow of the consequent bollocking from the boss. "My bus/train/tram was delayed", in my experience, works about as well as "my dog ate my homework" as reason for being late into the office.

I will say, I used to commute into Salisbury for college every day for ab out 3 years, and in that time (probably over 500 journeys in and out), I can count on 3 sets of appendages how many times I had problems, and I can count on one hand how many times it was a crippling one. Granted, South West Trains ran a much tighter ship in my experience than the MTR/FG South Western Railway did, but I very rarely had any problems that weren't at least partially self inflicted.

Has the boss never been delayed?

 

[Watershed]

I've done a variety of commutes over the last 15 years or so - driving, cycling and by train. The worst commutes were when I had to change at Birmingham New Street or London Euston - the unreliability of the congested WCML has caused me to miss countless connections. I've done long and short commutes but it is really the disruption that's the worst part, more so than the length in my view.

Apart from when I could cycle to work in 10 minutes, the next best commute is arguably the one I have now, about 20 minutes on a direct train running at very frequent intervals. With another station on a different line I can walk to in 20 minutes if it all goes "Pete Tong".

 

[saismee]

There are a few simple rules that most commuters learn quite quickly:

• always have a plan B, and know when to stick and when to twist
• always have something to read
• don't get angry
• don't get stressed

As frontline staff, they certainly do not learn this quickly enough!!!