Are you telling me that when the network grinds to a halt everyone in NR and the ToCs immediately go to work on resolving the problem? Including the Customer Services call centre folks who are no doubt multi skilled and can change roles to engineer, planner or driver as needed? You just need one person to get the info out to the train crews, who (guess what?) have nothing else to do until the problem is resolved.
It's not hard, you just need to have the right attitude something the senior and middle managers in the industry lack.
What surprises me is that none of the front line staff have called out that in such circumstances they are left with 2-3 people to try to handle 200+ increasingly angry and frustrated passengers, with absolutely no support whatsoever. Perhaps if their line managers spend more of their time actually doing their job by providing their reports with the support and resources needed to deal with such situations and less time blaming them for their own inability to run an efficient railway, we might have a railway that was fit for purpose and affordable.
A long post and one full of assumptions and hypotheses that a little reflection would have demonstrated are flawed.
Firstly the passenger pays through the farebox for all staff costs ultimately. Control offices are staffed to deal with the expected peaks and can deal with extraordinary situations such as the scenario that is being discussed but with lesser efficiency.
It is NOT either logical or sensible to man control offices to be able to deal with irregular or rare failure scenario. The emergency services operate on the same basis and any major incident like 7/7 or the Cumbria shootings requires off duty staff to be brought in to support.
If you want control offices staffed to deal with any and every eventuality then I am sure the Industry will be delighted to do so, but YOU will be paying for that luxury in increased ticket costs. Your call.
During major incidents there is considerable work to be done and telephone calls increase exponentionally in these cases. Staff have to deal with setting up a strategy, which has to be based upon information that may not be to hand for an hour or so. They also have to work out the logistics of how they are going to modify the service.
So a question for you.
During the hour or so that normally elapses before an estimate can be given, what would YOU do. Cancel all services travelling to/from the affected area, even from long distance origins?
What about train crew ? Are you going to leave those on the trains to fend for themselves or are you going to look at what may be necessary to be done to find them relief ?
What would YOU do about other services that they are due to operate ? Will you cancel them as well or will you try to get train crew from off duty, thus running the risk of impacting the following day's services ?
Will you make an assumption in the first hour as to the likelihood of the incident being just a simple failure rather than a theft somewhere along a line of route that can only be identified by walking it from end to end ?
Will you make an immediate assumption that it will be major, implement major changes and cancellations and then discover that it will be resolved within a short period of time ?
Remember whatever decision YOU make will be criticised by armchair warriors such as yourself and dissected with intricacy in the comfort of absolute hindsight ?
Now remember that whilst all this is going on in the TOC control, a similar scenario will be worked out within the Network Rail Control.
Your posts suggests that the Signalman (as it will either be them or the TOC control who will speak to them) will have nothing more to do with his/her time than sit down and drink tea
You just need one person to get the info out to the train crews, who (guess what?) have nothing else to do until the problem is resolved.
This quite misses the point that both parties will be working hard to in the one case try to move trains if possible, and will perhaps be reversing trains away from the area, and in the other will be trying to set up alternative arrangements.
Nobody suggests that there are
some areas where things cannot be improved but many of these are locked in by legal constraints.
A railway cannot be always run on the basis of "common sense" firstly because common sense is far from common, but also what is common sense to you will most certainly not be common sense to me or others. Operational procedures and rules are necessary to ensure the proper regulation of activities in every organisation throughout Industry. I doubt that you would wish the Nuclear Industry or the Gas Industry to work on the basis of "common sense" yet you seem to believe that the Railway Industry is populated by idiot managers.
I suggest this says much about your perceptions of other people.
As I said at the start IF you want a Rolls Royce service then that can easily be arranged but not if you only want to pay for a mini.
Until that time major disruptive incidents - albeit not as common as people seem to believe - will occur from time to time. Like the major closures of Motorways little can be done to mitigate them without fairly major expenditure which would have to be recovered.
