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Sheffield - Nottingham Services (Saturday 17th March)

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pro4600

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Does anyone know if Northern or EMT will be providing extra carriages for their services that run between Sheffield and Nottingham tomorrow? Sheffield Wednesday are taking cira 5000 fans to Notts County tomorrow and judging by the owlstalk(SWFC) forum, a majority of them plan to take the train.
 
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YorkshireBear

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Does anyone know if Northern or EMT will be providing extra carraiges for their services that run between Sheffield and Nottingham tomorrow? Sheffield Wednesday are taking cira 5000 fans to Notts County tomorrow and judging by the owlstalk(SWFC) forum, a majority of them plan to take the train.

Wouldnt hold your breath. If you are getting the train i would seriously consider either
a) going via derby
b) Catching a much earlier train
 

Yew

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I have friend who lives in Sheffield, he says sometimes he can get a meridian from notts to Sheffield. I think that would be your best bet.

It's a shame they haven't got a HST doing it, as far as I can tell a few sit in a depot outside the peaks
 

pro4600

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It's going to have a be a really early one, as there are plenty talking of getting into Nottingham for Weatherspoons opening. Breath in.
 

pemma

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FA cup and Premiership games will be more of a priority if the usual diagramming was changed. 5,000 visiting fans is much less than the number that travel to Manchester or Liverpool most weekends.

The 13:38 departure from Sheffield for Norwich on Saturdays is booked as 4 carriages.

Using a Meridian or HST on Liverpool-Norwich requires a timetable revision to either run Liverpool-Nottingham and Nottingham-Norwich as separate services or to allow for the Meridians and HSTs not being able to run at Sprinter speeds through Norfolk. The former is done for two workings in each direction on Grand National Days.
 

YorkshireBear

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Very rarely do meridians run to nottingham from sheffield infact as far as i am aware it has only happened during grand national.
 

YorkshireBear

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I think those ones are all early morning/evening HSTs to leeds to get to neville hill depot. SO i imagine it would happen if a failure occured but otherwise i doubt it sa purpose of service is to get HSTs to neville hill. (he says 99% confidently)
 

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When the Canaries play a club at home affecting East Midlands trains, 4-cars have been running through to Norwich on 13.13 arrival with the unit on the stops detatched, left & attatched to the 17.13 arrival for the 17.54 Nottingham.
 

Bellwater

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Does anyone know if Northern or EMT will be providing extra carriages for their services that run between Sheffield and Nottingham tomorrow? Sheffield Wednesday are taking cira 5000 fans to Notts County tomorrow and judging by the owlstalk(SWFC) forum, a majority of them plan to take the train.

Has anyone from SWFC spoken to EMT about this?

 

34D

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They could let them know how many are likely to come, its no effort to put a HST on Sheff-Nottm and back if EMT know its going to pay. Route/Traction knowledge isn't an issue.

But they'd have to find a 5 man crew on a Saturday, get extra paths, etc etc.
 

DDB

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But they'd have to find a 5 man crew on a Saturday, get extra paths, etc etc.

Surely organising train crew (notice in the crew room offering overtime?), organising paths with network rail etc is the sort of thing that the people running rail companies do all the time. This surely shouldn't take more than a week to organise and SWFC have presumably known their fixture list for months.

There seems to be a lack of can do attitude in terms of getting extra business sometimes.

DDB
 

YorkshireBear

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But they'd have to find a 5 man crew on a Saturday, get extra paths, etc etc.

EMT have done it before for wednesday fans on a saturday when we played derby a few years ago. So clearly it is not that impossible. That was a saturday 3pm kick off like this one.
 

pro4600

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So did they put on any extra trains?

Not as far as I could tell. Looked like EMT were running 4 carriages and Northern 2. I got a Northern service around 10:15am from Dronfield that was so full there were problems closing the doors. People packed in like sardines, and a fair few of them had already started drinking. I changed at Chesterfield and went via Derby as I didn't fancy an hour of that. Thanks for the tip YorkshireBear.
 

Yew

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It's a shame the system doesn't encourage TOC's to be more dynamic :/
 

dk1

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Watching Channel 4 racing yesterday i noticed EMT where running a 158/153 combo on the Crewe-Derby route. It was Midlands Grand National day at Uttoxeter.
 

tbtc

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It's a shame the system doesn't encourage TOC's to be more dynamic :/

There are roughly fifty professional games a weekend in the UK (bear in mind that this thread is about a Third Tier match in the English league) - as well as plenty of other events (inc rugby/ cricket/ semi-pro football etc) - how do TOCs manage to cater for all of those flows?
 

HSTEd

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It's a shame the system doesn't encourage TOC's to be more dynamic :/

Where will the rolling stock come from?
The "more efficient" rolling stock usage under privatisation means that there is none spare for occasions like this, unlike BR which probably would have tonnes of Mk 1s (or now Mk 2s?) sitting in sidings waiting for things like this.

Additionally there is unlikely to be a significant demand supression effect on this event (most fans will go anyway and they have no other practical means of transport especially if drinking), so packing them in like sardines is the sound business decision to make. (Most people using the smallest possible quantity of resources).
 

Chapeltom

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Oh come on now, 5,000 Sheffield Wednesday fans going a short distance to Nottingham is a bit different to Charlton going Scunthorpe, Derby to Doncaster and Reading to Barnsley. I saw fans of all these clubs as I was at Sheffield station at 1ish, I only saw 25 max of Derby, Reading and Charlton fans on trains/at stations/boarding trains! Wednesday are a club that travel in numbers and a good number that go by train.

When there's 46 games in the Football-League only a half dozen, dozen absolute max will encourage great demand, surely some spare stock not used at weekends could be used?
 

HSTEd

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That stock is getting its maintenance work done on it
 

87015

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That stock is getting its maintenance work done on it
All of it? I think you are massively underestimating the weekend exam schedule for your average depot, more maintenance gets done during the week than on weekends as its easier and cheaper to fully staff depots on weekdays.

That such a simple operation of a Sheffield/Nottingham footex is put on the too difficult/not interested pile is a pretty damning indictment of our "world class railway"
 

tbtc

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Its hard enough to get staff to work weekend services just to run the timetabled trains (look at the problems at London Midland etc).

Plus there's then the hassle of pathing services for one-off trips.

The stock would probably spend more time sat empty at Nottingham whilst the match was on than it would travelling from Sheffield to Nottingham and back again (but the staff would been paying for the full shift).

Its not as simple as it sounds, sorry.
 

D1009

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Its hard enough to get staff to work weekend services just to run the timetabled trains (look at the problems at London Midland etc).

Plus there's then the hassle of pathing services for one-off trips.

The stock would probably spend more time sat empty at Nottingham whilst the match was on than it would travelling from Sheffield to Nottingham and back again (but the staff would been paying for the full shift).

Its not as simple as it sounds, sorry.

From what's been posted on here, at least EMT found extra stock to strengthen its Liverpool - Norwich and Crewe - Derby services. Usually extra trains only work if there's huge demand such as Cheltenham races, where advance booking comes into play, otherwise nobody knows about them.
 

Yew

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On weekends you don't have commuters though do you, and even on weekends emt have hst's spare outside the peaks.
 

calc7

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Watching Channel 4 racing yesterday i noticed EMT where running a 158/153 combo on the Crewe-Derby route. It was Midlands Grand National day at Uttoxeter.

I saw that unit at Derby! :)
 

HSTEd

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FA fixtures are potentially planned sufficiently far in advance that you could arrange for these trains at the start of the timetable change period, but that has all sorts of pitfalls.

There simply is no stock to run these trains, not to mention the difficulty of finding drivers from the correct company with the correct signing.
And who would run these trains? You can't just grab the nearest available crew with route knowledge and hook up the nearest available locomotive (like in the days of Cl20s hauling non-air con Mk 1s and 2s) any more.
 

tbtc

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On weekends you don't have commuters though do you, and even on weekends emt have hst's spare outside the peaks.

There are no EMT units stabled at Sheffield.

So you'd need to take one from Leeds or Nottingham to Sheffield, find a spare platform, do the fifty minute trip to Nottingham, find somewhere to sit in Nottingham for three hours, take another fifty minutes to come back to Sheffield and then head back to Nottingham or Leeds.

So the train is going to be needed for roughly seven hours (from depot to depot)? So thats a seven hour shift for at least a couple of staff. Given the overtime rates on top of the staff wages (without wanting to get into an argument about that again...), maybe you'd need £500 just to pay for the afternoon? On top of fuel/ track access charges etc.

You'd have to flog a lot of £12.20 cheap day singles to justify that.

(Assuming that you can find a spare driver who signs HSTs and signs the route from Sheffield to Nottingham, and fancies working on Saturday, of course)
 
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