When the Core fails there's really not much you can do. It's like the Central Line going down between Marble Arch and Liverpool Street. Ruislip and Epping will simply be f*cked.
The whole thing seems to be very much bury head in sand, which is the whole attitude of U.K. government to everything nowadays.
From a GN perspective, we have four separate immediate issues, which if anything seem to be getting worse.
* Peterborough-Horsham is not dependable, and the lack of alternatives between Hitchin and Peterborough in particular. (There are also similar issues south of the river but I’m not going to comment on those as I’m less familiar with how this affects users in practice).
* Cambridge-Brighton is also unreliable, though at least this has alternatives. In particular it gets pulled at the slightest hint of problems. During the daytime this leaves just 1tph at times between Letchworth and Cambridge for the intermediate stations.
* Poor performance of other non-Thameslink GN services. The Cambridge stopping service and the Ely and Kings Lynn services. Late running is endemic, and is likely to get worse when the new timetable comes in.
* Recovery from incidents is poor and disruption often lasts for entire days. Any significant after about midday is likely to result in a significantly disrupted service right through til close.
All four of these issues are a direct result of Thameslink through services and the negative effect they have on an already congested section of the network.
Things that would help:
* Split Peterborough-Horsham in some way. I realise there’s challenges in doing this, but at some point there needs to be an acceptance that this service is not working well. It’s been seven years now and it isn’t improving. Work needs to start now on looking at how this can be split.
* Introduce an all-day hourly Peterborough to King’s Cross service, calling at all stations Peterborough to Hitchin then fast to King’s Cross.
* A look at what can be done to improve performance of the Kings Lynn and Ely services. Longer turnarounds at Kings Lynn and (if possible) at the London end as well would at least give some chance of recovering from delays, though the real problem is delays picked up following slower services between Hitchin and Cambridge, entirely as was envisaged on here a decade ago.
* The quality of regulation on the route could also be better. Like yesterday, I was on a 2Lxx service into London, that lost a few minutes between Letchworth and Alexandra Palace for no particular reason, but then ended up following a Moorgate service between Alexandra Palace and Finsbury Park, despite the US2 being completely free and seemingly fully available to use.
* Remove the Alexandra Palace stop from the stopping services to give more options to the signallers to recover late running.
* Prioritise getting all the 379s facing the same way, which currently is putting extra time on dwell times in some situations.
