Do LNER journey times need adjusting upwards?

[Angmering1974]

I can't recall an LNER service recently to/from London I've taken that's been on time notably on the Leeds branch. Looking at OnTimeTrains it's not just me having bad luck.

Should the timetables be padded like airlines do, to give people more realistic journey times?

If people believe this should be done in principle, what's your threshold? x% of services over N minutes to pad by N, over what period?

 

[The Planner]

I can't recall an LNER service recently to/from London I've taken that's been on time notably on the Leeds branch. Looking at OnTimeTrains it's not just me having bad luck.

Should the timetables be padded like airlines do, to give people more realistic journey times?

If people believe this should be done in principle, what's your threshold? x% of services over N minutes to pad by N, over what period?

As in the way they used to be by public timing them 5 minutes later at end destination?

 

[NCT]

Padding is not a good practice on the railway. Paddington leads to running earlier than timetabled and that is actually detrimental to capacity and performance. Headways are based on trains running on greens - if you are running early and hit a red and come to a stop, you cause a ripple effect of reds and yellows behind you. You hit a station early and your platform isn't yet available - you block the line you are on that another service requires to enter / leave the station. You hit a junction early and are let through in front of a faster service that's meant to be in front of you.

 

[stevieinselby]

Looking over the last 5 days (I'm not counting Monday or Tuesday because the whole of the ECML was up the spout and it clearly wasn't in normal operation), about 2/3 of trains from Leeds to London have arrived within 5 minutes of on time (97 out of 150), and of the trains that were 5 minutes or more late, about 2/3 of those were within 10 minutes of on time. While that isn't great, it doesn't seem to suggest that the timetable is unachievable. Adding too much padding will make the timetables look unattractive to passengers, and if it means that most of the time any passengers making a connection are hanging around for ages because their train arrived early then that isn't going to be too popular either.