Avanti's serial cancellations of last trains

[Skie]

I've arrived at a terminus at 1am, long after any connecting services had stopped running. Nobody from Avanti stuck around to greet the massively delayed train as it arrived or help with onward travel to get people safely home. Train manager only had phone numbers that were all closed for the day (but was very apologetic and clearly exhausted after a long stint). They're a shambles, the only thing they seem good at is increasing prices. First at their usual best.

 

[Bertie the bus]

Many don’t though & soon return.

That's alright then. No need for the railway to bother running a service or treat passengers decently as they'll soon return anyway.

 

[All Line Rover]

They expect a lone woman, who had expected to travel on a direct train from London to Manchester, to hang about at Wolverhampton overnight waiting for a bus at 01.15: https://twitter.com/AvantiWestCoast/status/1532829487074779138

Heck. I don't like hanging about at Wolverhampton at the best of times, let alone in those circumstances.

Wolverhampton is no longer managed by Avanti. I presume they no longer have Avanti station staff based there?

 

[Dave91131]

They expect a lone woman, who had expected to travel on a direct train from London to Manchester, to hang about at Wolverhampton overnight waiting for a bus at 01.15: https://twitter.com/AvantiWestCoast/status/1532829487074779138

Heck. I don't like hanging about at Wolverhampton at the best of times, let alone in those circumstances.

Wolverhampton is no longer managed by Avanti. I presume they no longer have Avanti station staff based there?

The person (presumably employed by Avanti) couldn't even spell the woman's name correctly when replying to her message.

Beggars belief.

And numerous cancellations already showing on the Avanti website for Saturday morning due to staff availability (or lack of).

 

[pinkmarie80]

There was a cancellation of a Euston train from Preston on Friday afternoon as well- think it was the 13.17. The 14.17 was rammed so I gave in, caught the train to Manchester instead. My mate was working the EMR to Nottingham so I got that one. Took me 6 hours to get back to Leicester from Blackpool.

 

[185]

Their 9pm, 9.36 & 10pm - last three Manchesters were pulled.

"No ticket acceptance" - Avanti twitter ie Avanti contol, despite the fact most passengers boarded the other firms' train up to Crewe, then onto the 0044 Northern to Manchester arriving 0125.

Common sense applied by station staff disregarded that 'no acceptance' silliness and got people home.

 

[Adam Williams]

Just imagine how many hundreds of potential passengers are now thinking of permanently changing to driving a car, or catching a coach

I'm honestly at this point when it comes to trying to get back out of London late at night, which is sad because I've always been pro-public-transport and pro-rail.

But the reality is, if you park in somewhere like Harrow you avoid the pain of driving in central, you avoid the chronic overcrowding on Chiltern, you avoid Avanti cancelling last services and you avoid stupidly-early-last-services that prevent you from enjoying an evening in London. You can use the public transport that actually runs properly late at night (met line) and then handle the long distance travel section yourself.

Certainly what I intend to do going forwards.

Disclaimer: opinions obviously my own!

 

[185]

The blame lies with the transport secretary (Shapps) and his former minister (Heaton Harris), and the two DfT rail executives (Kelly, Oudahar) who awarded this contract.

FirstGroup.... "Transforming travel".

Give them credit, certainly does what is says on the tin.

 

[Wolfie]

The blame lies with the transport secretary (Shapps) and his former minister (Heaton Harris), and the two DfT rail executives (Kelly, Moriarty) who awarded this contract.

FirstGroup.... "Transforming travel".

Give them credit, certainly does what is says on the tin.

First equals worst! Utterly useless company that should have all contracts removed. Couldn't run a bath!

 

[Howardh]

Anyone thinking of London to Leeds then Manchester to get round Avanti cancellations has to put up with Transpennine strikes as well, I believe they are asking...pleading..pax not to travel with them this weekend.
Avanti - monopoly over most of the Manchester London line. TPX same across the Pennines.
That should change for the sake of the poor beleaguered passenger.

 

[judethegreat]

Reading this sort of thing always reminds me of back in about '94, still BR - a Glasgow-Euston on a (scheduled) diversion over the S&C, while on that route got stuck behind a broken down freight train.

All the time the guard kept us informed, including regularly walking through the train. Then at some point started noting everyone's final destination that night.

On arrival at Euston at about 1am, four hours late, we were greeted by more black cabs than the eye could see, and plenty of staff, who had already recieved the list of destinations, and organised the geographical taxi loads, directing everyone into their correct chariots, for distribution all over the south east of England (my taxi was for something like Kingston, New Malden, then Godalming and Reading...poor driver didn't have a clue of directions without his passengers' help, pre sat nav etc...)

Absolutely sterling effort by all, really wish i'd written to congratulate them at the time, but anyway..

Dare i ask if we can look forward to this sort of thing again with GB Rail or whatever it's to be called?

 

[dk1]

That's alright then. No need for the railway to bother running a service or treat passengers decently as they'll soon return anyway.

Not saying that. Just that in my experience those passengers do return regardless of a bad journey or two.

 

[TUC]

They expect a lone woman, who had expected to travel on a direct train from London to Manchester, to hang about at Wolverhampton overnight waiting for a bus at 01.15: https://twitter.com/AvantiWestCoast/status/1532829487074779138

Heck. I don't like hanging about at Wolverhampton at the best of times, let alone in those circumstances.

Wolverhampton is no longer managed by Avanti. I presume they no longer have Avanti station staff based there?

Good customer service might nevertheless suggest that, even if no Avanti station staff are available, a member of Avanti's management team gets themselves to Wolverhampton for 0115, to ensure that all of their passengers are successfully transferred onto the bus.

 

[judethegreat]

The coach operators have far less training to do making it easier to find replacements.

Theoretically, that could make organising some kind of back up fleet of RRBs (and drivers for them on call) for short notice work easier.

 

[footprints]

44 cancellations due to 'lack of train crew' announced for today already.

 

[CHESHIRECAT]

Can you explain the comment loads £! please

it makes it sound as if going to gain money, but surely you only get back what you have already spent, and end up stranded

Meant gonna cost them loads..chill chihuahua!

The airlines should be cashing in, would love a last flight from Heathrow to Manchester after 9pm....but airports and airlines have enough issues of their own.

How are the likes of Megabus and National express managing r/e staff?

There is at 2130 now...as it forms the sole LGW next day....

 

[Watershed]

44 cancellations due to 'lack of train crew' announced for today already.

And another 8 part cancellations.

 

[irish_rail]

First equals worst! Utterly useless company that should have all contracts removed. Couldn't run a bath!

First managed to recruit sufficient staff on GWR, because DFT mandated it
Yet on Avanti the DFT are seemingly OK with running with the bare minimum of drivers etc. The blame lies with the DFT in my view, and not Avanti or First group. Avanti should be given permission to recruit 100 odd drivers ASAP in the way GWR has recruited constantly over past few years. Its no good just trying "to get by" when it comes to drivers!

 

[gazzaa2]

Just imagine how many hundreds of potential passengers are now thinking of permanently changing to driving a car, or catching a coach. It just gets to the stage where enough is enough.

I won't travel long distance after about 6pm now (or earlier depending on the time of the last train), just not worth the risk of being stranded all night, or hanging around station car parks at 1am waiting for a coach to turn up.

These kind of issues regarding last trains were always a risk but usually restricted to something rare, like the last train breaks down, or extreme weather conditions. Now it's high risk every time you travel because of staffing problems.

 

[Mag_seven]

First managed to recruit sufficient staff on GWR, because DFT mandated it
Yet on Avanti the DFT are seemingly OK with running with the bare minimum of drivers etc. The blame lies with the DFT in my view, and not Avanti or First group. Avanti should be given permission to recruit 100 odd drivers ASAP in the way GWR has recruited constantly over past few years. Its no good just trying "to get by" when it comes to drivers!

When the new West Coast franchise was set up under Virgin they had a massive recruitment campaign (I think it was called "Millennium Drivers" or something like that). The VHF timetable came in and everything ran OK for several years. Where has it all gone wrong? Have they let a whole lot of drivers retire without replacement?

 

[Moonshot]

First managed to recruit sufficient staff on GWR, because DFT mandated it
Yet on Avanti the DFT are seemingly OK with running with the bare minimum of drivers etc. The blame lies with the DFT in my view, and not Avanti or First group. Avanti should be given permission to recruit 100 odd drivers ASAP in the way GWR has recruited constantly over past few years. Its no good just trying "to get by" when it comes to drivers!

Why should Avanti need to be given permission?

 

[Watershed]

Why should Avanti need to be given permission?

Because the TOCs need permission to do virtually everything nowadays, with the DfT underwriting their costs.

 

[muz379]

Surely the serious issue is leaving passengers stranded late at night with no one to assist them with alternative arrangements.
Replacement road transport is usually provided during engineering works so why not for train crew shortages. Remember they seem to have fair notice that there are likely to be issues.
The trouble is the more often the operators are allowed to get away with this so called service the more it apparently becomes acceptable.

There is still considerably less notice for traincrew shortages than engineering work . Engineering work is planned months in advance , doesn't always lead to rail replacements being needed to run full routes so can be worked in with trains and is generally well advertised which usually suppresses some demand.

On the other hand you might only have a few days notice of traincrew issues , you won't really know until you do the roster for the day what resources are available , and even then upto the day the resources available can change . You can't put together a RRB plan in such short notice .

Given the capacity of a pendolino Vs a coach you'd also need a fleet of busses to replace one train let alone multiple cancellations.

I just don't see bus/coach companies with an abundance of drivers sat around at short notice for late night runs London / Manchester / Liverpool etc . Even for the overtime I can't see there being many takers over a series of bank holidays .

I've arrived at a terminus at 1am, long after any connecting services had stopped running. Nobody from Avanti stuck around to greet the massively delayed train as it arrived or help with onward travel to get people safely home. Train manager only had phone numbers that were all closed for the day (but was very apologetic and clearly exhausted after a long stint). They're a shambles, the only thing they seem good at is increasing prices. First at their usual best.

I think in circumstances like this on call managers should be sent out to these places to assist passengers in these circumstances.

Theoretically, that could make organising some kind of back up fleet of RRBs (and drivers for them on call) for short notice work easier.

Not sure many tocs could make a financial case for back up fleets of busses and on call drivers . That is why the industry contracts RRB's .

 

[Moonshot]

Because the TOCs need permission to do virtually everything nowadays, with the DfT underwriting their costs.

Isn't that a fully nationalised railway? If so, you can see the sort of service that comes from that. Back to the poor days of BR......and yet a lot of people actually advocate that. Be careful what you wish for.

 

[dk1]

Isn't that a fully nationalised railway? If so, you can see the sort of service that comes from that. Back to the poor days of BR......and yet a lot of people actually advocate that. Be careful what you wish for.

Spot on. I have used that line so many times this last year. Why anyone thought going back to some sort of nationalisation was a good idea baffles me. I worked under BR too & it was always struggling for cash in some way or other. Privatisation was the best thing to happen to us TOC employees especially drivers.

 

[Watershed]

Isn't that a fully nationalised railway? If so, you can see the sort of service that comes from that. Back to the poor days of BR......and yet a lot of people actually advocate that. Be careful what you wish for.

It's a fully nationalised railway in all but name. Of course the government is too pathetic to admit that privatisation has been a disastrous failure in almost all respects (at least, as far as the government's interests are concerned).

It thus insists on keeping private sector involvement in the everyday running of the railway - and in so doing, it foregoes the notable savings which could be attained by returning to vertical integration.

Don't you just love it. Political ideology over common sense!

 

[Moonshot]

Spot on. I have used that line so many times this last year. Why anyone thought going back to some sort of nationalisation was a good idea baffles me. I worked under BR too & it was always struggling for cash in some way or other. Privatisation was the best thing to happen to us TOC employees especially drivers.

Totally agree. I myself would advocate total open access services on the main intercity routes. Have competition between operators and let them bid for paths. That's probably not the easiest thing to achieve under the current structure but still ....it should be an aim

 

[Watershed]

Totally agree. I myself would advocate total open access services on the main intercity routes. Have competition between operators and let them bid for paths. That's probably not the easiest thing to achieve under the current structure but still ....it should be an aim

There are certainly steps which could be taken to encourage more Open Access Operators, but you would soon come up against such fundamental issues as:

a) Many intercity routes simply aren't profitable at all, even at the highly subsidised access rates that OAOs benefit from. So you would have to directly subsidise the OAOs - at which point you're back at square one!

b) Even on those lines which are generally profitable, who would bid to run the unprofitable services very early/late at night, or at the quietest midday times?

c) How would it work in terms of ticketing? If you had interavailable tickets then the whole point of competition - that the bad companies will be forced to improve, or else fail - would be defeated, as revenue would be automatically distributed anyway. If you had everything as Advance-style ticketing, that would mean the attractiveness and flexibility of the walk-up railway would be destroyed. And what would you do during disruption? It'd be a minefield.

For good reason, no other country does it this way. It's a proposal that was made as part of the privatisation process in the 90s, and a number of times since then, but it has quite rightly been rejected as unfeasible and undesirable.

 

[D1537]

Isn't that a fully nationalised railway? If so, you can see the sort of service that comes from that. Back to the poor days of BR......and yet a lot of people actually advocate that. Be careful what you wish for.

Yet I am unable to remember a time when BR were regularly cancelling last trains to and from major WCML destinations, let alone the last three.

Also, in my experience BR were pretty good at getting you where you needed to if an incident meant that said last train was cancelled.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Theoretically, that could make organising some kind of back up fleet of RRBs (and drivers for them on call) for short notice work easier.

Standby RRBs aren't unknown, LNR had 2 at Bletchley during the calamitous 230 introduction.