Not tonight it shouldn't. 1N35 2308 off London was booked to terminate Doncaster and outstable there due to Doncaster-York being unavailable. 1Y01 would then commence there.
For any armchair crayonistas looking at ways of fixing the Welwyn bottleneck (due to which these disruptions keep ruining the whole south ECML not just either the fast or slow lines), may be worth rethinking a tunnel. More expensive, sure, but mostly safe from the constant weather or trespassing issues
Ah, OK. Given the fault I'm surprised they haven't run it down to Donny and then back to NH.
An OHLE issue at Hitchin wouldn't have affected long-distance services then, assuming you did London-peterborough (also bypassing Holme fen).
What I was should have said is LNER could have come as far South as Biggleswade then SLW over Down to Stevenage. OK one or two trains an hour is all that could be achieved but it gets some people to destination. Mind you a 12 car 700 could shift even more people!
I thought something must be open when they started sending things south from York again. Thanks
It appears that the situation will not improve overnight, and that morning rush-hour travel will be disrupted. Fantastic, seeing as that will be on a Tuesday when the most people will be travelling in; you'll have both the usual Mon-Fri crowd, but on top of that there's the hybrid crowd who usually go into offices on Tuesdays. This will be an absolutely miserable morning of disrupted travel right before arrival into the office. And of course, with half term having just passed, this will be the sort of time where the country collectively goes back to work, and you'll have far fewer people taking annual leave etc. Expect pandemonium come 8am.
Ah yes ...they can just use the legions of staff they employ to sit around all night, every night across the full length of the country just in case they need to reposition their entire fleet at the drop of the hat.
I'm confused, who are GTR? I cannot find them on a list of TOC's. I have found TSGNL and TFGO.
TSGNL are continuing to use GTR (now standing for Greater Thameslink Railway) as a public-facing name for the overall operation.
This certainly involves a great deal of effort, but it is by no means an insurmountable problem. The key word is flexibility: flexibility in the deployment of rolling stock, in the deployment of staff, and in the infrastructure. However, all of this also requires a high degree of cooperation and standardisation between the TOCs and between the TOCs and the network operator (bidirectional signalling, rolling stock and staff freely deployable on many routes). If trains can be deployed flexibly and staff can also be deployed flexibly on these trains, things become much simpler. Fragmentation and bespoke solutions are the opposite. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which train is available the next morning for a particular service. The only thing that matters is that a suitable solution is found.
To a degree it very much does - though more in the sense that units are supposed to cycle through a depot for exam every 48 hours, and that you need the right type of unit (electric, bi-mode or MK4 set) on the right diagram, or you need a follow-up plan to correct things at the earliest opportunity. Fuelling (where applicable) and toilet tanking also need doing at the earliest opportunity if a unit hasn't made it onto the right depot overnight, so if you just put any unit on any working you quickly have a much larger mess to untangle.
The purpose of my post was to highlight the importance of flexibility in the event of a disruption. Many of the problems you mentioned do exist, but they are not laws of nature; rather, they are problems that have been created over decades. The very idea of a ‘wrong depot’ for example might seem very alien to many TOC outside GB.
No doubt. However the financial/resource constraints of operating railways in GB would also seem very alien to many TOC outside GB.
I don't have the date. But to me it looks more like the difference between a short sighted view and a long term view regarding spending money. Every TOC is very tight with money these days. That includes TOC in public hand, they have a tight budget too and are not free to spend unlimited amounts of money.
More fundamentally though is there needs to be a national standard/policy across all GBRs operations about how to deal with disruption. Currently, as we saw last night, even when part of the infrastructure is still available we wont or cant use it in degraded mode. Now I acknowledge that there are lot more issues that have to be considered compared to BR but that doesnt stop a revisit of the now esoteric task of Single Line Working for example being looked at what it takes to make it deliverable or not.
I still haven’t worked out how it works or why it still exists at all. Even when I started at SBB 30 years ago, we no longer had a method in use that was anywhere near as complicated and slow. Today, it is estimated that more than 95% of lines are equipped for bidirectional operation. Even the few lines without bidirectional operation can be used with signalling and without paperwork.
The advantages of sustained investment in infrastructure over many decades. There are still lots of lines over here in GB, including mainlines like the ECML, where there is no bi-directional signalling at all or it is only very limited (with much longer signal sections and reduced line speeds).
