Should services be suspended for the day prior to severe wind warnings.

[philthetube]

This weekend we ended up with many people stranded all over the place, should all services have been suspended for the time the wind warnings were issued.

It is only luck that no lives were lost on the railway.

Having no trains out in the first place would have made the clear up much quicker for some.

occasionally forecasters will get it wrong but in my view safety should come first and a decision should have been made a day before the storm, effectively a country wide code black.

 

[74A]

Why did you decide to travel? The forecast weather was really bad. Maybe you should have stayed at home. Certainly if I lived in Scotland or the North of England I would have.

Also why country wide. Down in the South the weather was not that bad. GWR ran a petty normal service. Should the whole country come to a stop if one part has bad weather ?

 

[philthetube]

I didn't decide to travel, I was working on the rails and did what was expected of me, however I don't think it was reasonable for me and others like me to have to put ourselves at risk.

 

[74A]

OK appreciate that. I thought you were a passenger. (And I assumed from your user name you were based in London !l)

Still my second point still stands. Where do you draw the line. It is always a judgement call as to what does run and what doesn't.

The railway needs to run as much as possible. Many people use it to get too from work for example.

 

[Bletchleyite]

It might not be a bad idea to have a Government mandated "sort of lockdown" i.e. an official holiday.

Without that, people still have to travel to work or they could be sacked.

 

[O L Leigh]

Just had a conversation with a colleague about this after we both had exciting shifts on Saturday.

If I'm honest it's a hard one to call. We both had incidents in areas where there had only been a yellow warning, with mine happening after the warning had expired (at least I think it had). At what point do you decide that the railway needs to take the nuclear option of halting services? In my colleague's case I think that there should have been a blanket speed restriction at least as he was working an early train, but for me I don't think that there would have been much that management could have reasonably done to predict and therefore prevent it.

 

[class 9]

The decision to shut the ECML north of Newcastle turned out to be the correct one, as it took 2 full days to carry out repairs after the storm passed.