There is a price to be paid if you want reliability. How crummy do you like your public services?
I guess this is what happens when a company gets rid of essential staff.
It must have been earlier in the day as I got the 18.09 Crewe to Glasgow Central service and it arrived a couple of minutes early into Glasgow
Any party that promised to reverse this and place unlimited liability on the trespasser would have my vote at once!
Who is signing Colwich - Stoke (Alsager Crewe) - Manchester - Chat Moss/Bolton - Preston?
Obviously all links wouldn't sign all routes, the roster clerk's / traincrew supervisor's skill is in looking at who is going to be available in the next few hours and their route and traction knowledge and matching the resources to the needs. (And knowing all the individuals' preferences for staying on /accepting a request to work a different turn.)
Preston signs the chat moss and also the Bolton line and also Manchester drivers link dependant sign both towards Preston. I’m sure all depots sign Alsager
On my recent Swiss holiday which involved some 35 hours of train travel, I heard a horn sounded only once. We then saw some people trackside, having come out of the lake I think. The driver didn't slow down, let alone stop, so presumably the warning was sufficient to comply with SBB regulations. Britain is an outlier in the way it does things and we don't seem to want to learn from others (which would of course involve changing the law).
Avanti can't even resource the advertised service, let alone spare cover.
Unfortunately there is no financial incentive for TOCs to mitigate disruption. When there is disruption, NR pays them. Never mind that they could have mitigated by having more spare cover or by maintaining diversionary route knowledge, Network Rail still coughs up in full.
You should see how extensive the route cards were when they had VXC work at Preston too.
It’s not just about safety, it’s about protecting equipment from theft also.
True, but unless your going a long way back into BR times VXC had entirely separate crews from VWC so it wasn’t necessary to sign both TOCs routes
Even counting VXC alone, the route cards at Preston were vast. Probably not as vast as Saltley though
Was anywhere?
Hence the joke that the depot crest was a seagull with the motto: "Coast to Coast and **** on everyone!"Was anywhere?
I'm pretty sure that spare cover is a thing at all Avanti depots. The issue is just that they don't have enough staff so all spares have been marked to turns.
but it would be more effective ("efficient") if that spare cover wasn't just for Avanti trains - and if Avanti could borrow traincrew from local services. Balkanisation has a cost, and joint (one-railway) depots eveywhere give you lots more flexibility. It worked before sectorisation.
Well yes. At larger depots (such as Manchester Piccadilly) cross-cover between intercity routes, and cross-cover between regional routes. At smaller locations (such as Holyhead) cross-cover between both.
True, but it is what it is.
'Saltley Seagulls'
It costs upwards of £530 for a return ticket to Manchester from London. I think they can afford to have someone sitting around doing nothing on 40% of days.
How many people are actually spending that?
