Great Western Coffee Shop

As has been discussed elsewhere on these forums, there have been a number of significant and prolonged issues with TOCs failing to provide a proper service.

Examples include southern with a series of strikes over a couple of years, and FGW/GWR who have been short of staff and rolling stock for a couple of years.

Infrastructure reliability seems to be worsening, an example being the failed re-signalling scheme in the Reading area, and subjectively less resilience to only moderately adverse weather.

New and expensive rolling stock has often failed to meet passengers expectations. My views on the IETs are well known, but suffice to say that it is not just me who thinks that they are a backwards step.
Elsewhere, In south London we have new trains without toilets, progress I know, but toilets ARE needed not so much for the planned journey times but for the breakdowns.
Crossrail though providing valuable extra capacity is going to be a backward step in passenger facilities with limited seating, no toilets, and no catering for passengers making lengthy journeys, and would otherwise have used proper trains.

There is a general view that the railway copes very poorly with incidents such as the recent stranding at Lewisham and other similar incidents.

I fear that all this is damaging the future prospects of rail travel, and will result in less investment in public transport and more spending on roads.

I recently met a local political figure who is demanding that the proposed Bristol Arena be re-sited from near the railway station to Filton. He stated that putting it near a major station is "pointless" because you cant plan an event without knowing if "the trains will be running on the day" He also wondered how the trains will cope with large crowds when they cant cope on a holiday weekend.
Better to build it at Filton were there is space for thousands of parking spaces.

At an unrelated social event I met another political figure who is calling, with some vigour, for various road widening schemes in the Minehead and Taunton district, in order to encourage tourism and employment.
I suggested that encouraging rail travel might be better, for environmental and other reasons. He was incredulous at my suggestion that trains could help, having attempted holiday travel by train with his own family and vowed "never again" after "paying hundreds of pounds to stand for hours" He has travelled once on what I suspect was an IET and commented on it being shorter, full and standing, and reservations not being honoured. Presuming that it WAS an IET, they did not realise that it was one of the splendid new trains but believed that it was "a local train sent by mistake instead of a main line train"

Both these conversations were before the various well reported failings over the early May bank holiday weekend.

(edited only to clarify date)

I am frankly puzzled that the opening post has, until today, generated zero replies and a rather low view-rate.

Yesterday, services around Leeds and York came to a standstill for several hours; reports suggest that this was due to a lightning strike affecting York IECC. As an example, the 07:00 Edinburgh-Plymouth spent four hours stationary a couple of signal sections outside York station; it was eventually terminated at York.

The scale of disruption was huge. Of services Edinburgh-Kings Cross, around 13 were cancelled or terminated somewhere en-route (e.g. Newcastle and Darlington). Of the services that made the whole journey, lateness on arrival at London was recorded as: 22, 60, 300, 141, 88, 83, 72, 72, 82, 63, 5 (in order of service). More infrastructure problems at Doncaster didn't help.

Sheffield-York as another example: after the 08:40 arrival the next (after 16 cancellations) was the 16:30 (actual arrival 16:52).

Similar pictures for Skipton, Ilkley, Harrogate and so on...services to Manchester Airport affected.

A thread appeared about the events on Railforums.
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/weather-related-disruption-leeds-york-doncaster-27-07.167611/ (https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/weather-related-disruption-leeds-york-doncaster-27-07.167611/)
Apart from a couple of posts questioning the lack of resilience and wisdom of putting all eggs in one IECC/ROC basket, the general tone seemed very complacent; most of the argument being over the availability (or not) of information and rail-replacement buses. One comment stuck out:
If cancelling all TransWilts services the larger part of a day before snow actually fell is "coping well", plus problems at Lewisham and in Dorset with passengers stuck on trains, then I wonder about the excess tint on the poster's spectacles.

Yes, we can't expect the railway to plan for rare events like lightning strikes... like hot days... snow... football... lineside fires... OK, I'm being a bit harsh on the professionals out there who really are trying to do that planning.

But (and I'm an old git who can remember different times) the railway seems to have become victim to a creeping disease of fragility and cascading failure, on top of all the other problems plaguing the system at the moment that are well-covered on this forum.

What is the railway for, if it cannot provide a reliable service?

Acts of God are generally tolerated by the travelling public far more readily than week in, week out incompetence, poor management, poor industrial relations, promises not kept...

The rail industry seems to be in meltdown, and the meltdown seem attributable to those in the rail industry and those who regulate and govern it.   People understand and are so understanding of occasional things, or acts of god - especially if they're told what's happened.

But


What indeed. And, yet again, today it failed to provide that reliable service.  It then failed to provide am adequate alternative.   See reports here.

The major disruption at York and Leeds was caused by a direct lightning strike on the IECC (Integrated Electronic Control Centre) at York.  Not too much you can do to protect against a major strike like that.  Internally it 'fried' two of the Leeds workstations and externally destroyed up to 20 trackside signalling modules.  Moving trains at York meant having to manually operate and Clip and Padlock (C&P) 30 sets of points, which is a significant task.

Things like that are relatively rare.  Most signalling lightning protection does its job quite well and its nothing new.  Mechanical installations were just as prone.  Been in many a mechanical signalbox during a storm like that and to hear the block bells ringing away and the block instrument needles swinging away like they are at sea, is a sight and sound to behold :D

I'm sure it was very dramatic - and possibly quite frightening.

But, when all's said and done, were the block instruments still working after the storm? How quickly could services be resumed or was it necessary to change the instruments and/or other components?

The recent thunderstorms do seem to have produced disruption much worse than that experienced back in the day.

However my original post, following meeting two unrelated political figures, was about the general downgrading of services, not about an individual breakdown.
The example of the proposed Bristol Arena is most apt, Large events are planned a year or more in advance. With todays railway, how does one know that a decent train service will run for the long planned event ?
What if it coincides with engineering work, or a thunderstorm, or staff shortage.

Whilst some problems may get better, Eventually GWR will HAVE to recruit enough staff, or lose the franchise. Eventually the new DMUs will hopefully perform reliably and run full length, for example. Even the failed re signalling scheme in the Reading are MIGHT one day work properly.

However some recent and planned downgrades are permanent.
West country passengers will be stuck with no buffet DMUs for nearly 30 years.
South London suburban passengers will be stuck without toilets for a similar time.
Crossrail passengers who previously used main line trains will be confined to "metro style" trains optimised for standing, for the foreseeable future.

And looking at more local issues for the Minehead and Taunton area, there is growing support for road widening and new roads rather than encouraging public transport.
The point was made that a car, and enough road space to use it freely is in effect a requirement of almost any job in this area.
Various plans to run an all day/all year round service on the West Somerset Railway have come to precisely nothing. It looks as though each time there is a chance that it might happen, that a new barrier is erected by "them".
Local buses are getting worse, and of very limited use for work travel since they are cancelled at the merest hint of bad weather, when cars and trucks use the same road without any problems.
And of course no one can use the bus on a "Butlin's day" but employers still expect people to get to work on such days.

What re-signalling scheme?

The one featured in the "building a greater west" publicity posters, that promised a more reliable and more frequent service.

The immediate Reading area has been reliable since it was resignalled.  What hasn't been reliable is the section from Maidenhead to Paddington.

That's what I thought, everything seems smooth in the Reading area since the layout change, some dodgy ARS/Human input decisions at times, similar to what SandTEngineer was discussing here (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=17353.msg242816#msg242816), other than that I've not come across any problems

Yes.  I understand what you are driving at.  The protection systems on modern electronic signalling systems have improved considerably since their inception by BR some 33 years ago now.  A lot of the data transmission is now by fibre optic cable rather than copper cable (which of course is prone to propogate any electrical interference). Its usually the earlier schemes that have the extensive copper networks and thus the ones that will suffer.  York is an example of that.

And the reason for that is, its one of the earlier schemes that was engineered (downwards) to a budget.  Also the modern data transmission technology wasn't available at the time the schemes were designed (see post above).

To the best of my knowledge there have only been a few minor 'meltdowns' since the Reading area was resignalled?  Its certainly been one of the more reliable signalling schemes of recent years.  Lets see how the most recent scheme (Oxford) performs!

Partly a function of the way the forum software works. The "Show unread posts since last visit" button doesn't actually show everything you haven't read – after a time things seem to slip off the list.

It got off to a good start, as I'm not aware of any signalling issues in the first week of operation.

I would suggest, as a long time observer of the railway business, that the failings described by broadgage are a reflection of a deeper malaise within the industry.

There have been two very informative reports published over the last couple of years. One was by Dame Colette Bowe in 2015, Report of the Bowe Review into the planning of Network Rail’s Enhancements Programme 2014-2019 and Nicola Shaw’s The future shape and financing of Network Rail published in March 2016. Both were sponsored by the Department for Transport.

Both point out the confused and unclear relationships between Network Rail, the Office of the Rail Regulator (now the Office for Road and Rail), the Train Operating Companies and the DfT. Shaw writes:


She reports on the results of a wide ranging consultation:


These reports are specifically concerned with Network Rail, but the detail in them suggests there is confusion and lack of clarity regarding who does what and when in a variety of different areas, including relationships with the TOCs. It is clear that Network Rail was, possibly still is, uncertain who its customers are - Shaw considered that NR’s customers were the TOCs and FOCs but notes that NR sees the DfT - its owner and funder for improvements - as a customer. The DfT requires a lot of NR’s management time to service its demands. Another customer is the ORR which also continually requires information; NR has much less contact with the TOCs and FOCs than with these two Government bodies.

I don’t think much will change until the DfT works out what it should be doing - at the moment it is confused as to whether it is the Ministry for Transport for the country or the Ministry of Railways. In its MoR role it is so intimately concerned with the minutiae of railway operation that over the last decade and more it has removed any capability for the senior management of the TOCs to act in their interpretation of the best interests of their paying customers. The TOCs are kept in such a financial straightjacket (because of the franchising contracts which insist on a given profile of premium payment increase or subsidy reductions regardless of business conditions) they have little or no incentive to add to their operational flexibility, and therefore increase its costs, by adding more staff or equipment.

If things lower down in the food chain of any organisation don’t seem to be going well it is practically always because the targets set by top management and the directors are vague, contradictory and the incentives perverse resulting in apparently odd decisions. In a publicly quoted company this would result in an underperforming share price making the organisation a target for a takeover. This path is not available to the passenger train operators or to NR, so I only hope that the DfT can reform itself and teach itself to disentangle itself from what should be purely railway management decisions.

If this does happen one result may be that the railway business will be able to hire higher quality managers…good people do not accept being told what to do all the time and (added in edit as it's what I meant to say all along) even more being told what they can't do.

On a positive note these two reports are by respected people so they are - I hope - evidence that these problems are being taken seriously at the highest levels. I hope that they are not simply pro forma exercises. Change may come, but it will be measured in years, not months.

Discussions like this have me (as the board operator) scrambling to take a look and asking 'what is going on", even with facilities that I tend onto you use in my own day to day browsing.   We are looking at the "Show unread posts since last visit" menu option at the top of the page, I think.  And I suspect that the answer might lie in "Show unread posts since last visit" - and the definition of a "visit".

Individual topics have "new" flags on them when they have not been read and those offer far more than "Show unread posts since last visit" as they have no cut-off.   And having taken a look, I suspect that a visit may be defined as something like "a login by a user who has not been active on the forum for the last 15 minutes". If so, it will work well for many people; imagine you come along and log in once a day, then you'll see back to yesterday. but not the previous day, from which posts will slip off the list given.    But for people who log in every few hours,  and fully browse just at the weekend, posts may get missed as the list will be shorter than ideal come Saturday having been trimmed on Friday night back to Friday lunchtime.

Other factors may be that people tend not to respond to posts ...
* When there's so much else going on that they don't see them or skip quickly by to the big news
* Which are made at a time of day / week after which the reader doesn't come for a while - if my habit was to be here each gay between 9 and 10 p.m., I'm going to less note posts made at 11 p.m., for example
* Ironically, where the post is so good and thought provoking that the reader thinks "I'll have to come back to that one" and doesn't
* as first responder to a really good and long post, especially where they only want to respond to one small point - a thoughtful feeling to help avoid conversation on much of the topic being overlooked as the thread leads off on a sub-point
* As an early response on a very technical thread, as the potential responder may not feel qualified to comment
* To a poster who's known to be argumentative / drag in the responder, or an old subject yet again.  A pragmatic "I will leave that".

Not sure which of these apply on this particular thread - certainly not the last one (we're not talking buffet v trolley  :D ), and checking back on the posts per day counter, it doesn't look as if the forum was especially snowed under with posts.  I will leave it at that / may split this out into its own thread if I draw a series of responses.   The " Long term consequences of present/recent railway problems. " topic is far too important to be drowned out by my long speculation on posting habits and people's reactions.

As someone who always uses "Show unread posts since last visit" it has always worked well for me. I occasionally go on the Home page and scroll down to check if there are any darker blue boxes next to each category to see if I've missed any posts.

I guess the question is, has the move the IECC's and RoC's meant that disruption is spread around a larger area?
Is it acceptable that say a lightening strike on Didcot (to bring it more towards GWR's area) would mess up the Severn Beach line?
I accept there are reasons why larger signalling centres work and make sense, but I also think the public have the right to then complain when railway industry controlled decisions (aka the move to larger centres that control larger areas) end up making non railway caused disruption worse.

In the example you mention at York, would the disruption at York caused disruption at Leeds like that if systems and signalers were more spread out?

There has always been a centralising policy for signalling centres ever since I started on the railway S&T some 50 years ago next month.  Firstly they controlled areas of about 20-30 route miles, then 50-60 route miles and in the mid to late 1970s over 100 route miles.  Since those days the distances controlled have expanded even more, so that we now see control centres controlling significant parts of the network (Thames Valley Signalling Centre at Didcot being a prime example - It was planned to control the whole of the Western Territory from there at one point).

So, despite all the diversity you can possibly build into such large centres, sometime will come that the whole centre gets shut down.  It has happened in the air industry I think.

Its possible to go back to smaller control centres, but that comes at a cost.  At one time it was planned that a control centre could be switched over to another standby one elsewhere, but somebody forgot about the staff logistics of that one.