Caledonian Sleeper discussion

[Bletchleyite]

No, but at least First had a semi-decent reputation for running Scotrail, knew the foibles of the rolling stock and had contracts in place for reliable traction.

True, possibly the least-worst option, as while the original operation was basic and old-fashioned it was at least reliable.

I woudn't want Arriva within a million miles of it.

 

[fgwrich]

No, but at least First had a semi-decent reputation for running Scotrail, knew the foibles of the rolling stock and had contracts in place for reliable traction.

That, and of the 3 at least already have experience of running Sleeper trains within the UK - both with the former ScotRail job and Night Riviera on GW.

Sorry to read about your trip TonyTaysider - That really doesn't sound good at all, not least with the Sleeper being replaced by a rail replacement bus - I certainly agree with you about the sleeper beating any other way of travelling between London and Scotland. ad:

 

[Bletchleyite]

Even in the seats with the 4am changeover, the Highlander is a magical train, particularly the FW bit.

Serco cannot be allowed to kill it.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
Meanwhile, a bus is not an even vaguely acceptable replacement for anything other than a seated passenger, and because the seats are of First Class standard a regular 2+2 bus is not an acceptable replacement for that either, unless sufficient coach seats are provided for there to be two each.

 

[D1009]

True, possibly the least-worst option, as while the original operation was basic and old-fashioned it was at least reliable.

I woudn't want Arriva within a million miles o f it.

Had First won it, they couldn't have run it in the same way, as in any event it would have to be run independently from Scotrail.

 

[Essexman]

I hope this is sorted soon.
I usually use the sleeper to Scotland but last week used up some East Coast Reward tickets to Edinburgh.
With the sleeper I have one day away from the office but this trip using day trains meant three days out for one meeting. I did manage to fit in a late afternoon trip on the Borders Line and a short ride on the loco hauled Fife Circle, but from a work point of view the sleeper works out far more efficient in both time and cost.

 

[92002]

I hope this is sorted soon.
I usually use the sleeper to Scotland but last week used up some East Coast Reward tickets to Edinburgh.
With the sleeper I have one day away from the office but this trip using day trains meant three days out for one meeting. I did manage to fit in a late afternoon trip on the Borders Line and a short ride on the loco hauled Fife Circle, but from a work point of view the sleeper works out far more efficient in both time and cost.

The current problems seem to revolve about the First maintenance of the sleeper stock. With the new owner of the franchise and a new maintainer the problem will not go away. So Serco are biting the bullet and trying to get Alstom to work miracles. Last Friday nights Fort William portion had 3 defective vehicles that were sent to Polmadie on Saturday to be resolved.Which probably just made the queue of defective vehicles even larger.

 

[scotraildriver]

To be fair when I used to work the sleeper under first and, apart from semi regular power failures in the mk2's, the trains were very very rarely short formed. I'm not sure what happens now but light maintenance used to be done at Fort William by DBS fitters including brake pad changes, lamp replacement etc. Also Inverness fitters could travel relatively easily to Ft William and Aberdeen to sort defects overight. It was the 67's that caused us the most grief, rarely the coaches.

 

[Tim R-T-C]

I think this all does demonstrate the problem with mini franchises. Limited access to spare stock in the event of problems.

Even if First were running the sleeper seperately to.SR, they might have been able to loan stock more readily.

 

[Highland37]

Maybe the reason the SNP don't seem to care is that the sleeper is such a drain on scarce resources and maybe they'd rather use the money elsewhere. Lets face it, it may as well be permanently cancelled right now as it hardly ever runs a full nights service any more.

This has to rank as one of the most poorly thought out and silly posts so far.

It was the SNP that allocated the resources, more of them. The polar opposite of what you say is true.

 

[Mag_seven]

Last Friday nights Fort William portion had 3 defective vehicles that were sent to Polmadie on Saturday to be resolved.

There was another daytime sleeper stock move today from Polmadie to Wembley - Serco seem to be running more trains empty during the day than passenger carrying trains during the night at the moment.

 

[AngusH]

I wonder if the answer might be just to say that the service will be paused for a short period, a few weeks perhaps, and all of the vehicles given a thorough inspection and overhaul.
Perhaps also allowing the new new maintenance staff to become more familiar with the problems.

It would be predictable and couldn't be worse than the current random failures.


Although if this did happen, would people come back after the break?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Dare I suggest that, as it's the dead of winter, they could perhaps do that by suspending the Fort Bill portion and replacing it with a Class 156 connection hired in from Abellio? Would 3 sleepers, a lounge car and a seated car be enough to allow some heavy maintenance in rotation?

 

[andrewkeith5]

Dare I suggest that, as it's the dead of winter, they could perhaps do that by suspending the Fort Bill portion and replacing it with a Class 156 connection hired in from Abellio? Would 3 sleepers, a lounge car and a seated car be enough to allow some heavy maintenance in rotation?

Hmm, if it were publicised well and Serco admitted why they were doing it, I could see that working actually.... It'd take some careful PR but that isn't beyond Serco to arrange...

 

[Chrism20]

Other than the 48 sleeper cars, 9 lounge cars and 9 seated coaches that are required every night what additional carriages do Serco have?

Bearing in mind that this is a franchise that has the luxury of the entire fleet not needing to turn a wheel on revenue duty for the best part of thirty six hours EVERY WEEK there really should not be a need for the number of cancellations and short forming period.

Ask any other TOC out there if they would like that luxury and they would bite your hand off for it.

If Alstom can't get it right Serco really need to to get a grip on it. I don't want to get into another Inverness v Polmadie debate but something is fundamentally wrong here when the service has not been able to run as scheduled for three weeks.

 

[TonyTaysider]

The Fleet Availability requirement in the Franchise agreement specifies (Point 4 of Appendix 2 to Schedule 1.1) a total of:
- 53 sleeper coaches
- 11 seated coaches
- 11 lounge/dining cars.
48 of the sleeper coaches must be available for passenger service with 2 in reserve and 3 in maintenance at any one time. For the other two categories the figures are 9,1 and 1 respectively.
If, as Chrism20 says, 48 sleepers, 9 seated carriages and 9 lounge cars are required every night then you can immediately see why there is a problem. There is hardly anything in reserve.
However, the legal obligation on Serco is clear. The only justification for reducing fleet availability is "fluctuations due to seasonality" and this requires Scottish Government approval. There is no get-out for "technical problems".
I wonder why Serco agreed to such stringent requirements. Didn't anyone tell them the age of the fleet?

 

[sprinterguy]

I wonder why Serco agreed to such stringent requirements. Didn't anyone tell them the age of the fleet?

It's the same fleet as First Scotrail had to work with, and as scotraildriver says, short formations were a rare phenomenon under their management. I certainly don't recall seeing services cancelled consecutively for days or even weeks on end due to stock shortages since the carriages were refurbished in 1999/2000.

An availability figure of 81 - 82% (in the case of the seated and lounge vehicles where the problems appear to be concentrated at present) is not notably stringent in terms of a typical train fleet.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I suppose it's not all that surprising that Mk2s should have more of an availability issue than Mk3s - they are getting on a bit. Another case for getting more in from charter fleets as a backup?

 

[TonyTaysider]

Sprinterguy. I don't think the current problems are concentrated on the seated and lounge cars. My two trains were cancelled because the sleeper coaches I had been booked on were not available. The required availability figure for these coaches is more than 90% (48 out of 53).

 

[sprinterguy]

Sprinterguy. I don't think the current problems are concentrated on the seated and lounge cars. My two trains were cancelled because the sleeper coaches I had been booked on were not available. The required availability figure for these coaches is more than 90% (48 out of 53).

True enough on the availability of the mark 3s. Perhaps the problems with the fleet are more widespread than is being reported, but it has been mentioned several times on this thread that the recent cancellation of the Edinburgh portion of the Lowland sleeper has been down to a lack of serviceable brake vehicles:

Reported elsewhere as a shortage of BUOs (ie the seated car with the brake van). There are 11 of these for 9 duties (ie one in each half set and one for Fort William) so presumably 3 out of service at the moment.

A very trustworthy source tells me that the problem with the BUO shortage is severe wheelflats. they cannot simply hire one in from elsewhere because there are some differences between those that are used in the Sleeper fleet and those in the rest of the UK fleet.

In fact they are hiring in several carriages, from Riviera I believe, to cover for shortages, but these will need some work done to them first to make them compatible with the Sleeper rakes so they won't appear immediately. I don't know when they will appear, before anyone asks...

Which is being supposed as the reason why the Lowland sleeper has been reportedly arriving at Glasgow with more or less the full quota of sleeper cars for both Edinburgh and Glasgow portions (on at least some occasions), yet the Carstairs to Edinburgh portion has not run.

 

[Chrism20]

I'm pretty sure it's 48, 9 and 9.

Lowlander is 6 sleeper, 1 lounge and 1 seated for EDB and the same for GLC in both directions

INV is 6, 1 and 1
ABD is 4, 1 and 1
FTW is 2, 1 and 1 but the 1 and 1 detach at EDB

So from/to EDB its the same as the lowlander and the FTW then re-attaches to the northbound.

So that makes

24, 4 and 4 southbound and the same northbound plus the FTW 2 that attach and detach at EDB.

Have I missed anything?

 

[92002]

​

There was another daytime sleeper stock move today from Polmadie to Wembley - Serco seem to be running more trains empty during the day than passenger carrying trains during the night at the moment.

That was the cancelled Edinburgh portion, having been made serviceable and run empty to London to form a Northbound service later. Otherwise there would have been another cancelled service.

 

[marks87]

Correct. You get the same figure looking at it the other way:

A full "set" is 12 Mk3 + (2+2) Mk2.

There's four full sets per night = 48 Mk3 and (8+8) Mk2. Plus (1+1) Mk2 for FTW = 48, 9 and 9.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Have I missed anything?

FTW has had 3 sleeper coaches when I've seen/used it recently.

 

[marks87]

FTW has had 3 sleeper coaches when I've seen/used it recently.

The usual diagram is 6 INV, 4 ABD and 2 FTW but occasionally during summer it's 6/3/3.

Although with no requirement anymore for Inverness to always get a full half-set, there's more flexibility there, e.g. 5/4/3.

 

[sprinterguy]

FTW has had 3 sleeper coaches when I've seen/used it recently.

That's normally achieved by reducing the number of sleeper cars used for the Aberdeen portion from 4 to 3 though, so resulting in the same total (Beaten to it - see post above).

 

[jopsuk]

The usual diagram is 6 INV, 4 ABD and 2 FTW but occasionally during summer it's 6/3/3.

Although with no requirement anymore for Inverness to always get a full half-set, there's more flexibility there, e.g. 5/4/3.

to split 5/4/3 would be much more complex. You'd have to marshal the train so that the lounge and seated coaches were at each end (normally one pair will be towards the centre). As the 3 would still likely be the Fort William section, these would have to be in the middle

 

[TonyTaysider]

I stand corrected. The unavailability of the brake vehicle would explain why the Edinburgh service had to be cancelled so often (and why someone expressed surprise on the Caledonian Sleeper Twitter feed about waking up in Glasgow when they expected to be in Edinburgh).

What it doesn't explain is why I was initially given the chance of joining my berth in Glasgow on 1 November and then had the offer withdrawn to be replaced by a bus only option.

If they had enough sleeper carriages to run all of the lowland service to Glasgow, I am sure most of the Edinburgh passengers would have accepted this in preference to the bus.

I realise it could be that Glasgow Central doesn't have the capacity for 16-coach trains, but I'm sure I saw a comment from someone on Twitter who had seen a much longer sleeper train than usual there in the last couple of weeks.

 

[marks87]

The 73/9s have been out and about. 73966 ran 0B73 Craigentinny to Aberdeen today.

Not my photo, but here it is at Dundee:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajrm1976/22894435126/in/dateposted/

Apparently this is the first time a 73 has been north of Edinburgh - is that true?

 

[sprinterguy]

Apparently this is the first time a 73 has been north of Edinburgh - is that true?

I wouldn't be at all surprised: In terms of Southern Region traction in general, while class 33s cause less of a stir in Scotland now than when a pair of them turned up at Inverness on a railtour in 1995; having since seen use at Aberdeen under EWS and more recently providing traction for a period for the Royal Scotsman on the West Highland line under West Coast; I would have thought that the class 73s titchy (until now) diesel engines would certainly have precluded them from such mammoth treks up north.

 

[jopsuk]

in BR use the 73s would presumably have very rarely left the Southern?