Indeed. Any foreign military intelligence services with bad intent - I suspect there are one or two around - will surely be taking note of how incredibly easy it is to cripple train movements over trunk routes in the UK.
Probably someone who moved on a long time ago to another bunch of suckers.
How do they have the staff and rolling stock availability to do things like this at short notice? With an ECS move like with the LNER one, I understand that the train and staff are already going somewhere, rather than the train undergoing maintenance.
Presumably GBR will build in more appropriate resilience
Could she use this as an excuse to bring forward nationalisation of the operator? I'm not saying that would instantly improve things, but it wouldn't be the first time a TOC was stripped due to some issue the TOC was responsible for.
One answer is that there are less train and crew diagramming constraints on a Sunday, so there's possibly more of an opportunity to operate this rather than doing the same on a Monday (for example).
Apart from the "last mile" into Peterborough, all of this is now on railway operated by the Greater Anglia Integrated Business Unit.
www.railforums.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk
They don't want to taint the GBR brand with CrossCountry anytime soon.
Our posts overlapped, making the same point!
And I would even freely admit that my line of work is nowhere near as important to the daily lives of people as a train service is!
Because XCs Control office is just a floor in rented office building shared with many other non railway, non safety critical businesses.
Its also a 1960/70s building that appears not to be refurbished to a modern spec (you can see the lighting internally compared to new buildings looks ancient in colour). I bet the electrical wiring internaly in places is old and has not been touched.
Yes....the late Peter Rayner for one. Well worth reading his excellent book "On and Off the Rails" for his candid opinions on the cack-handed way the railways were privatised.
I did consider that there would be fewer services on a Sunday than on a week-day, but I also thought that there would be proportionally fewer staff to work those services, and perhaps more maintenance work scheduled on the trains, so fewer trains might be available for use - but I suppose if frequency is lower on a Sunday, but the length of rota duties is the same in terms of length of time, then more services could be fit in to be worked during a shift.
So the building has not been refurbed in 20 years, the wiring is ancient considering the increased demands by modern computers etc. Backs up my previous comment
