Misinformation

[Peter Sarf]

I was entertained this evening at East Croydon while waiting to see if the 19:11 to East Grinstead (ex Victoria) produced any 377/6s on platform 6.

Well on the platform 6 indicator was "19:01 to East Grinstead cancelled". It went on to say tickets would be valid on bus service 400 from Redhill to East Grinstead.

Why the hell would anyone go to Redhill and wait for a bus when an East Grinstead service is 10 minutes behind the cancelled one ?.

My further puzzling is :-
I noticed the 19:01 was not on the departure sheets - how come !.
The train finally terminated on platform 2 !.
I travelled to South Croydon on a following train (19:14 ex East Croydon) where I saw passengers trying to board the stationary East Grinstead service that does not call there. They had apparently been miss directed - I guess onto my train 19:14 to Caterham+Tattenham.
There was also a following Uckfield service indicated that was running late 4 cars instead of 6 but it was not made clear that this was not an alternative (I assume it would be over-full).

In all my years commuting since 1985 I have felt despair at the poor information on the railways. The worst thing is a passenger has to be clever enough to cope with the way the railways faff. My (then) local platform staff had enough experience to guess what was really happening and quite often made announcements to that effect. The one sad thing is that the ****** idiots in their ivory towers have no inclination of how much aggression I saw the staff on the ground receive.

Its the one thing that I cannot forgive. Things will always go wrong BUT why oh why does the information have to be so lacking or just plain WRONG.

Dear directors/managers. Do you really think your passengers AND staff on the ground do not deserve some more respect.

CAN YOU ACTUALLY REPLY TO THIS ?.

(Shove this in a better folder than I can think of, if applicable, please Moderator)

 

[tsr]

If I may comment about the more immediate, specific situation in which you found yourself yesterday... there were several disruptions, including I believe at least 2 track circuit failures, on the Oxted route yesterday. This then compounded issues with leaf fall - Railhead Treatment Trains were then unable to operate on time and as planned, leading to slippery rail conditions. Because of this, ticket acceptance was arranged by (I think) around lunchtime with Metrobus services. Due to the earlier cancellations, it was deemed an acceptable alternative, although I would question how effective it was and whether or not the extended journey time of awaiting a train would be any worse than sitting on any given bus to/from Redhill. I can only assume that when the overall delays to journeys became less, the information was not removed from the CIS displays through some oversight or other.

 

[Peter Sarf]

If I may comment about the more immediate, specific situation in which you found yourself yesterday... there were several disruptions, including I believe at least 2 track circuit failures, on the Oxted route yesterday. This then compounded issues with leaf fall - Railhead Treatment Trains were then unable to operate on time and as planned, leading to slippery rail conditions. Because of this, ticket acceptance was arranged by (I think) around lunchtime with Metrobus services. Due to the earlier cancellations, it was deemed an acceptable alternative, although I would question how effective it was and whether or not the extended journey time of awaiting a train would be any worse than sitting on any given bus to/from Redhill. I can only assume that when the overall delays to journeys became less, the information was not removed from the CIS displays through some oversight or other.

Makes sense. I was not aware of the number of problems but I should have guessed leaf fall as my own garden path needs scraping !. Does make sense that the contingency was over the top (bus) if the problems had been worse earlier than when I saw them. Thanks for your reply.

 

[tsr]

Makes sense. I was not aware of the number of problems but I should have guessed leaf fall as my own garden path needs scraping !. Does make sense that the contingency was over the top (bus) if the problems had been worse earlier than when I saw them. Thanks for your reply.

That's not a problem. I do "feel your pain" somewhat, as it is hard to keep track of issues whilst on the move or at stations, rather than at home in front of your own computer. Thus anyone will get more frustrated because information is more limited. It is even possible to overlook really obvious stuff such as leaf fall because you are worrying about whether your train is on time from London and why the platform has changed (for example). As someone who has stood at East Croydon and had to make split-second decisions about where to run or what to specifically ask the very busy members of staff, I know how crucial a little nugget of knowledge can be!

One issue on Southern which I am very much aware of is that station staff do spend a huge amount of time liaising with Control and other stations, just to find out which resources (generally individual units) are being sent where, which services will be cancelled throughout or will skip stations, etc., etc. They have very little handed to them on a plate, and a whole lot of software and paper to go through before they know anything. It's all well and good doing this, and to some extent it must be really very similar for other TOCs' staff, but they do seem to make fairly elementary errors in then, as a result, not having staff available to make announcements, man the information desks or just see what's going on down the platform. At one of my local Southern stations recently, I had to advise station staff which units were on which platform because they were so busy negotiating with Control on the subject of the calling pattern of an inbound service some 8 to 10 miles away. Meanwhile, the signaller was trying to send another TOC's units in as normal, even though that was blocking Southern services and was not terribly practical from a Control point of view - thus leading to very quick dispatch, almost without any CIS info given (in turn, partly due to the obnoxious and inaccurate "Southern information centre" announcements playing, which were so generic that they were stating the obvious or useless). So you see how hard it is for the relatively few staff to manage things, let alone relay accurate information.

 

[Peter Sarf]

I think you hit the nail on the head tsr. The information needs to disseminate automatically without staff having to pester each other. Thats at the risk of information overload I suppose ?. Helps if staff on the ground can at least see the same info that the signallers have perhaps. Of course the signallers (or control) need to indicate what they are planning to change.

I remember one example was at Gypsy hill around 1991. I used to travel West(East ?) Croydon to Gypsy Hill (Victoria was its final destination) and change into the following service to London Bridge via Peckham Rye where I was outbased. This happened more than once. The platform staff would announce that the London Bridge service was cancelled only after the train I had got off had left. Upon asking the staff if they could inform us prior to the Victoria train departing they said they only got an idea of the cancellation when the next train was presenting itself. For us going to Victoria by staying on our first train and back out to Peckham Rye was a lot quicker than the infrequent Gypsy Hill to London Bridge service.

Another classic was waiting at West Croydon for the Wimbledon service about 1992. It would be cancelled and some of us would wait for the next train. Even I fell for it at first. It was one unit all day and if it was cancelled in the morning then that was it. I ended up buying a more expensive season ticket via Clapham Junction. It was the same era as the different snow btw. I regularly saw the same colleagues being charged the excess fare as they never bought any ticket and I felt like a mug. I had just started a new job in Thames Ditton and I did not hold it down !.

Both the above are examples, to me, of information (common sense in the case of the Wimbledon service) not being shared. That was twenty years ago and I don't travel regularly now so miss the opportunity to see any improvement and so cannot criticise too much. I suspect it is a lot better ?.

 

[Chrisgr31]

Last night on the Oxted line was particularly irritating, and it was more irritating down to the lack of information provided by Southern. Generally I find Southern are great with information as long as only a few services are affected, however once it is more than that he whole information service goes down the pan and enlightened passengers can normally guess what the best solution is going to be.

There were several tweets from Southern during the day stating there were issues on th Oxted line due to railhead conditions, however at 17.23 they tweeted they were solved and services were no longer affected. Shortly afterwards they tweeted the 16>48 ex LBG would terminate at COH and the corresponding return service would start at COH.

I caught the 18.08 LBG to UCK which came in to LBG avbout 10 minutes late but left on time, and I went to sleep. I woke up briefly to find we were at South Croydon and then woke up again to find we were at the signal between South Croydon and Oxted and to hear an announcement from the on board staff that we were at a red signal again, didn't know why and would let us know when they knew.

So I tweeted Southern to ask what was happening at 18.39 (and by this pint we should have been at Hurst Green). There was no response however at 18.56 Southern twweeted there were signalling problems on the line and trains were running at reduced speed.

At some point the onboard staff announced there were signalling problems and when we moved it would only be as far as Sanderstead, but the doors would open there to allow passengers to move around. We did indeed move on to Sanderstead, and the doors did open, and eventually we got a green light and it was then full speed to Oxted.

As it happens the train was eventually terminated at COH where it arrived on Plat 1 about 45 mins late, as the train in front was waiting in Plat 2, to take the passngers that wanted to go further on.

Nothing the onboard staff could do, but again its lack of information, as neither the onboard staff or the tweeting staff knew whet the problem was until we were running around 20 minutes late. Bearing in mind we usually get excuses when we are 3 minutes late it was not a great information exercise last night!

 

[Tomnick]

What's COH when it's at home?

 

[tsr]

What's COH when it's at home?

Crowborough. A "popular" point for terminating/starting short on the Uckfield Line.

 

[Tomnick]

See, I'd have understood straight away if the post said it was terminating at 87766 .

 

[Chrisgr31]

What's COH when it's at home?

Sorry couldn't be bothered to type it in full!

 

[D841 Roebuck]

Sorry couldn't be bothered to type it in full!

Jarvis Brook for Crowborough?

 

[Chrisgr31]

Jarvis Brook for Crowborough?

Something like that. There was even an announcement on the train to that effect recently!

 

[Bald Rick]

It was three separate incidents of trains failing to operate track circuits, which as you can imagine is a pretty serious issue to work around. It doesn't excuse poor info though.