LNR new WCML timetable, May 2019 (in open data feeds)

RealTrains07 said:

Meaning still catching the same old train. Iam just lucky that in Staffordshire the train time changes are not that big of a difference than before

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iainbhx said:

My morning changes are a pain in the neck, the very useful 06:59 Spring Road to Moor Street has gone, the replacement at 06:46 had about half the normal level of passengers on it, which will make the 07:13 rammed. It's also not brilliant for connecting to Crewe.

The evening changes are very minor, but the Euston bound 16:51 from Liverpool was a 350/2 which I wouldn't fancy if full for the full journey. The 18:10 Moor Street to Spring Road had been strengthened to 4 coaches, a 170 and a double dogbox, I was delighted but some of the passengers weren't that happy.

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centraltrains said:

Strange with the services on that branch... All 3 coaches in the 5 o'clock hour then 4, 5 and 6 coaches in the 6 o'clock hour. Were the 153s at the front or back? Fairly regularly use that service...

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iainbhx said:

My morning changes are a pain in the neck, the very useful 06:59 Spring Road to Moor Street has gone, the replacement at 06:46 had about half the normal level of passengers on it, which will make the 07:13 rammed. It's also not brilliant for connecting to Crewe.

The evening changes are very minor, but the Euston bound 16:51 from Liverpool was a 350/2 which I wouldn't fancy if full for the full journey. The 18:10 Moor Street to Spring Road had been strengthened to 4 coaches, a 170 and a double dogbox, I was delighted but some of the passengers weren't that happy.

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iainbhx said:

My morning changes are a pain in the neck, the very useful 06:59 Spring Road to Moor Street has gone, the replacement at 06:46 had about half the normal level of passengers on it, which will make the 07:13 rammed. It's also not brilliant for connecting to Crewe.

The evening changes are very minor, but the Euston bound 16:51 from Liverpool was a 350/2 which I wouldn't fancy if full for the full journey. The 18:10 Moor Street to Spring Road had been strengthened to 4 coaches, a 170 and a double dogbox, I was delighted but some of the passengers weren't that happy.

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RealTrains07 said:

The only train in the morning i would say is an issue is the 07:04 from stone which is gone, replaced by the 06:55

(while their is a 07:04 train going the other way towards birmingham which you could imagine will confuse people since all trains going stoke direction are 04 or 05 past the hour while the birmingham ones are 34 past.)

Back to the point. Its annoying if i want to get that train since i have to get up even earlier and leave even earlier since i rely on my feet which wouldn’t be an issue if i didnt live the other side of town

I know 10-15 minute difference might not seem a big deal to some but having to plan around lessons and exams is difficult without removing the 51 past trains and pushing them forward by 15 mins.

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nuneatonmark said:

IS it fair to say that compared to the Northern/TPE and Thameslink changes the LNR/WMT changes have been a bit of a non-event, i.e. it all seems pretty under control and working as expected?

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Bletchleyite said:

Maybe I indeed spoke too soon...

(Attachment is the departure board at New St just now showing some quite nasty delays)

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centraltrains said:

Someone was hit by a train at Milton Keynes this afternoon, will be interesting to see how it recovers. Snow Hill lines have unusually long congestion delays too, not sure on reason.

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Glenn1969 said:

RTT lists it as having lost 45 minutes outside Crewe station due to an incident but then going straight to Stoke and then run fast to Birmingham where it left at 2050. Not sure how accurate RTT is with things like that though

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sd0733 said:

There was a second fatality at Barlaston. No XC, VT or LNR services via the loop so pretty much irrelevant with regards to the timetable change, Whatever timetable no trains could run as cant even go via Hixon where it was.

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Glenn1969 said:

I was thinking the same. Maybe the delayed unit terminated at Stoke and they found another unit for it at Brum. Was that service supposed to be one that joined up with another at Brum?

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Bletchleyite said:

I think my hat is now safe, sadly.

While there hasn't been a collapse in normal service in the manner of Northern (probably because LNR don't have a pinch-point like Castlefield, don't do crew changes in stupid places, and bother employing enough staff and having enough units), the inter-related nature of all the diagrams does seem to have basically caused a progressive collapse of service, I guess as traincrews ended up displaced and ran out of hours.

I think this is going to be the nature of the beast when outside influence breaks things. In Silverlink days, a serious failure meant disruption between Euston and Northampton. In LM days, it meant between Euston and Brum - now it means across an entire franchise area.

Given how vulnerable to problems the WCML is, if it isn't viable to have a pre-planned "fallback" which would split the service at Northampton and New St to allow things to recover (in the manner of the classic WCML 2-track timetable with specific planned cancellations), I sadly return to my previous view that the gains aren't worth the risks.

FWIW, information was also very poor. I gave up working out what was going on with LNR services at New St and took the 2010 VT to MKC (which was on time), but even at MKC it was a bit of a mess, with the train I took to Bletchley being shown on displays as Watford Jn but the on-board announcements still saying Euston. At New St itself, there were two 2033 LNRs - one cancelled, one on time. I don't think either of these factually represented what was going on.

Edit: I think the only way to prevent this sort of collapse is to simplify even if you retain the through services - that is, have one set of crew and unit diagrams doing Euston-Liverpool, one doing Euston-Rugeley, one doing Euston-Northampton etc. Even if you kept the splits, they'd need to be self-contained, not interworked[1]. Then you can, in the event of serious delays, sort things out by cancelling and stepping up. The inter-related diagrams are just too complex to do that. The trouble is that this might mean, through sub-optimal layovers etc, that the whole thing just becomes non-viable. In which case, what's LNR's core market again?

[1] By that I mean, say, operating Euston-Rugeley/Crewe as a self contained set of crew and unit diagrams with no interworking onto, say, a Tring stopper.

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centraltrains said:

Someone was hit by a train at Milton Keynes this afternoon, will be interesting to see how it recovers. Snow Hill lines have unusually long congestion delays too, not sure on reason.

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Bletchleyite said:

I think my hat is now safe, sadly.

While there hasn't been a collapse in normal service in the manner of Northern (probably because LNR don't have a pinch-point like Castlefield, don't do crew changes in stupid places, and bother employing enough staff and having enough units), the inter-related nature of all the diagrams does seem to have basically caused a progressive collapse of service, I guess as traincrews ended up displaced and ran out of hours.

I think this is going to be the nature of the beast when outside influence breaks things. In Silverlink days, a serious failure meant disruption between Euston and Northampton. In LM days, it meant between Euston and Brum - now it means across an entire franchise area.

Given how vulnerable to problems the WCML is, if it isn't viable to have a pre-planned "fallback" which would split the service at Northampton and New St to allow things to recover (in the manner of the classic WCML 2-track timetable with specific planned cancellations), I sadly return to my previous view that the gains aren't worth the risks.

FWIW, information was also very poor. I gave up working out what was going on with LNR services at New St and took the 2010 VT to MKC (which was on time), but even at MKC it was a bit of a mess, with the train I took to Bletchley being shown on displays as Watford Jn but the on-board announcements still saying Euston. At New St itself, there were two 2033 LNRs - one cancelled, one on time. I don't think either of these factually represented what was going on.

Edit: I think the only way to prevent this sort of collapse is to simplify even if you retain the through services - that is, have one set of crew and unit diagrams doing Euston-Liverpool, one doing Euston-Rugeley, one doing Euston-Northampton etc. Even if you kept the splits, they'd need to be self-contained, not interworked[1]. Then you can, in the event of serious delays, sort things out by cancelling and stepping up. The inter-related diagrams are just too complex to do that. The trouble is that this might mean, through sub-optimal layovers etc, that the whole thing just becomes non-viable. In which case, what's LNR's core market again?

[1] By that I mean, say, operating Euston-Rugeley/Crewe as a self contained set of crew and unit diagrams with no interworking onto, say, a Tring stopper.

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Bletchleyite said:

1] By that I mean, say, operating Euston-Rugeley/Crewe as a self contained set of crew and unit diagrams with no interworking onto, say, a Tring stopper.

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bionic said:

How many crew changes are we talking on a Liverpool/Crewe/Rugeley to Euston service via Birmingham? Two or three separate driver and guard changes I would guess. A bare minimum of four train crew members being required to work these routes end to end, but in the bulk of cases its probably more like six or eight. Bearing in mind the crews taking over at New Street may well be coming off other routes, eg Cross City, and the crews taking over at Northampton may be working up from London you have so many variables that have to fall into place just to get that one train from end to end on that route. That's just for one trip.

Surely it would make sense, as you say, to get train crews signing the entire route to eliminate these crew changes, because they are probably the weakest link. That's what Thameslink did... for all their problems with awful planning, training, recruitment and PR, at least they have arranged it so all depots eventually sign end to end of their routes and eliminate unnecessary crew changes. It was a surprise to me to find that LNR don't have a depot at Euston.

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Bletchleyite said:

But even if you need those changes, keeping the diagrams self contained would make things "cleaner". Unless you bin off the through services, you aren't going to avoid something hitting the whole WCML breaking all of it. But at present a failure at Rugeley (on the branch) is going to affect Tring stoppers, whereas if you dedicated specific crews/units to specific branches all day and didn't interwork between the "service groups", a failure at Rugeley could affect only services that go onto that branch, and you could cancel a train or two and taxi traincrews around to sort it out. Similarly with a Tring stopper - if one ends up really late, just cancel a round trip from Euston and everything is back where it should be (which is how it was classically done on something really simple like Merseyrail). With the interworking it's way too complex to do this.

Same with the Crewe services - have pairs of 350s stay together all day and crews just work the whole thing on a wholly self-contained basis (i.e. you book on, you work Trent Valleys (with appropriate breaks), you go home). Then if it ends up that you've got one 45 minutes late, cancel a round trip or turn it short (pay VT to carry the passengers, who won't be annoyed by that) and it's sorted out easily.

If that means more units being required, get some more 319s in, they're not all spoken for, are they?

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