WCML Disruption 03/09

[KN94]

which is what frustrates so many of us (ex) railway people here. It seems that an "enthusiast" (or even/especially an ex-employee) with a mobile phone is way ahead of station staff in both understanding what has actually happened and - even more damningly - making an educated guess at what the options are for journeys.

I strongly suspect that the Balkanisation of Franchises/TOCs and the loss off all-line travel concessions (together with the universal use of journeyplanner-type apps) have had a major negative impact on the staff's understanding of the network or national geography and potential alternative routings.
I was taught to use/read the all-line BR timetable with its National index map for public enquiries when I first started at Bristol in 1974 and it has stood me in very good stead ever since.

Is it not more to do with available time? A passenger (with the know-how) can sit on their phone, figuring out various options, check social media, etc.. and get a better idea of what's going on. Station Staff are too busy responding to queries (as is their job) that they don't get a chance to update themselves? Information trickles through, yet staff are expected to know everything immediately. That's not to say the information flow isn't poor sometimes, but if you are talking to a queue of (angry/disgruntled/etc) passengers, you can't check your phone to see that the advice has changed or the XYZ service has now been cancelled.

 

[DarloRich]

There was also trouble at the south end of the WCML with flooding and a potential landslip near Bletchley

So how does this tally with "A fault on a train?" or " a train fault between Oxenholme and Lancaster." Are they admitting that their train pulled down the wires but managed to arrive in Oxenholme? This sort of mealy-mouthed/ evasive "explanation" just undermines what little credibility they have!

Because the message changes as more information emerges. It isn't a conspiracy.

 

[Mike395]

I was on the southbound train stuck at Penrith yesterday; we arrived at 15:49 and I wasn't in a taxi until around 20:15 (no buses were available anywhere apparently, they ordered 3 but they didn't turn up).

I'm going to start a separate thread on this at some point, but the main issue I had was the complete lack of meeting duty of care obligations placed on the rail operator. I'm a realist and understand it's going to take time getting c. 200 people out of a small town in the Lake District by taxi (most coming from Carlisle, who had their own taxi demands to meet too!), but not being offered any food/water in the two hours I was standing in the taxi queue once off the train is inexcusable. People were asking if they could be reimbursed at the McDonalds next door and told 'probably not' by the contract security person managing the queue. (All the Avanti station staff had long disappeared and were nowhere to be seen).

Just need to try and see if I can get a refund on our tickets from Oban back home for tomorrow, which are split tickets with a complicated mix of advanced and open singles!

Did you book these through a Trainsplit brand/the forum site? If so, pop a support ticket in linking with this thread and I'm sure they can get that sorted

There was also trouble at the south end of the WCML with flooding and a potential landslip near Bletchley


Because the message changes as more information emerges. It isn't a conspiracy.

It started out as reports of a stationary train with pantograph damage and then once they got the train out of the way at reduced speed using the other pantograph they could see the extent of damage. So the changing reports make sense, no conspiracy indeed.

 

[37069]

I was on the southbound train stuck at Penrith yesterday; we arrived at 15:49 and I wasn't in a taxi until around 20:15 (no buses were available anywhere apparently, they ordered 3 but they didn't turn up).

I'm going to start a separate thread on this at some point, but the main issue I had was the complete lack of meeting duty of care obligations placed on the rail operator. I'm a realist and understand it's going to take time getting c. 200 people out of a small town in the Lake District by taxi (most coming from Carlisle, who had their own taxi demands to meet too!), but not being offered any food/water in the two hours I was standing in the taxi queue once off the train is inexcusable. People were asking if they could be reimbursed at the McDonalds next door and told 'probably not' by the contract security person managing the queue. (All the Avanti station staff had long disappeared and were nowhere to be seen).


Did you book these through a Trainsplit brand/the forum site? If so, pop a support ticket in linking with this thread and I'm sure they can get that sorted


It started out as reports of a stationary train with pantograph damage and then once they got the train out of the way at reduced speed using the other pantograph they could see the extent of damage. So the changing reports make sense, no conspiracy indeed.

By the time 1S98 got through, Penrith station had closed, so passengers wanting to alight there had to go to Carlisle and get a bus/taxi back.

 

[Mike395]

(It's worth noting that the arrangement at Preston was similar having missed the last London connection - no staff in sight and a long taxi queue halfway up the station! I gave up and booked a Manchester hotel, which I am fully expecting Avanti to pay for even if it means the Rail Ombudsman)

 

[Royston Vasey]

Just need to try and see if I can get a refund on our tickets from Oban back home for tomorrow, which are split tickets with a complicated mix of advanced and open singles!

Did you book these through a Trainsplit brand/the forum site? If so, pop a support ticket in linking with this thread and I'm sure they can get that sorted

My own complex booking (outward yesterday and return today) was through Trainsplit, as was my commute this morning on a separate booking which I no longer needed, both refunds have been processed by your team already, great customer service as always!

 

[Lewisham2221]

Is it not more to do with available time? A passenger (with the know-how) can sit on their phone, figuring out various options, check social media, etc.. and get a better idea of what's going on. Station Staff are too busy responding to queries (as is their job) that they don't get a chance to update themselves? Information trickles through, yet staff are expected to know everything immediately. That's not to say the information flow isn't poor sometimes, but if you are talking to a queue of (angry/disgruntled/etc) passengers, you can't check your phone to see that the advice has changed or the XYZ service has now been cancelled.

Absolutely this. Plenty of times I've been dishing out advice to passengers based on the information I've sourced. If I'm walking through a 5 carriage train, I'm not re-checking that information after every passenger - I'd never get through the train. Then 3 or 4 carriages in, someone questions my advice whilst waiving their phone at me, based on information they've been reviewing during the 10 minutes that I've been walking through so far. So I check, and sure enough, things have changed. So I make my way to the nearest PA handset to advise passengers that there's been a change to what I've previously told them. Then as I'm about to continue walking through the train, I get a phone call from control advising me of the same revised information.

Quite simply, in these sorts of situations, the situation is constantly changing. A handful of people in control have got to assess the situation and make decisions. Then they've got to update systems. Then they've got to verbally (by phone) update relevant parties. They can't do all of this simultaneously, so there will always be some delays in communicating information, and there will always be brief spells where information and advice may be conflicting or contradictory.

Similarly, the "boots on the ground" can't simultaneously be checking for the absolute most up to date, accurate information and communicating that advise to passengers and provide a visible presence to every passenger to confirm or clarify information or provide more bespoke advice. Only yesterday I gave advice to a passenger. 5 minutes later that advice was "wrong" and the passenger was questioning my advice. Turns out that in that intervening 5 minutes, the train I'd advised him to catch had been cancelled. Whilst I was aware of disruption elsewhere, it wasn't affecting the route I was working, and the cancelled train was operated by a different TOC, so I had pretty much no way of knowing about the cancellation without continuously checking myself - which would clearly be impractical.

 

[DarloRich]

@Lewisham2221 a good summary - if only railway staff were connected to the matrix to instantly receive the same communication!

 

[TheHovisKid]

There was also trouble at the south end of the WCML with flooding and a potential landslip near Bletchley


Because the message changes as more information emerges. It isn't a conspiracy.

TPE were terminating short at Preston at 5pm, with both Edinburgh & Glasgow as "fault on THIS train" repeated several times. Possible bad code somewhere, but it causes confusion or mistrust when the auto PA at Preston was repeating it many times.
And there is distrust when the reason broadcast is plainly moonshine even to the uninitiated

Surely, having a staff app that summarises the current situation updates with push notifications isn't beyond the wisdom of mankind! Station staff at Preston seem as reliant on RTT etc as we do until they vanish.
Or maybe nobody knows anything reportable, which I don't believe, because info was appearing in posts here and there.

But it's the public facing staff who seem to get the rough end of the information stick- even some info is better than none, or wrong info. And that's not institutionally fair to them.

 

[KN94]

TPE were terminating short at Preston at 5pm, with both Edinburgh & Glasgow as "fault on THIS train" repeated several times. Possible bad code somewhere, but it causes confusion or mistrust when the auto PA at Preston was repeating it many times.
And there is distrust when the reason broadcast is plainly moonshine even to the uninitiated

Surely, having a staff app that summarises the current situation updates with push notifications isn't beyond the wisdom of mankind! Station staff at Preston seem as reliant on RTT etc as we do until they vanish.
Or maybe nobody knows anything reportable, which I don't believe, because info was appearing in posts here and there.

But it's the public facing staff who seem to get the rough end of the information stick- even some info is better than none, or wrong info. And that's not institutionally fair to them.

There is an app, I believe it can be set to send notifications but again, it's information getting to the app and staff having the time to stop and read whatever notification. No doubt if a member of staff stopped to read the notifications mid-queue, there'd be a picture somewhere of "look at this member of staff checking their phone rather than helping customers" post on social media - I've seen similar myself (without knowledge of what the staff were actually doing on their phone). Websites/apps like RTT, Traksy, etc.. are 'real time' so often a better source than a staff app which needs manually updating by somebody in Control.

That's not to say there aren't issues. The delay codes can be inaccurate, or as in your example above, incorrect. Information can be slow, and people want to know immediately. TOC's get things wrong, the use of 'do not travel' when customers are mid-journey is something that is frequently debated and something that winds me up, but no TOC is sitting there going "I'm deliberately going to withhold information / provide false information and make this really awkward for the customer today" (not that that is what you are implying) because nobody wins in that situation.

 

[Foxcover]

I would hope so and expect it would have been fine, but the NRE page didnt explicitly say "any reasonable route" under the Avanti guidance, so I didn't feel I had anything to point to if challenged, as a fallback.

I actually saw 2 Avanti west coast customers having to leave the 1807 XC Edinburgh to Birmingham before departure, because there was no ticket acceptance for Avanti. Like me they’d transfered to Queen St and then to Edinburgh on the fast-ish 1700 train. The train manager on XC kept repeating ‘no Avanti ticket acceptance‘ over the tannoy before departure.

 

[trainophile]

I actually saw 2 Avanti west coast customers having to leave the 1807 XC Edinburgh to Birmingham before departure, because there was no ticket acceptance for Avanti. Like me they’d transfered to Queen St and then to Edinburgh on the fast-ish 1700 train. The train manager on XC kept repeating ‘no Avanti ticket acceptance‘ over the tannoy before departure.

Typical XC. I suppose they were already full though, to give them the benefit of the doubt.

 

[thejuggler]

My own complex booking (outward yesterday and return today) was through Trainsplit, as was my commute this morning on a separate booking which I no longer needed, both refunds have been processed by your team already, great customer service as always!

I have now had confirmation of a full refund.

Excellent service.

 

[Royston Vasey]

I actually saw 2 Avanti west coast customers having to leave the 1807 XC Edinburgh to Birmingham before departure, because there was no ticket acceptance for Avanti. Like me they’d transfered to Queen St and then to Edinburgh on the fast-ish 1700 train. The train manager on XC kept repeating ‘no Avanti ticket acceptance‘ over the tannoy before departure.

I did retrospectively screenshot the Avanti customer advice at 21:45 yesterday night, as I wanted to check exactly what it had advised and whether it had changed since 17:30, and it read:

"Avanti West Coast are advising customers NOT TO TRAVEL north of Preston for the remainder of the day.

"If you are due to travel between Glasgow Central / Edinburgh and Preston today, then you can use your existing ticket via the same route tomorrow.

"You can use your ticket at no extra cost on the following services:
- Scotrail between Glasgow Central and Edinburgh
- LNER between Edinburgh and London Kings Cross

"If your train is cancelled, your ticket is valid on one of the two AWC immediately before your booked train or one of the two immediately after.

"If you no longer wish to travel because your train's delayed or cancelled, you can request a full refund from where you bought your ticket."

That, I felt, didn't empower me to self reroute other than back to my origin and didn't really help anyone heading for Cheshire or the Midlands from Carlisle. I seem to recall the TPE paragraph was much more along the lines of "any reasonable route" but I didn't snap it so can't be sure of the wording.

Having the rights enshrined in NRCoT to get to my destination to avoid being stranded, and asserting those rights (persuading a train manager of a different company to allow me to use their train) are, as we've seen on these forums, very different propositions. And I wasn't in the mood to wait an unknown time for a bus or taxi to Preston, and hope then for a train to Crewe.

The Avanti station staff at Carlisle were overrun and I knew couldn't answer on TPE's behalf anyway ("the man on the platform said...") and I had to make a decision whether to cut my losses and hop on the 17:24 to Newcastle.

I at least felt somewhat secure in my abandonment "itinerary" returning to origin, Carlisle-Newcastle-Stevenage, despite having got there via Stevenage-Leeds-Carlisle before abandoning, because at least I had tickets/a contract with both LNER and Northern, and was returning home using Northern and LNER - and of course both being state operators with reciprocal acceptance. Avanti aren't in that club of course!

Really, the only complaint I have was that "any reasonable route" was not issued publicly (which would have rather upset your XC train manager!) as if I had had that in writing at 17:30, I would probably have persevered to get to Crewe via Doncaster.

 

[trainophile]

All the knowledgeable people on this forum are at a huge advantage over the ordinary punters. I was surprised not to see more panic tbh. The British good spirits were in full evidence.

Not ideal either that it’s the traditional get-away week (month) for the oldies, who tend to take a break just after the schools start back. I bet it has put some of them off going away for a while.

 

[Russel]

Good to see the usual level of communication and customer service being upheld...

We're celebrating 200 years of the railway this year, yet whenever something goes wrong, it's like it's the first time it's ever happened.

 

[Mike395]

Good to see the usual level of communication and customer service being upheld...

We're celebrating 200 years of the railway this year, yet whenever something goes wrong, it's like it's the first time it's ever happened.

Yup. A few staff on each part of the network who could be trained up for incident response management would go a long way. All Penrith needed was someone competent with the authority to make decisions quickly on things like sorting food/accommodation where needed.

Technology in use by the airlines would help here too, for example those just wanting to stay put and travel the next day could have a QR code to scan that links to a page with a date-restricted pay on account hotel booking site showing nearby hotels with availability (which is what a lot of airlines do during times of disruption e.g. BA)

 

[thejuggler]

Just thinking back to last night I hope the few people we met and spoke to are now in a better place now than yesterday.

We were fortunate, yes we had a 12 hour trip to in effect go for a meal in London, but at least we had the option of the last train north to get home for a reasonable cost, even 45 minutes before it left Advances were still available and it has now been refunded.

The guy from London who was off to Scotland touring the Highlands and Islands and should have been in Mallaig today. He went home for a night in his own bed, before travelling today.
The couple who were off to Inverness to do the NC500
The American couple who wondered what the heck was going on
The German who was trying to get to see her sister.

And the very professional train staff and in particular the manager, who were all looking forwards to the trip back north of the Border, but ended up with hundreds of passengers to deal with. Thankfully I didn't see anyone lose their rag, including the passengers who didn't have the luxury of the lounge and were being held at the platform gates until the lounge had emptied.

 

[Peter0124]

On the alternative routes thing, I remember there was overhead damage on the Manchester - Preston line when I was trying to get from MAN to Glasgow. Station staff told me to go via York, I instead took a service to Crewe through my own judgement to catch the Glasgow service there. I spoke to the staff before boarding and they were all fine with me doing it.

If I had've gone via York, I would've been stranded at Edinburgh as it was the evening time and there'd be no onward trains.

 

[trainophile]

I put my delay repay claim in to Avanti about this time yesterday, just had confirmation that it's being paid. That's impressive. I suspect they are just paying everything, as they will be inundated and they know it was chaos.

 

[Jimini]

Maybe I don't stumble across this sort of stuff often, but I was surprised to see the "bugger off" advice on NRE tonight:

Disruption to / from London Marylebone until the end of the day​

Route(s) affected​

Between Stourbridge Junction / Birmingham Snow Hill / Birmingham Moor Street / Oxford / Aylesbury Vale Parkway / Aylesbury / High Wycombe / West Ruislip and London Marylebone

Description​

A fault with the signalling system between Wembley Stadium / Harrow-on-the-Hill and London Marylebone means that some lines are blocked. Trains running to / from London Marylebone may be cancelled, delayed by up to 30 minutes or revised.

Disruption is expected until the end of the day.

Customer advice:

You can no longer use your ticket on the following services, at no extra cost:

• Avanti West Coast
• CrossCountry
• Elizabeth line
• Great Western Railway
• London Northwestern Railway
• London Underground
• London Bus

Check before you travel:

You can check your journey using the National Rail Enquiries real-time Journey Planner.

Compensation:

You may be entitled to compensation if you experience a delay in completing your journey today. Please keep your train ticket and make a note of your journey, as both will be required to support any claim.

My use of red, above. Seems a bit harsh when trying to work around a significant issue?

 

[tumbledown]

The incident now shows as Resolved at 2212 - you must have caught it in an indeterminate state.

 

[AndrewE]

The incident now shows as Resolved at 2212 - you must have caught it in an indeterminate state.

but some people will be half-way through a reorganised journey. That suggests the alternative routings have been swiched off completely. You would hope that on-board ticket checks and barrier staff would recognise reality and accept off-route passengers for the rest of the day.

Having seen some of the stories here it would make me determined to get a screenshot of the original advice if I was ever in that situation.