But possibly carrying the fewest passengers in the area covered by the depot which is short-staffed.
How would you cancel services where a depot is short of staff? What would be your priorities?
Good question. I would probably look at passenger delay minutes(1), or even passenger delay minutes after the industry standard acceptable delay of 5 minutes on a local service or 10 minutes on a longer distance one(2). You might even consider 15 minutes acceptable as the industry seems to do when it sets up "delay repay"(3)
Using your "never mind HOW badly you inconvenience people", you would cancel the Swindon train and run the
Bristol train.
Using method (1), 50 passenger delayed by 2 hours to Swindon gives you 6000 minutes of delay. 150 passengers delayed by 30 minutes gives you 4500 minutes of delay. So cancel the Bristol and run the
Swindon.
Using method (3), 50 passenger delayed by 2 hours gives you 5250 minutes of delay. 150 passengers delayed by 30 minutes also gives you just 2250 minutes of delay. So cancel the Bristol and run the
Swindon.
Of course,
* the best way to fix the issue is to have enough da**ed staff but that appears to be beyond out
TOC▸ .
* Second best is to step the frequency up to an approiate level - a train at least every hour on local and regional services.
* Third best is to spread the pain and cancel the same proportion of services on each line
--- we feel we're put fourth in line here on the Swindon -> Westbury line. Better - just - than not being in line as we were a decade ago
