With Avanti cancelling multiple services lately due to staff shortages/absences, I have noticed that their decisions as to which ones to cancel have been quite bizarre. They seem to target the busiest services before/after Liverpool matches on a regular basis, that is when they are not downgrading them from 11-car to 9-car. The resulting chaos in recent weeks on match days has been amongst the worst I have ever experienced on the trains.
Yesterday, Avanti ran the 17:03 Euston-to-Liverpool on time but without passengers, meaning that many fans will have missed all but the final 30 minutes of the Liverpool/ManU game (as the next two trains were heavily delayed).
What was unusual was that the same train then ran back to Euston at 19:47, again without passengers. I'd like to think that the reason this happened was because Avanti expected to have staff at Liverpool, and that changed en route. Otherwise, it would seem to be environmental madness to be running literally an empty train in both directions, as opposed to sending it off to a depot/sidings for a few hours. Is there really no mechanism for preventing pointless running of ghost trains?
Yesterday, Avanti ran the 17:03 Euston-to-Liverpool on time but without passengers, meaning that many fans will have missed all but the final 30 minutes of the Liverpool/ManU game (as the next two trains were heavily delayed).
What was unusual was that the same train then ran back to Euston at 19:47, again without passengers. I'd like to think that the reason this happened was because Avanti expected to have staff at Liverpool, and that changed en route. Otherwise, it would seem to be environmental madness to be running literally an empty train in both directions, as opposed to sending it off to a depot/sidings for a few hours. Is there really no mechanism for preventing pointless running of ghost trains?