Who decides, at what level, of GWR?

[Railcar]

On GWR, who decides, and at what level, to split a pre-booked 10-coach train from Plymouth to Paddington into a five, thus wrecking the seat booking system and making the train packed from Exeter St Davids with folk getting on at Tiverton Parkway wandering aimlessly up and down the aisles looking for a seat? Is it done to save money? Or just a whim?

And who decides to employ attendents who can barely pronounce English words so that their loudspeaker announcements are unintelligable apart from the 'thank-you!' at the end?

And who sends a train out with a faulty trolley that cannot dispense hot drinks?

 

[VP185]

Control. They don’t split sets for the fun of it. It’s done for operational reasons, perhaps a fault on the train, or to form another service that would otherwise be cancelled.

As for the trolley. Is there evidence it was sent out with a fault or did it develop the fault during the journey?

Attendants. GWR don’t employ attendants and they don’t use loudspeakers.

All in all. A rather pathetic post.

 

[skyhigh]

And who sends a train out with a faulty trolley that cannot dispense hot drinks?

"This train has been cancelled due to a shortage of hot drinks"

Bet that would go down well.

 

[DaleCooper]

And who sends a train out with a faulty trolley that cannot dispense hot drinks?

Obviously the train should have been delayed while a working trolley was found.

 

[Horizon22]

Control / shift controller would split the train. Perhaps the other 5-car was needed to protect a service back into Penzance later. Or one unit had a fault and had to be out of traffic. Things aren’t done for “a whim”. In fact far from it; actions are taken which might not benefit passengers now but might be of substantially more benefit hours later or for key safety reasons.

For the “attendants” these would be hosts or guards.

 

[Railcar]

The decisions of 'Control/shift controller' will lose GWR their customers. In my hearing, he lady on the platform near to me talking to a member of platform staff was told " look for the green lights to find a seat". As the booking system had been wrecked by splitting the train, there were no lights above the seats. Cue distress all round. Another customer lost to GWR?

 

[mrcheek]

Obviously the train should have been delayed while a working trolley was found.

or cancelled altogether, surely! You cant run a train with no drinks provision, Im sure everyone would rather be left behind.......

I had this argument with a fellow passenger once, coming out of Paddington. She was furious that due to a staff shortage, there would be no drinks served. She argued the train should be cancelled. I pointed out that the train was full, with many standing, and that every other service leaving Paddington at the time would be the same. So it was better to run out so that people could actually get where they were going

 

[Horizon22]

The decisions of 'Control/shift controller' will lose GWR their customers. In my hearing, he lady on the platform near to me talking to a member of platform staff was told " look for the green lights to find a seat". As the booking system had been wrecked by splitting the train, there were no lights above the seats. Cue distress all round. Another customer lost to GWR?

Fine, but some decisions are inevitable. What about the passengers later on in the day who were maybe faced with a cancellation and now have a service?

There are always constraints and things aren’t always perfect and whilst this can be irritating for passengers (and indeed staff) there is a complex and long-term picture to managing the fleet, service and any disruption to that.

 

[a_c_skinner]

I am sure you are all correct but the dismal thing for a non-railway person reading these fora is the way people spring to the defence of unsatisfactory events and arrangements. The OP is right, this costs the railways custom and credibility. If a faulty set has to be stopped then it does, obviously mean shortforms and cancellations. It doesn't seem overly demanding to expect a non-working drinks trolley to be replaced at the next principal station or announcements to be clearly audible.

 

[Horizon22]

I am sure you are all correct but the dismal thing for a non-railway person reading these fora is the way people spring to the defence of unsatisfactory events and arrangements. The OP is right, this costs the railways custom and credibility. If a faulty set has to be stopped then it does, obviously mean shortforms and cancellations. It doesn't seem overly demanding to expect a non-working drinks trolley to be replaced at the next principal station or announcements to be clearly audible.

There’s a difference between “springing to the defence” and explaining why certain customs and practices exist or things happen the way they do. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is satisfactory but might be necessary given the constraints available.

 

[Mojo]

Your real question should be about what went wrong to mean the train had to be split, not about who made the decision to manage the service for the overall good.

 

[The exile]

How much training is given in the art of making announcements over PA? There are some on train staff who are excellent - while others need to slow down and not swallow words, as well as think about what they’re saying. Yesterday, while reassuring passengers that the 20 minute wait at the station was scheduled, the guard on my train managed to describe it as a “delay” - guess which was the word passengers latched on to!

 

[tbtc]

I am sure you are all correct but the dismal thing for a non-railway person reading these fora is the way people spring to the defence of unsatisfactory events and arrangements. The OP is right, this costs the railways custom and credibility. If a faulty set has to be stopped then it does, obviously mean shortforms and cancellations. It doesn't seem overly demanding to expect a non-working drinks trolley to be replaced at the next principal station or announcements to be clearly audible.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that this should be encouraged, they are just trying to explain through experience of why such decisions would be made and at what level

But but there seems an increasing trend on here for people to suggest that there’s some shadowy conspiracy, that things (Station layouts, application forms, timetables etc) are designed to be as confusing as possible, that staff must somehow hate passengers, that regrettable decisions are made “on a whim”, that railway professionals are somehow proud of operating with substandard equipment (like a faulty trolley)

But when something unfortunately goes wrong, someone has to make a decision; do we cancel the service because there’s no drinks trolley/ indefinitely delay it whilst we try to fix it/ source alternatives? Or just keep the train running and apologise? Any course of action will upset some people, as someone who rarely buys drinks on board I might be furious if I found myself kicked off an otherwise working train just because there was no hot water

It really depends on how you phrase the question; suggest that things happen because staff “can’t be bothered” or that difficult decisions are taken “on a whim” and don’t be surprised if those with experience at the coal face bite back

 

[Trainbike46]

How much training is given in the art of making announcements over PA? There are some on train staff who are excellent - while others need to slow down and not swallow words, as well as think about what they’re saying. Yesterday, while reassuring passengers that the 20 minute wait at the station was scheduled, the guard on my train managed to describe it as a “delay” - guess which was the word passengers latched on to!

I never worked for a UK TOC, but when I worked for NS my manager instructed me (and everyone else who worked for catering) that we weren't allowed to do announcements ourselves, and had to request the guard to do an announcement on our behalf. Funnily enough, most guards told me to do it myself; obviously I had not been trained for this. I doubt it's a big part of most TOCs training regime either

 

[Flying Snail]

Short formed trains are the inevitable consequence of having trains that can be short formed.

I seem to recall assurances when they were planned/introduced on GWR and LNER that the short sets would only be used for splitting/when appropriate/blah blah blah. But of course that was fantasy, the reality is that if the soft option is there to short form but not cancel then it will be used abused.

I am sure the same assurances were made every other time fleets of long trains were replaced by short units, absolutely not were 5-6-7 car regional trains being replaced with 2 car sprinters, after all weren't the big rubber things on the front meant for them to be run in long formations. Cue decades of 2 car sprinters being the default across the entire regional fleet.

 

[Falcon1200]

The decisions of 'Control/shift controller' will lose GWR their customers.

What other decisions should Control have taken, and what would have been the adverse effects of the alternatives? Without having the full details, we cannot possibly know. I made plenty of decisions as a Controller to cancel, terminate and short-form trains, none of them was made on a whim but due to incidents which disrupted the service. Controllers (but not me) have even been known to cancel their train home (but still head to the station after work to catch it!)

 

[Trainbike46]

Short formed trains are the inevitable consequence of having trains that can be short formed.

I seem to recall assurances when they were planned/introduced on GWR and LNER that the short sets would only be used for splitting/when appropriate/blah blah blah. But of course that was fantasy, the reality is that if the soft option is there to short form but not cancel then it will be used abused.

I am sure the same assurances were made every other time fleets of long trains were replaced by short units, absolutely not were 5-6-7 car regional trains being replaced with 2 car sprinters, after all weren't the big rubber things on the front meant for them to be run in long formations. Cue decades of 2 car sprinters being the default across the entire regional fleet.

Short-forming is clearly a better option than cancelling a service outright; I don't think it's fair to call that abuse.

Sure it would be nice if GWR had more 9-cars, but that was decided by DfT years ago and is currently hard to change.

Wasn't the introduction of sprinters part of a reduction in fleet size? If so, reducing unit length was kind of inevitable

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 9 Sep 2022 ==

What other decisions should Control have taken, and what would have been the adverse effects of the alternatives? Without having the full details, we cannot possibly know. I made plenty of decisions as a Controller to cancel, terminate and short-form trains, none of them was made on a whim but due to incidents which disrupted the service. Controllers (but not me) have even been known to cancel their train home (but still head to the station after work to catch it!)

Had they forgotten they cancelled their train home?

 

[mikeb42]

The OP has not in any way been singled out for this treatment. Whoever does the splitting has been very, very busy indeed for some time. The preponderance of these stupid little half-a-trains on long-distance services to Bristol, Swansea and others over recent months is an ongoing insult to the saps who've had our pockets comprehensively drained for the privilege of being packed into them.

It is bad enough that there are many such scheduled - such as the 2202 Paddington-Plymouth - which routinely yields the dismal spectacle of a train rammed to the gunnels at least as far as Didcot or Swindon late on a midweek evening. Anyone in the know travelling no further than Bristol can at least avoid that one like the plague at the cost of a 30 minute wait. If their luck is in and the 2232 isn't half a train with all of 3.5 coaches of standard at zero notice again that is.

However, ad-hoc short forms are scattered about all over the place recently even on the longest distance services. It has been happening so routinely that they often don't appear on JourneyCheck, thwarting attempts to work around them.

Presumably, the controllers are doing the best they can to work with what they've got. Can it really just be down to repairs to the structural failures these new trains are suffering? Something has changed in recent months. Every time I've passed North Pole depot recently while wedged into the vestibule of one of these half excuses for a train it has appeared unusually full of trains sat about doing nothing. Cost cutting? Staff shortages?

GWR is charging super-premium prices for the sort of service you'd reasonably expect to quietly put up with at Megabus prices. That a comparison with recent attempts to get to Glasgow by train in an organised fashion made GWR look good tells you only what a massive advertisement for car ownership "The Railway" presently is.

 

[mrcheek]

Short formed trains are the inevitable consequence of having trains that can be short formed.

I seem to recall assurances when they were planned/introduced on GWR and LNER that the short sets would only be used for splitting/when appropriate/blah blah blah. But of course that was fantasy, the reality is that if the soft option is there to short form but not cancel then it will be used abused.

I am sure the same assurances were made every other time fleets of long trains were replaced by short units, absolutely not were 5-6-7 car regional trains being replaced with 2 car sprinters, after all weren't the big rubber things on the front meant for them to be run in long formations. Cue decades of 2 car sprinters being the default across the entire regional fleet.

on the plus side, it means that if the unit develops a fault, they can send out a 5 car service instead of cancelling it altogether

 

[voyagerdude220]

Your real question should be about what went wrong to mean the train had to be split, not about who made the decision to manage the service for the overall good.

Definitely. You can imagine the subsequent complaints had the splitting of the two sets not occurred and they continued on their journey, only to break down, causing far worse problems/delays/cancellations etc. to happen.

 

[Falcon1200]

Had they forgotten they cancelled their train home?

They had, and to make matters worse, when they got to the station and asked the staff where their train was, the reply was 'some bustard in Control cancelled it'! (IIRC they were joining the train at an intermediate station rather than its origin, hence their mistake).

 

[Flying Snail]

on the plus side, it means that if the unit develops a fault, they can send out a 5 car service instead of cancelling it altogether

But that's the problem. Trains develop faults all the time, they need maintenance constantly to keep them in service.

If you have a fleet of only 9 car trains then the options are having a full compliment of 9 car trains plus spares to cover short notice issues or you will be constantly cancelling trains.

If you have a bunch of doubled-up 5 car trains running 10 car diagrams then you have the fall back option to only have 80% availability but short form before you have to cancel trains, that option will be taken.

 

[father_jack]

Realtime Trains | Departures from Plymouth all day on 08/09/2022

Train information at Plymouth all day on 08/09/2022. From Realtime Trains, an independent source of train running info for Great Britain.

www.realtimetrains.co.uk

Looks like it was yesterday OP is on about, 1A77 was split 10 to 5 car and the remaining 5 car formed 1A80 starting Plymouth. The one in between 1A78 was 5 car as well coming up from Penzance.

(Quote function doesn't work on Realtimetrains.)

 

[PupCuff]

On GWR, who decides, and at what level, to split a pre-booked 10-coach train from Plymouth to Paddington into a five, thus wrecking the seat booking system and making the train packed from Exeter St Davids with folk getting on at Tiverton Parkway wandering aimlessly up and down the aisles looking for a seat? Is it done to save money? Or just a whim?

This would be a control led decision generally. The exact reasons for a train being split would depend on the circumstance, but a couple of examples could be a defective unit which can't continue in its journey or needs to go onto a different circuit for depot attention at the end of day; or disruption leading to no unit for another service, so it's perceived to be better to operate a short formed train than a fully formed train and a cancellation.

And who decides to employ attendents who can barely pronounce English words so that their loudspeaker announcements are unintelligable apart from the 'thank-you!' at the end?

PA skills vary in people's competence at making them. In an ideal world everyone would have a confident and clear PA voice; is there an argument to say that rail staff should have better PA training - perhaps. We did when I started, don't know how it is now. Not everyone has a natural speaking ability.

And who sends a train out with a faulty trolley that cannot dispense hot drinks?

Trolleys/urns/hot water jugs (delete as appropriate for which specific bit broke down) will only be stored at a very small number of locations so if one develops a fault depending on what circuit the unit is allocated to it could be a while before the unit gets to one of these locations and the defective equipment can be swapped out and sent for repair. There'd be no point unloading a defective trolley at Penzance if the facilities for maintaining them are at, say, Bristol.

 

[43096]

PA skills vary in people's competence at making them. In an ideal world everyone would have a confident and clear PA voice; is there an argument to say that rail staff should have better PA training - perhaps. We did when I started, don't know how it is now. Not everyone has a natural speaking ability.

The PA has a safety-critical role in terms of communicating with passengers in an emergency. If staff aren’t able to communicate clearly using the PA then they need re-training. If the PA is viewed as safety critical in a TOC’s DOTE* policy, then the same should apply to the people using it.

* Defective On Train Equipment

 

[JN114]

Posters have broadly covered the bases already; but as a GWR fleet controller - We will always work with the adage of a short train is better than no train at all. None of us have any awareness or interest in the financial “cost” element of our jobs (how much delay repay it will cost to do x or how much will be paid in delay minutes to do y). And certainly none of us ever, ever do anything on whim - that suggestion is sickening and insulting.

We would love a much larger fleet of 9 car IETs.

We would love enough spare units everywhere to cover every potential failure.

We wish every call we made was “right” and didn’t disrupt anyone.

Unfortunately we have to run the train service with the tools that we have. We have to look at the whole picture - and that picture is bigger than just the one train Mr Bloggs happens to be travelling on.

 

[a_c_skinner]

There’s a difference between “springing to the defence” and explaining why certain customs and practices exist or things happen the way they do.

Yes, of course (and off topic) but there seems to me a thread (sorry) running through the replies to any question like this that the railway as a whole is not as dissatisfied with these events as one might hope. I know it does not make a huge difference it just gives an air of the railway being indifferent. A better reply to the drinks trolley question is "you are right, there should be enough spares" not should a train be cancelled for want of a trolley which is asked up thread.

 

[irish_rail]

I think the problem at present is the route which the short forms are frequently falling on. For a good year or so , the Plymouth to London route was predominantly 9 car trains, and guess what, I remember hardly any short forms. Since the may timetable change we have a lot more 10s and a few 5s booked back onto the Plymouth route, and guess what? , short forms have become common again.
So where are the 9 cars gone that the west country was getting until May on almost all trains? The 10s are utterly awful in terms of passenger distribution as well as a nightmare to staff, and as mentioned by other, easy to short form. Where have all the 9 cars gone???!!!

 

[Clarence Yard]

ACS - you are right - they are largely indifferent because they can only work with the equipment they have available. The railway doesn’t have spare stock situated down an intercity route, it doesn’t have catering points at every major station so you tend to have to recover from a position of weakness, not one of strength.

Resources have to be shared out to meet the needs of the overall timetable - even now there are choices that have to be made with the base plan, let alone trying to cope with perturbations. If you want things to change it needs a change of policy at DfT/Treasury level.

 

[railfan99]

The PA has a safety-critical role in terms of communicating with passengers in an emergency. If staff aren’t able to communicate clearly using the PA then they need re-training. If the PA is viewed as safety critical in a TOC’s DOTE* policy, then the same should apply to the people using it.

* Defective On Train Equipment

As a foreigner, my expectation is that the conductor, guard or whoever is making announcements is able to do so in clear, intelligible English. (I don't use the term 'host' - they're conductors or passenger attendants, just as I'm a 'passenger' not a 'customer' or a 'guest').

This ought be a key criteria for new hires, and a key competency for existing staff. If they can't achieve this, they're not suitable for using a public address system, as in the event of a derailment or other incident, they'd be absolutely incompetent and hopeless: a danger to passengers on board (and other staff).

Some of the defensive posts in reply haven't picked up on the OP's legitimate concerns.