So, are you insinuating the delays are due to inexperienced train crew and not problems with the unit's themselves? Nearly all the heavy delays are gen set issues. It's easy to blame the train crew I suppose
Not at all. I'm not saying they're overly reliable at the moment either and clearly there are major delays and cancellations due to faults when they occur.
Being a guard who works them myself, my experience is as follows. My first in service working was 2 round trips (4hrs). The first trip I lost around 5 minutes getting used to the door controls, the position of the door panels, being extra careful to ensure the whole train was platformed as they're longer and quite tight at some stations. For your first working you have trainers onboard to assist - in their words I picked the unit up quickly in comparison to some others. I had one of the regular drivers on the 1st trip who was very good on the acceleration/braking!
By the 2nd trip, I had got used to working it, however there was a driver change and the driver was also on their first working in service, and lost about 15 minutes as they were very cautious coming into stations. It took a few minutes at each end for them to setup the desk. In the 12 hours I've spent on 230s since, my maximum delay has been no more than 5 minutes.
Exactly. Don't see the same issues with 197s
This is an interesting point. I worked a 197 recently where a group of trainees were onboard doing their first ever session of dispatch training. The opening/closing of doors was extremely slow as you would expect and dwell times were quite lengthy. The 197 performance however is very good and they have few issues keeping to time along the coast, often having to wait time at all stations (whereas a 175 might lose a minute or 2, the 197 makes up a minute or 2)
The door control layout on a 230 is quite different to every other unit, the buttons are all arranged differently and panels on some doors are the complete opposite way around to those at others - certainly takes a while to get used to! On the Bidston line there just isn't time for dwells at all. You open, quick watch as everybody gets on/off, then close up and go asap.
They can when all the gen sets are functioning correctly, these are 150 timings and not the proposed 230 timings.
I wasn't aware different timings were coming in for 230s at some point, an improved timetable with chance to recover time would be a welcome change on this line as its been crying out for it for decades. Here's hoping!
I made the same point in the Class 769 threads - you could tell when they were running ok because no-one was ever posting about them but the minute something negative happened, the thread lit up once again. Negative issues will generally garner more discussion, naturally, but I do think some people just thrive on it!