Complete agreement with
@TheEdge here
We don’t want a railway where things only work if everything is run at full line speed between each pair of stations and has only a minute to dwell at intermediate stops, things would fall apart instantly.
Passengers happen, slippery tracks happen, engineering happens!
It feels that there’s a contrast between people who want lots of “resilience” when it comes to maintaining/reopening barely used secondary routes that might be handy for diversionary capabilities a couple of weekends a year… and want plenty of resilience in fleet sizes (so we have enough trains to meet all demand, all year round)… but yet get agitated with a timetable that allows an extra minute here and there to ensure that passengers can enjoy some resilience in their everyday journeys
As someone who’s been on my share of delayed XC services, sometimes it only takes one thing to go wrong for your train to hit a delay that it’ll never bounce back from
I think that most members of the public would prefer a service that was reliable and they could plan lifts/ connections around the arrival time of, even if that means often being sat in the station throat for two minutes or sometimes arriving earlier than the timetable had suggested
But there seems to be a trend of persecution complex on here, people seem very quick to assume that others are trying to upset them
We see threads where people suggest that ticket machines are deliberately made too complicated for people to use, or that seats are designed to be uncomfortable or that services at a busy station like Leeds are cunningly scheduled to ensure that certain connections between blockade services are not possible without 59m waits.
Ticket Office staff are part of the conspiracy too, since they only seem to be trained on 99.9% off ticket sales and not the obscure exceessing of PRIVs or whatever niche ticket someone on here wants to buy.
See also the increasing use of claiming that other parties “can’t be bothered”, as if the only reason why services were cancelled during periods of huge staff absences were because someone at the TOC shrugged their shoulders and absent mindedly removed random diagrams, or that Network Rail didn’t build in significantly more capacity that a line/ junction will need in the medium term just because of apathy
It just feels like people used to accept/understand that, in a world of cost/ benefit analysis and audits and finite subsidies, sometimes it’s not possible to satisfy everyone all of the time.
Now though, people are looking for things to be offended by, like a centre forward running at the legs of defenders so they can fall over and claim a penalty.
Give me a railway I can trust to get me to my destination at the promised time, rather than one With no scope to cope with any problems