Great Western Coffee Shop

From Edinburgh Live (https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinburgh-news/could-waverley-haymarket-stations-set-16867937)


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Seems somewhat familiar with some issues at Cardiff ... 'old' questions about who's responsibility it is to even out the big events to avoid overloading public transport ... and how much it's public transport's responsibility to be geared up to cope with passenger flows.

International rugby matches are scheduled months, if not years in advance & the dates are widely available (in the case of the 6 Nations). If public transport can't gear up with that sort of notice, there's a serious problem.

Before (let's pick an arbitrary date) 27th March 1963, the railways (for I assume that this is the aspect of public transport we are discussing here, given the context) were extremely flexible but not very efficient. The modern railway is efficient but inflexible, to the extent that there may not be much leeway to 'gear up' for major events, particularly when two happen at the same time and place, regardless of how much notice is given. Did the organisers of the rugby match talk to the train operators? Did they not know about the Edinburgh Festival?

I did get the impression that those pre-World Cup warm-up matches were a bit improvised, and maybe they were fixed rather late and with dates chosen for internal Rugby reasons alone.

The classic way of shifting big post-event crowds has to be what LU do. Having all trains the same - same destination, even - helps a lot. You load a platform with a bit more than a trainload of passenger, run in an empty train, fill it, send it off, and bring in the next train. Passenger flow rate onto the platfrom is controlled to match. The only time I saw that was actually in the 1960s*, leaving White City - as we were going out from London, we could see the empty trains stacked up one at every signal and in every sleeping siding.

That would need significant translation for Edinburgh, but I would suggest that stopping trains at either Haymarket or Waverly but not both would help (more so for loading than unloading). That's obviously of particular relevance for Rugby+other things since Haymarket would be for Murrayfield (only?). Other changes to services or ticketing could help, specifically if they contribute to the platform>train move being done as fast as possible. But once you get a platform crammed full of people wanting different trains then no-one's going to get home quickly.

(10 July 1965, I now think)

To a point, but if there aren't any additional trains available, and a limited pool of staff on which to call, what do they do?  I've quite a lot of sympathy for Scotrail, in that it does seem to be asking for trouble to schedule a match to be the same time as the busiest weekend of the festival, which from what I've read the railway already puts on a lot of additional trains and late into the night too.

Its only been going annually since about 1946!