We have just had 3 days of the worst amount of cancellations ever on the the North and West London lines, plus the East London has also had a fair share as well. Driver shortages is apparently the reason! Why? On Saturday afternoon we had 6 consecutive trains cancelled which is ridiculous on a 5-10 min headway. The management need to be sacked. And of course this is TFL where everything is a secret service, with little of no information, just minor of major delays due to driver shortage. However they don't of course tell you why there is suddenly a driver shortage. To find that out you need to put in a FOI request and wait a month until they can make up an excuse for the reply, which I have told they hate doing.
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London Overground Unbelievable amount of cancellations
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whoosh
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Is it school holidays this week? Likely no one wants to work overtime on their days off during the school holidays. Especially when it's a bank holiday weekend at the start with nice weather.
Picture the scene:
You only get 50% of weekends off.
Do you want to work these days off as overtime?
If the answer is "maybe", does the likelihood decrease if these fall on a:
Bank Holiday Weekend
Weekend bookending School Holidays
All of the above with nice weather.
Picture the scene:
You only get 50% of weekends off.
Do you want to work these days off as overtime?
If the answer is "maybe", does the likelihood decrease if these fall on a:
Bank Holiday Weekend
Weekend bookending School Holidays
All of the above with nice weather.
D1537
Established Member
Let's have a think
Bank Holiday weekend
Half term school holidays
Hot weather
Major football weekend
Nicholas Lewis
Established Member
So depot establishments aren't sufficient to cover the timetable?
Nova1
Member
If nobody wants to work overtime, yes
The Planner
Veteran Member
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What is sacking the management going to solve? If you rely on overtime and people don't want to work it, short of getting more cash to recruit, there isn't much you can do.
a_c_skinner
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Overtime is cheap. That is the thing. For NHS doctors (the one area I do know about) double time for overtime is actually cheaper than extra staff.
Nicholas Lewis
Established Member
running the base timetable shouldn't need overtime though
Why should running a railway timetable be dictated by school holidays? The same thing happens every December with Thameslink having hundreds of cancellations, and you told the staff are using up leave which they should be told to do earlier in the year, like most companies do. To have a huge percentage of your drivers on leave during busy holiday periods is clearly bad management. Have rules where only so many staff can be on holiday, not half the work force.
Fire by line in Hackney.
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www.standard.co.uk
Hackney Central fire: Dozens of firefighters called as caravan engulfed in flames
The blaze forced the closure of Hackney Central station on Sunday night
www.standard.co.uk
They almost certainly do have these conditions.
But unfortunately those that can’t get leave just go sick. (and they don’t leave a trail having leave declined).
Sack ‘em/discipline them some will say. That will make the problem worse as goodwill to do favours disappears.
increasing the depot compliment is the solution but there is a big financial cost to that and in the current environment that will not be resolve.
Back in bad old days of BR it was a problem, but there were spare staff about and bank holidays were paid at an enhanced rate (rather than a normal working day).
Some depots had no Rest Day working and they were the ones that normally managed to cover all the work.
As a Roster Clerk at 2 depots that didn’t work rest days, casual discussions (ie in the pub) with the local reps was that they were opposed to RDW as the depot becomes reliant on it. That would appear to be true nowadays.
(When there were uncovered turns, the local reps helped out/offered solutions to ensure that everything was covered).
rmHawk765
Member
The North London Line's performance and reliability is in general very poor, due to the freight situation. Therefore if any other issues are layered on it all goes massively bottoms up.
Islineclear3_1
Established Member
Don't worry, we had our fair share of delays and cancellations on GTR Thameslink and Southern today...
boiledbeans2
Member
Lioness Line has packed up since ~1400 today, and it remains so till end of service. TfL status shows there's a fire at South Kenton. Can a shuttle service for the unaffected sections be run? Even at 30min headway instead of the usual 15min would be better than nothing.
Those rules exist already.
What is more likely the case is that there is a reliance on overtime to meet the timetable which normally goes under the radar. However when it’s nice out as opposed to a wet November, then this means - alongside probably a small amount of “strategic” sickness - means that cancellations appear more frequently.
This isn’t TfL secrecy though - most TOCs would use “shortage of train crew” or “driver shortages”. They are not going to explain why this is happening, just like it’s not explained why there’s a “fault with the signalling system” or a “train fault”.
ASLEF’s long-standing position is that there should be no overtime available with the establishment at such a level to manage any issues.
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Well have I got news for you! Most TOCs too, let alone healthcare, emergency services etc.
Deepgreen
Established Member
Does anyone think doing so solves all problems? I've never seen a comment saying that.
A few do. Just like some who think GBR will be a silver bullet to all of the things they don’t like about the railway or want to see improved.
norbitonflyer
Established Member
I don't think that. I want TfL to take over services in South London so we pay the same fares as across the river.
Snow1964
Established Member
Having some overtime is one thing, but scheduling 6 consecutive trains (which get cancelled) to be staffed by those volunteering to do overtime is a management decision.
Someone has to take responsibility for not having at least alternate trains scheduled to be worked by staff on normal contracted hours.
Management also need to understand if they chose to rely on overtime, they need to incentivise it properly (pay sufficient overtime rate to actually get the volunteers), or they need to learn how to role up their sleeves and step in to help out (even if that means doing a bit of work to keep their competencies up to date). They can't have it both ways.
CC 72100
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With all due respect, Rostering, crew coverage and the ability for managers to be used is far more complex than you have said there.
Ultimately customers don't care, they just want a reliable service and this is a business provlem, but it doesn't work like you've said and is much more complex.
Also the Managers who can drive and unlikely to be the ones setting AL quotas, doing diagramming and crew resourcing, so if you're suggesting they drive almost as a punishment for their decision making, the eyes are looking in the wrong direction.
How would any of us know those 6 trains were all scheduled to be those doing RDW? Is a RDW rostered train any more or less likely to run than a non-RDW service?
Some trains that were cancelled could have been scheduled to be a normal working day but called in sick, or a unit failure, other technical failure or any one of a number of the usual railway excuses for a cancellation.
Mattplans
Member
Not to mention a consistent structure to timetables and frequency uplifts, which TfL have been happy to lay on since Covid while the National network lags behind. In my turf, we lie in wait to see what crumbs Southeastern will share in December and enjoy what commuters in every other corner of the city have enjoyed since the pandemic ended.
For most of South London, commuters pay more for their services and wait longer, and they have longer journey times overall. They start later and end earlier. Stations are generally unstaffed, routes have lopsided timetables, and these services which are supposedly so low in demand that they don’t warrant frequency uplifts, tend to cover the running costs of the lesser used services on the network.
The benefits of transferring some South London metro lines to LO clearly outweigh the negatives, and this is not a reason undermining that argument, especially when one consider’s most S London metro routes are more comparable in nature to the Weaver line which was not heavily affected by the disruption faced by other lines on the network.
The idea being posed is that transferring lines to LO would replicate the issues faced this BH to other parts of London’s rail network, but when one considers this, even if it was the case, against fare reductions & integration with the rest of the capital’s payment system, frequency uplifts, a rigid/predictable service (ie: one line, one terminal), having stations properly staffed, I reckon the scale still tips in favour of LO.
Additionally, some of the issues faced by LO depots were not issues South of the river. When creating depot structures and contracts etc, I fail to see why these would not be amended to provide a better BH service going forward. That’s if current depot arrangements (which evidently are
not as problematic for BH working) wouldn’t be brought forward anyway?
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Falcon1200
Established Member
Or reduce basic pay rates so that staff have to work overtime to earn a decent wage? (not a serious suggestion!) That was how it seemed in BR days, and even then it was not enough; I recall, one summer evening, passengers besieging the Station Manager's office at Liverpool Street when multiple consecutive trains were cancelled but no special stops hade been issued on expresses over the same route. This was in 1979.....
The question always comes down to how many staff should, or realistically could, be employed to guarantee 100% cover for every possible eventuality? For example, had this Bank Holiday weekend been wet and miserable, would there have been the same disruption to the service?
Snow1964
Established Member
Even if can't guarantee 100%, should be expected to have something like at least 85% covered by normal contracted hours, and as said earlier, not schedule 6 consecutive trains with volunteers rather than contracted hours.
Even at 85% they are expecting average employee to want to work 5-6 hours overtime. Some will do no overtime, so probably asking for 8-11 hours overtime for remainder. Now that basic pay is fairly high I think this is unrealistic.
Maybe realistic in November when weather is poor, but no where near realistic during school holidays and/or good weather season. But of course good management would compensate the staffing schedules seasonally and holiday period for likely volume of cover at overtime rates. Clearly London Overground management failed in this managing task yesterday
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fodphil
Member
Correct