So a question for you.
During the hour or so that normally elapses before an estimate can be given, what would YOU do. Cancel all services travelling to/from the affected area, even from long distance origins?
To what end?
What about train crew ? Are you going to leave those on the trains to fend for themselves or are you going to look at what may be necessary to be done to find them relief ?
I don't understand your point. The crew's first duty is the safety
and comfort of their passengers. It is the responsibility of their line managers to ensure they get the support and resources they need to fulfil that duty. That is clearly not happening at present - as evidence for that claim I give you the repeated incidents where trail crews are unable to keep irate passengers on trapped trains without endangering themselves/
What would YOU do about other services that they are due to operate ? Will you cancel them as well or will you try to get train crew from off duty, thus running the risk of impacting the following day's services ?
Again to what end?
Surely you only need 1 person to get information out to the train crews who then relay that to the passengers. Somebody somewhere surely must know what is going on????
Will you make an assumption in the first hour as to the likelihood of the incident being just a simple failure rather than a theft somewhere along a line of route that can only be identified by walking it from end to end ?
Why? How will that impact the ability to pass information onto the passengers?
Will you make an immediate assumption that it will be major, implement major changes and cancellations and then discover that it will be resolved within a short period of time ?
Why? The decision should be made when the information is available to make it
or when it becomes apparent that the incident is dragging on for too long with no end in sight.
Remember whatever decision YOU make will be criticised by armchair warriors such as yourself and dissected with intricacy in the comfort of absolute hindsight ?
That I the nature of working in a business that receives a subsidy from the taxpayer (in the case of the ToCs) or is owned by the state (as is NR untilmately), which makes you accountable to the taxpayers, who are entitled to ask such questions.
Your posts suggests that the Signalman (as it will either be them or the TOC control who will speak to them) will have nothing more to do with his/her time than sit down and drink tea
Can you please highlight where I said this so that I correct my post as I had no intent to make such an assertion? What I was tarrying to say is that by insulting passengers with "There is a problem on the line ahead and I have no idea when it will be fixed" and then claiming they are providing information risks giving passengers the impression that that is what is happening.
This quite misses the point that both parties will be working hard to in the one case try to move trains if possible, and will perhaps be reversing trains away from the area, and in the other will be trying to set up alternative arrangements.
I don't claim otherwise, but why not communicate those efforts to the passengers? Why is it such a secret. Surely 1 person from customer services could be co-opted into handling the information flow, thus avoiding diverting those qualified to resolve the problem, from working to do so? I'll lay odds that regular updates are being given to senior managers, why not get their PA to rely it back down the chain to train crews?
Nobody suggests that there are some areas where things cannot be improved but many of these are locked in by legal constraints.
Then those constrains should be highlighted so that we taxpayers can work with the industry to get any unreasonable obstructions removed.
I doubt that you would wish the Nuclear Industry or the Gas Industry to work on the basis of "common sense" yet you seem to believe that the Railway Industry is populated by idiot managers.
I am sure there are many decent managers in the industry, but they are not the people who 6 years after barriers were installed at Edinburgh Waverley still allow season ticket stock to be issued that fails to last more than 3 weeks in the slots. Nor is it the managers who believe it is acceptable to leave 2-3 of their reports to try to handle 200+ irate passengers trapped on a train for 2+ hours, nor is the the managers who ordered trains that rely solely on electro-mechanical ventilation.
Until that time major disruptive incidents - albeit not as common as people seem to believe - will occur from time to time. Like the major closures of Motorways little can be done to mitigate them without fairly major expenditure which would have to be recovered.
They will always happen no matter how much money is spent on them, it is how you handle things that go wrong that separates good managers from bad ones.
