Cross Country train crew shortages

[londonmidland]

A rather ‘interesting’ experience with Cross Country this evening.

I was originally due to catch the 17:11 from Leeds to Birmingham, however this service was cancelled at Leeds due to late running, as a result of overhead wire damage at Durham.

An additional service was formed to restart the service at Leeds and leave right time. This was due to form the 17:11 to Bristol Temple Meads. The original service was due to go to Plymouth, but was cancelled after Bristol due to train crew shortages.

On approach to Derby, we were told the train will now terminate here vice Bristol due to train crew shortages. So this additional service ended up working from Leeds to Derby only, where it then terminated. Luckily, there are local XC services from Derby to catch to Birmingham and Cheltenham.

I feel sorry for passengers heading to and from Exeter, Plymouth and Penzance, as these services are often subject to short notice changes and alterations.

 

[Sly Old Fox]

Basically, the railway doesn’t have enough staff and it continues to aggravate the ones they do have.

 

[elephant1]

this is unrelated but how do you post a thread on safari iphone?

 

[godfreycomplex]

this is unrelated but how do you post a thread on safari iphone?

Grey “Post thread” button above the list of existing threads

 

[duffield]

XC have been cancelling and terminating short many services due to staff shortages for several years now. For example, there have been periods when around half of the hourly Cardiff<->Nottingham services have been truncated to run Birmingham<->Nottingham only, sometimes leaving three hour gaps. I've frequently seen Plymouth bound services being truncated at Bristol. The situation seems to improve periodically with full services running but just as I wonder if it's settled down it seems to fall apart again.

Anyhow, this is somewhat anecdotal, so turning to the actual statistics for the last quarter of 2023, the ORR report linked here does show that Cross Country has the worst cancellation record of all operators (if I'm reading it right) at 12.3%, and that it's worse than the previous year's equivalent period by 2%. A new set of statistics covering the first quarter of 2024 should be released on 30th May. Cancellation statistics do appear to include terminating short, suitably weighted.

The following quote is from P17 of this report, which is the Office of Rail Regulation performance stats release for October to December 2023, and it is followed by a graph showing the cancellation score for each train operator:

Figure 4.3 Most operators saw an increase in their Cancellations score Cancellations score by operator, October to December 2023 and percentage point (pp) change compared with October to December 2022 (Table 3123)

It's worth noting that unlike most operators, there are no figures available for the P-coded cancellations for Cross Country (shown on P19, P-coded means removed from the timetable before 2200 on the previous day) . Since Cross Country in my experience have been a frequent user of these "non-cancellation cancellations" it seems likely that their record is somewhat worse than the 12.3% figure mentioned previously.