Goldfish62
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I can vouch for that having had the misfortune to use the line a couple of years ago. Never again!
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Skegness line reservations (Was - Compulsory reservations on Skegness trains)
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43096
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Like the Little Britain reference - presumably to Vicky Pollard!
Anyway, I thought it was called Langley Mill-on-Sea, not Skegness.
Mainline421
Member
It won't, and no. Reading the EMR site there is no use of the word compulsory or similar. As long they can physically board the train as usual nothing changes at intermediate stations. There will be a dedicated queue and even buses hired in especially for those without reservations at Skegness, or you can wait for space on the next train.
Bevan Price
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Perhaps local train users should complain to their MPs about the (lack of) competence of the DfT ??
class397tpe
Member
Could they not spare another 170 and make it a 6 car 170? Or use 2 3 cars? That would provide more capacity than last summer.
dk1
Veteran Member
These issues to do with severe crowding are nothing new on the Skegness route. Going back to to Regional Railways days publicity regarding avoiding travel on certain days during Summer where no units available to strengthen services & passengers left stranded at Grantham for example were commonplace.
Great Yarmouth was the same in the early 1990s. A single 153 was booked to work the 13:35 ex-Norwich on Summer Saturdays with nothing else available. Passengers were advised in advance to avoid this train & as station announcer we advised passengers of the extremely limited capacity & instead to wait for the 14:19 departure which was formed of 2x158s running through from the midlands/north.
Great Yarmouth was the same in the early 1990s. A single 153 was booked to work the 13:35 ex-Norwich on Summer Saturdays with nothing else available. Passengers were advised in advance to avoid this train & as station announcer we advised passengers of the extremely limited capacity & instead to wait for the 14:19 departure which was formed of 2x158s running through from the midlands/north.
They don’t. This isn’t limited to this scenario though. Unless it has changed VERY recently, EMR do not let season ticket holders reserve seats. They’ve had their money etc.
It works well.
Of course they absolutely are eligible but the railway doesn’t need to follow the rules or laws so I suspect they’ll reject reject reject. After all EMR are happy to make up rules as they go a long when it comes to delay repay. “As the service you attempted to board terminated short at your origin you would not be eligible for delay repay”. Classic.
You can reserve seats through a ticket office, or some TOCs online (GWR definitely allows you to reserve seats on any TOC)
Failed Unit
Established Member
Looking the Derby services I wonder if they could do 6 car 170s? That would need 9x 170 (3 car) which would remove them from other busy services such as Grimsby - Leicester and Nottingham - Worksop (which might not need them if it goes back to ½ hourly anyway)
Reading the other posts, keeping the 156s would help this year but what about next year?
The only real solution is chartered stock, but loadings on this line (as other coastal routes) are difficult to guess as the sun makes a big difference and it is surprising how many customers chose to travel on the day.Charters need advanced planning. They could be very useful with the butlins passengers as they could be included in a package with coach transfer. The Butlins passengers are less likely to have just turned up because it is a nice day.
43096
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It used to be chartered stock in the days of Central Trains. EMT had a can-do attitude and got HSTs cleared for the line so didn't need to hire stock with a double benefit of much cheaper operational cost and a much better service for the passengers.
What has stuffed it up is the influx of Class 360s in place of the HSTs on the London routes. The problem being that you can't use the 360s on EMR anywhere except London to Corby. The benefits of having high capacity, go-anywhere trains now lost.
Running extras from Grantham to Skegness, plus running buses direct to Butlins and the other holiday parks to the north of Skegness from Grantham/Peterborough is probably a lot cheaper than hiring in the HSTs and training drivers etc.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Translation: We aren't running enough / long enough trains on this route.
Without necessarily blaming EMR if they can't get the trains (because other TOCs have them / The DfT won't authorize it /whatever), this seems an awful indictment of how the railways are run. Considering various TOCs are still running reduced timetables post-Covid, it seems incredible that we can't find the stock to run an adequate service on a route where the TOCs know there will be huge demand.
Any specific examples of this ?
During my time at EMT (approx 10 years), I can’t recall this happening.
Maybe things have changed under EMR, but I am sure if that was the case it would have been highlighted here.
Translation: We aren't running enough / long enough trains on this route.
Without necessarily blaming EMR if they can't get the trains (because other TOCs have them / The DfT won't authorize it /whatever), this seems an awful indictment of how the railways are run. Considering various TOCs are still running reduced timetables post-Covid, it seems incredible that we can't find the stock to run an adequate service on a route where the TOCs know there will be huge demand.
But is it really feasible in these hardened (and DfT constrained) times to have additional stock (if available) on the books 365/365 just to cover a peak period when the good denizens of Langley Mill (as mentioned upthread) etc. want to head to Skegness for all the dubious atrractions it seems to offer? Even if (as @LowLevel advised earlier) these good folks generally hold tickets (and often anytime ones) the economics of it all must be dubious from the Dft perspective.
bramling
Veteran Member
If that’s the case, the government need to be honest with people, especially if they’re going to discourage alternative modes of transport such as the private car.
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
I wonder if a big part of the problem is the way, instead of having a small number of standard types of stock, we have so many little micro-fleets that, as far as I can make out, require fleet-specific training to operate and can only be used on certain routes? Aside from the fleets being leased to specific TOCs which restricts the options for transferring them elsewhere.
If you have - I don't know exactly how many DMUs EMR has available but let's say for the sake of argument - 20 DMUs and you need another 3 to provide enough capacity on the Skegness line, then it's going to be almost impossible to find anything that's available. On the other hand, if the pool you could theoretically get the units from comprises - say - any of 500 DMUs that are in operation across the country, then it's probably going to be much easier to find the extra ones to use temporarily on the Skegness route.
They used to bin off the Mansfield short workings to free up a unit for Liverpool occasionally during particularly bad days.
Baxenden Bank
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In the bad old BR days, Tyseley used to send a number of their sets up to Manchester to provide extra capacity for Blackpool services at weekends.
Clarence Yard
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Finsbury Park used to send their Cravens away too - the Liverpool Street to Cromer working being their most famous summer Saturday working. Must been quite a sight blasting up Brentwood bank.
One Summer Saturday I got on a 6 car DMU formation at Grantham, heading for Boston. I was in the back set, a Cravens. It was rammed and being staff I got to sit on my case in the guards van, opposite a prisoner and escort for Freiston Camp (then a young offenders institution) with the day old chicks on one side of me and boxes of Zwetsloot flowers on the other, complete with a very strong smell of exhaust (the pipes ran up through the guards compartment in those days), all on a very hot day. I was very pleased to get out of that train!
Even if we had identical stock, the number of “normal” diagrams that have to operate on weekends precludes the easy transfer of stock onto summer only workings. The days of spare “peak only” stock sitting in sidings at weekends have long gone.
One Summer Saturday I got on a 6 car DMU formation at Grantham, heading for Boston. I was in the back set, a Cravens. It was rammed and being staff I got to sit on my case in the guards van, opposite a prisoner and escort for Freiston Camp (then a young offenders institution) with the day old chicks on one side of me and boxes of Zwetsloot flowers on the other, complete with a very strong smell of exhaust (the pipes ran up through the guards compartment in those days), all on a very hot day. I was very pleased to get out of that train!
Even if we had identical stock, the number of “normal” diagrams that have to operate on weekends precludes the easy transfer of stock onto summer only workings. The days of spare “peak only” stock sitting in sidings at weekends have long gone.
The hoardes of travelling public causing the overcrowding issue in the first place I guess?
Failed Unit
Established Member
The fragmentation hasn’t helps. EMR to be fair did a good job with the HSTs. Back in the CT days Tyseley was had lots of 150’s that were used in Monday - Friday peaks that were not needed at the weekend. Northern possibly is a good way to hire a few units at the weekend (156s while EMR still sign them and 158s) However as others have said who is prepared to pay? Do northern have spare trains sat around now? With weekend travel up everywhere and Mon - Fri peaks down there defiantly is no easy solution to this.
Ah, I’d forgotten about that (and the occasional 222 to Lincoln and a one off to Lime St on a non Grand National day)
I’m sure it has been discussed here on more than one occasion but my search isn’t finding any as yet. It’s not just the Skegness ones though. They used to sack off the Worksop to Mansfield section of the line and put a bus on to use the rolling stock to strengthen the Nottingham to Lincolns at Christmas market time some years ago.
The way EMR manage competency traction knowledge for 156 will be deleted at each driver or guard's biannual rules from the day the last unit leaves the fleet. It won't take long for big holes in that knowledge to appear.
I've averaged working one about every 6 weeks this year and I don't expect to get another but you never know.
Failed Unit
Established Member
They did but hasn’t happened for a number of years, with a combination of Covid and industrial disputes - EMR haven’t offer a full service at all for the Lincoln Christmas market since at least 2019. But that is another thread.
12LDA28C
Established Member
Who paid when loco and stock was hired in for Skegness trains due to lack of capacity back in summer 2017? This solution is very much not a new idea and has been used on several routes in recent years.
There's been a slight tightening of the purse strings since 2017.
Charter companies aren't allowed to accept national rail tickets, so you either sell tickets specific for the relief, arrange ticket checking on the platforms or trains and hope nobody looks too closely or just waive the ticket checking.
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