Most things are predictable if you have the data, and the desire to do so.
The NHS can, and does, place ambulances to areas of greatest predicted need by time of day and week. Similarly any good police control room knows roughly where the fights will be on Friday night. Not the exact house, but by postcode sector. Ditto the fire service and environment agency in their respective professional areas.
As has been shown, the railways also have that knowledge and use it. For example by 'deploying the sausage' when necessary. I think Network Rail generally do a good job and have people out in all weathers trying to fix things when they go wrong. Sometimes I think they could be a bit quicker at getting a route re-opened, but they have their constraints in terms of staff and budgets.
The issue I have is with TOCS abandoning the whole service in anticipation of storms, advising passengers not to travel, and not implementing contingency plans for those who do travel, or who are already travelling. Yes, the people who set out in Ciara or Dennis to get that new pair of trainers on Sunday were fools for ignoring the advice, but only in some parts of the country. Elsewhere, there were only yellow or amber warnings in place, life continued except for those reliant upon the train service.
Last week EMR abandoned the Crewe to Derby service in it's entirety.
Yesterday LNR ran a 1/3 service around the Stoke-on-Trent wobble in the morning, why? I guess they had insufficient staff volunteering to work. Did they communicate this to anyone? No. In the afternoon an 'overhead line' incident occurred between Stafford and Crewe and they abandoned the whole service for the remainder of the day. Their own 'live trains' feature, on their own website, entirely under their own control, which they refer passengers to in times of disruption, continued to show trains as operating and on time. Why wouldn't the average passenger set out based on that information? It was clear, bright and sunny but with a couple of sudden very heavy storms with strong winds. The average passenger doesn't have the knowledge to know to look at real data coming, ultimately, from the same source.
TOCS need to publish timely and accurate information to passengers, enabling them to make decisions about their travel plans. Alternatively direct people to the more competent and accurate sources such as RTT! If a TOC gets a reputation for pushing out information that is clearly incorrect, passengers will simply stop taking any notice of that information.