At around lunchtime today, there were problems with services through Paisley Gilmour Street because of a points failure at Arkleston. This seemed to mostly effect services to Gourock, one of which I was due to catch to Carstdyke.
There's 4tph to Gourock from Glasgow Central - two stoppers (what I needed) and two fast. After a couple of cancellations, there was a fast due to leave at 13.25 and a stopper at 13.35. What then happened was that the fast left at 13.35 and the stopper left...whenever (I bought a single to Greenock Central to make sure I could at least get to Greenock, so caught the fast. In hindsight, I should probably have just waited and bought a single from Port Glasgow-Greenock Central on the train and used my Dundee-Cartsdyke ticket as far as PTG).
Even the ticket inspector was baffled as to why they didn't just make the fast a stopper, leaving on-time, and more or less get the timetable back to normal.
So my basic point and question is - when there's a line with a combination of fasts and stoppers going to the same place, is there any reason to not have a general contingency plan, where stoppers are preserved over fasts? So in the specific case of today, the default would have been for the service I caught to stop everywhere, even though it was due to run fast.
There's 4tph to Gourock from Glasgow Central - two stoppers (what I needed) and two fast. After a couple of cancellations, there was a fast due to leave at 13.25 and a stopper at 13.35. What then happened was that the fast left at 13.35 and the stopper left...whenever (I bought a single to Greenock Central to make sure I could at least get to Greenock, so caught the fast. In hindsight, I should probably have just waited and bought a single from Port Glasgow-Greenock Central on the train and used my Dundee-Cartsdyke ticket as far as PTG).
Even the ticket inspector was baffled as to why they didn't just make the fast a stopper, leaving on-time, and more or less get the timetable back to normal.
So my basic point and question is - when there's a line with a combination of fasts and stoppers going to the same place, is there any reason to not have a general contingency plan, where stoppers are preserved over fasts? So in the specific case of today, the default would have been for the service I caught to stop everywhere, even though it was due to run fast.