2018 - A cursed year for the railway ?

[jfollows]

TPE are quite keen to get their trains back into the right place but have shown no interest in trying to get their passengers to the right place.

I think this is the mentality of most of the organisations operating trains this year, there will always be occasions when terminating trains short or missing out stops will be the right course of action, but from a passenger perspective it feels like 75% of the time this happens it's not right.
For people operating trains, having services run through major centres like Manchester "makes sense" because on paper there is less contention for platform space at terminal stations. But not many passengers want to travel through the centres, for example from Adlington (Cheshire) to Adlington (Lancashire). And we know the reliability of these cross-city services is dreadful and always will be when too many of them are asked to use infrastructure that's not up to it.
To me, one necessary part of the solution is a deep-rooted culture change in management and project management to put the passenger first at all times, to stop playing with trains and chasing availability figures and to stop promising jam tomorrow on the back of major disruption today (because tomorrow never comes anyway).
But it could just be me having a rant and maybe everything will be OK again in a few more months. Let's see.

 

[agbrs_Jack]

As a regular user of the railways of West Yorkshire, (thankfully avoiding Leeds at rush hour most of the time), whilst the May timetable debacle is well recorded I have not been too badly affected. My grumble are the constant slightly late services - 3-10 minutes being typical on a regular service I use.

Quite the opposite here! Northern's performance in the last two months especially has been pretty good here.
May timetable change, however, was awful with cuts to peak services for no reason (had nothing to do with the electrification) and another service lost. We now have an hourly evening peak service and an hour gap in the morning peak too! The services we do have, are generally close to on time.

 

[tbtc]

No improved frequencies for me. Quite the opposite

The timetable, even had the trains run according to that timetable, is worse than in 1990

Where's your local station then?

I'd guess at somewhere like Marsden (based on your "West Yorkshire" location and the "twenty miles from Manchester" reference). Somewhere that's seen it's 1980s trains (75mph 150s) replaced by 21st century trains (100mph 185s)? Is the published timetable that much worse than what went before? Direct links to Leeds every hour (rather than nothing going east of Huddersfield)?

(obviously the disruption meant that the actual timetable hasn't been the same as the published one but that's a different argument - you're arguing that the actual published timetable is worse and frequencies are down)

I don’t think expecting trains to run roughly according to the timetable is OTT. I don’t think expecting to be able to get home the 20 miles from Manchester in less than 3 hours is OTT

That's not what I'm talking about - I'm talking about the kind of expectations that some people on here have (given how complicated/ busy etc the railway is nowadays, compared to the Good Old Days when every connection was apparently held etc).

No-one around here is complaining about seating or paint

Oh, they are on this Forum! Loads of arguments about the comfort of seats on trains that haven't been built yet, or criticism of liveries that people have only seen in renders - the amount of froth over these kind of minor subjects kind of suggests that many/most things on the railway are going okay-ish, if that's the kind of "problems" we have to get knickers in a twist about.

 

[LOL The Irony]

Can anyone think of a year as excrable as 2018 for the railway ?

1939 - 1945.

 

[yorksrob]

1939 - 1945.

That's probably a fair point.

 

[nr758123]

Where's your local station then?

I'd guess at somewhere like Marsden

Fairly close. Slaithwaite.

Somewhere that's seen it's 1980s trains (75mph 150s) replaced by 21st century trains (100mph 185s)?

I like the Class 185s. They are a vast improvement on a combination of pacers, 150s & 156s. But I prefer a pacer that turns up to a Class 185 that is cancelled.

Is the published timetable that much worse than what went before? Direct links to Leeds every hour (rather than nothing going east of Huddersfield)?

(obviously the disruption meant that the actual timetable hasn't been the same as the published one but that's a different argument - you're arguing that the actual published timetable is worse and frequencies are down)

1990: hourly throughout the day, half-hourly in peaks.
2018 (May): hourly throughout the day, hourly in peaks. The previous 6 trains from Manchester to Slaithwaite in the evening peak has now been cut to 3. Often one of those, occasionally two, has been cancelled.

The direct service to Leeds was the one good thing about the 2018 timetable, but this had to be withdrawn in December in order to restore a bit of reliability.

From the passenger point of view the (inadequate) published timetable and the disruption are both factors in the absymal service we have endured. The impact of a cancelled train is much greater when the wait for the next one is an hour rather than ½ hour.

Loads of arguments about the comfort of seats on trains that haven't been built yet, or criticism of liveries that people have only seen in renders - the amount of froth over these kind of minor subjects kind of suggests that many/most things on the railway are going okay-ish, if that's the kind of "problems" we have to get knickers in a twist about.

I'm with you on this one. These are not subjects which bother commuters in this valley.

 

[Bald Rick]

1982 was horrendous.

 

[vlad]

2018 hasn't really seen the Crewe to Derby line getting any worse.

Things haven't got any better either, however.

 

[coppercapped]

Thirty years as a regular train traveller and I've never experienced anything like it.

Never-ending engineering works, timetable meltdown, never ending industrial action, and now the whole of Kent has self-immolated.

I suppose the years of the closure programme were bad in the long term.

Can anyone think of a year as excrable as 2018 for the railway ?

1955 and the ASLEF strike from 29th May to 14th June showed that in the day of rising car ownership and effective lorry transport the railways no longer had a stranglehold on the economy. This one event changed people's perception of the railway.

Parcels and sundries traffic disappeared overnight - never to return. At one stroke the raison d'etre for many local stations vanished. For example the strike occurred at the peak strawberry season in the Cotswolds and stations like Toddington (on the Stratford - Honeybourne - Cheltenham line) lost one of their main traffics. Similar stories were repeated all over the network.

 

[backontrack]

It's not Southall, Hatfield, Great Heck, Potters' Bar or Ladbroke Grove - those are in a category of their own, obviously - nor is it in line with 1955 or 1963. But it hasn't exactly been a vintage year.

A great deal of this can be laid at the door of Chris Grayling and the DfT.

 

[Dr Hoo]

2018 hasn't really seen the Crewe to Derby line getting any worse.

Things haven't got any better either, however.

An interesting post, given the massive re-modelling at Derby. Whilst the Crewe service is one of relatively few that terminate there rather than continuing my impression from other services in the area is that they are much more ‘fluid’ now. And the actual work, replacement buses, publicity, etc. was rather well done by many accounts.
If Derby wasn’t regarded as a definite success the industry really is in trouble. (I refrain from commenting on other matters in this post.)

 

[Bald Rick]

1955 and the ASLEF strike from 29th May to 14th June showed that in the day of rising car ownership and effective lorry transport the railways no longer had a stranglehold on the economy. This one event changed people's perception of the railway.

Parcels and sundries traffic disappeared overnight - never to return. At one stroke the raison d'etre for many local stations vanished. For example the strike occurred at the peak strawberry season in the Cotswolds and stations like Toddington (on the Stratford - Honeybourne - Cheltenham line) lost one of their main traffics. Similar stories were repeated all over the network.

Which led to Beeching. Perhaps we therefore should all blame ASLEF for Reshaping the Railways.

*dons tin hat and withdraws to bunker*

 

[backontrack]

Which led to Beeching. Perhaps we therefore should all blame ASLEF for Reshaping the Railways.

*dons tin hat and withdraws to bunker*

Or, alternatively, those on here that support the closures (and there are a few, bizarrely) can thank ASLEF.

But this is off-topic.

 

[spongsdad]

2018: maybe not the worst year but certainly up there with the worst years in the past especially if you’re coming at this from the point of view of a paying customer as opposed to a railway professional or a rail enthusist. Where to start: modernisation programmes years late, over budget and pruned back to the point where some of them can no longer be expected to work properly, (e.g. Piccadilly platform 15 & 16).
Trade Unions who deliberately disrupt services for the people who pay their salaries over a dispute about manning trains that haven’t even been delivered yet, let alone gone into service. TOCs who seem to think that their sole purpose is to fleece everyone in sight in order to turn a profit for their shareholders. Secretaries of State for Transport whose competency registers less than 0.1 on the Richter scale. Timetable planners whom I wouldn’t trust to run a model railway, let alone the real thing. In all, a monumental year of cock-up, incompetence and downright cussedness. Maybe in 2019 somebody, somewhere might, just might spare a thought for the long suffering customers. But I rather doubt it. After all they are just a bloody nuisance.

 

[al78]

Can anyone think of a year as excrable as 2018 for the railway ?

2017 if you had to use trains in SE England.

 

[AlastairFraser]

1994 - the Railways Act , which leads us to where we are - with Hatfield on the way.

Absolutely, I see this year's crisis as the cumulative culmination of all the failings of the franchise system and partly the fault lies with the Government's inability to deal with the financial instability of this model.

 

[AlastairFraser]

In the case of the missed connection at Didcot , and yes I know I am a Dinosaur) - the BR Chargeman / Supervisor would have held the train for a couple of mins on his own initiative - and herded the passengers onto it with maybe a 2 or 3 min delay but passenger journeys completed. No need to bother "Control" with that.

Now we have delay attribution clerks in distant offices - who stare at screens and have zero passenger facing duties. Is that a benefit.? A senior railway manager wrote of the "don't see, don't care" attitude of some elements of the railway structure today. Note , I said "some" - there are some great staff out there ......there was one at Luton Airport Parkway yesterday helping out the confused diverted air passengers.

It also seems to me that the people at HQ managing it all are given limited resources to sort problems out by the very top i.e the general shortage in platform staff, dispatching, drivers, guards etc.

 

[yorksrob]

1955 and the ASLEF strike from 29th May to 14th June showed that in the day of rising car ownership and effective lorry transport the railways no longer had a stranglehold on the economy. This one event changed people's perception of the railway.

Parcels and sundries traffic disappeared overnight - never to return. At one stroke the raison d'etre for many local stations vanished. For example the strike occurred at the peak strawberry season in the Cotswolds and stations like Toddington (on the Stratford - Honeybourne - Cheltenham line) lost one of their main traffics. Similar stories were repeated all over the network.

Yes, I've read about that. Undoubtedly a calamatous event for freight. That said, I get the impression that it was a fairly middling year for passengers - traffic still bouyent due to limited car ownership, pre closure programme so still a good range of places served, yet before the successful aspects of the modernisation programme had taken off (electrification, deltics, DMU/DEMU introduction), so still a lot of knackered pre-war stock everywhere.

 

[yorksrob]

2017 if you had to use trains in SE England.

I suppose it depends which bits of the South East. My usual routes on South Eastern seemed pretty reliable - although the Marshlink was still up the creak I think.

 

[DarloRich]

Which particular claims would you say are outlandish, out of interest ?

Difficult to sub quote on phone but I would draw attention to your opening post and the posts by jrod fearless jfollows and nr758123

You and they are welcome to express views on the subject. I disagree with them and consider the truth much more complicated than you are prepared to acknowledge and much less conspiratorial

 

[coppercapped]

Yes, I've read about that. Undoubtedly a calamatous event for freight. That said, I get the impression that it was a fairly middling year for passengers - traffic still bouyent due to limited car ownership, pre closure programme so still a good range of places served, yet before the successful aspects of the modernisation programme had taken off (electrification, deltics, DMU/DEMU introduction), so still a lot of knackered pre-war stock everywhere.

Hmm! Passenger traffic buoyant? From the start of the nationalised railway passenger traffic in terms of passenger-journeys was 20% lower than the inter-war average. There was a peak in 1955/6 which is largely explained by the Suez Crisis and short term petrol rationing.

The point about the freight traffic was that it essentially cross-subsidised passenger traffic. When the freight went away the passenger traffic had to support itself.

The long term effects of the 1955 ASLEF strike were disastrous. It certainly had more significant long term effects than Saturday strikes on a couple of parts of the railway network.

 

[cactustwirly]

Hmm! Passenger traffic buoyant? From the start of the nationalised railway passenger traffic in terms of passenger-journeys was 20% lower than the inter-war average. There was a peak in 1955/6 which is largely explained by the Suez Crisis and short term petrol rationing.

The point about the freight traffic was that it essentially cross-subsidised passenger traffic. When the freight went away the passenger traffic had to support itself.

The long term effects of the 1955 ASLEF strike were disastrous. It certainly had more significant long term effects than Saturday strikes on a couple of parts of the railway network.

If that was the case, then it could be argued that, the 1955 strike was one of the factors that caused the beeching cuts!

 

[xotGD]

I'm one of the lucky few who has seen an improvement since the May timetable change with a doubling in direct Leeds - Knottingley services and the regular use of 153s. However, when I have to go to Manchester that is a whole different story.

 

[Bald Rick]

If that was the case, then it could be argued that, the 1955 strike was one of the factors that caused the beeching cuts!

Is there an echo every 10 posts?

 

[coppercapped]

Is there an echo every 10 posts?

Sorree...? Say again, again!

 

[PeterY]

I don't think the railways has covered itself in glory this year.

At least one signal failure a day, short forming, skipping stations, ending journeys well short of destination, lack of staff (Sundays) strikes. 1,2,3 minutes late. Just another usual day out there.

I'm glad I'm a railway enthusiast not not a commuter

It's hard to plan a rover/ranger because I don't if a train is going to turn up. RANT OVER

 

[Fearless]

Difficult to sub quote on phone but I would draw attention to your opening post and the posts by jrod fearless jfollows and nr758123

You and they are welcome to express views on the subject. I disagree with them and consider the truth much more complicated than you are prepared to acknowledge and much less conspiratorial

I don't regard it as 'outlandish' to hope that a connection will be held when it will mean a delay of less than a minute.

 

[DarloRich]

I don't regard it as 'outlandish' to hope that a connection will be held when it will mean a delay of less than a minute.

It isn't going to happen though when staff are marked on some kind of otif measure. However it is clear you and others see conspiracy where there is none.

Oh and before you start it happens to me on a regular basis. My branch line train often leaves the moment my late mainline train arrives.

 

[Fearless]

I said nothing about conspiracy - just annoyance! It just seems to be the way things work these days. Don't get me started on the local buses...

 

[yorksrob]

Difficult to sub quote on phone but I would draw attention to your opening post and the posts by jrod fearless jfollows and nr758123

You and they are welcome to express views on the subject. I disagree with them and consider the truth much more complicated than you are prepared to acknowledge and much less conspiratorial

I can't speak for the other posters on here, however my opening description of the service throughout 2018 is how I've experienced it, so you can disagree all you like from the home counties, however this is the worst its been up here in the North, and there are plenty who've had it worse than me.