A couple of questions about the railways

1. Why would a train leave before its allotted departure time? If everything else is running to time, but RTT says it left 2 minutes early, and the TOC social media team say the TOC will launch an internal investigation.

2. When things are up the creek, who decides on the train calling patterns when trains have to have revised calling patterns, by either skipping some stops or adding additional ones.
Is this down to the TOC, the signaller, or both?

Cheers!

1) depends on the location. At London Bridge trains bound for Charing Cross often leave early as the service is frequent and they can move out of the way

1) can also be a genuine mistake where crew don’t double check their schedule card and go when they believe they’re due to if the signal is showing a proceed aspect. There can also be discrepancies between the crew schedule card and the advertised timetable.

2) this is decided by a train running controller depending on what the stock and crew next working is. There is a common misconception that trains skip stops to massage delay repeat etc, that’s not true. If the coaches only have a tight turn around, or the crew are due a short grub break before working a different line then trains may be run fast the prevent disruption spreading.

the train running controller or train service manager will Hopefully inform the relevant signallers and crew as well as major stations who will trickle this information down to their dependents.

it doesn’t always work like this, trains that may have been due to run on slow lines calling at all stations still occasionally get put on slow lines instead of fast where they could make up more time.

Also worth noting that RTT isn't always 100% accurate.

An example local to me of (1) a few days ago: a Skipton to Bradford train is, very unusually, booked to sit at Saltaire for several minutes around 0900, because the single line through Shipley is occupied. For some reason on this occasion the line wasnt blocked, the signal cleared and the train set off.
Random variations in an otherwise regular-interval services (timings or stopping patterns) are common causes of mistakes.

Passengers do it as well - I did so only last week and so did my sister (different trains)!

ComUtoR said:

Also worth noting that RTT isn't always 100% accurate.

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This. Where I am we have a known issue with TRUST and RTT reporting trains as leaving early when they in fact leave Right time or even slightly late! Due to the berth offset being incorrect.

221129 said:

This. Where I am we have a known issue with TRUST and RTT reporting trains as leaving early when they in fact leave Right time or even slightly late! Due to the berth offset being incorrect.

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If you know areas where RTT is wrong then please report it and don't just sit on it assuming we can't do anything about it.

TRUST uses a different offset to RTT in virtually all locations. A lot of RTT data is used internally but we don't get visibility of most issues unless they get reported.

Our old schedule, pretty much all trains in one direction left at xx10, apart from one a day which left at xx07. So I'm ambling about when suddenly dispatcher walks up and starts prepping to give me the tip.

And crew breaks are based on the Working Time Table, so even though train arrives Right Time in the Published Time Table, it's actually late for the crew break. Sometimes these margins are so tight that a decision will be made early in a journey to skip stops, rather than risk the delay getting out of hand.

Sometimes though, the service runs anyway, the following service may be delayed going out, but there's enough turn around at the end of that journey to absorb the delay.

Skipping stops fails PPM and can be costly.

30907 said:

An example local to me of (1) a few days ago: a Skipton to Bradford train is, very unusually, booked to sit at Saltaire for several minutes around 0900, because the single line through Shipley is occupied. For some reason on this occasion the line wasnt blocked, the signal cleared and the train set off.

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Exactly the same error seems to have been made this morning - I have just checked on RTT for my train into Leeds, and spotted the telltale green "ink."
The changed departure from Saltaire only came into force a couple of weeks back - another source of error.