Really? There's 480 minutes in 8 hours. Not including mandatory breaks. Nigh on impossible to receive that many phone calls and still function.
Yes, really. Calls just go unanswered and you prioritise (and barely function!).
Information flow as ever is always a problem. Too much, too little, too late, etc.
(so often a contributory factor in incidents too)
So the question is how to make the work easier and achieve the same or better outcomes.
But 500 calls per shift is an awful number, just awful. Even half that would be awful.
Is there no way that the calls could be replaced with some other system (data interchange or messaging or something)
or handled via a telephone clerk?
This sort of thing has been trialled. But normally the "telephone clerk" doesn't have the knowledge, experience or ability to deal with the problem at hand so just becomes a glorified message taker for the controller making the decision in the first place which puts you at square one.
How do you know the delay wasn't mitigated from a 30L departure to the 15L one ?
There is also a whole plethora of things happening inside the control room and across the network. I've had many phone calls from Signaller/Control where I've had to wind my neck in. Just a quick sample. Signaller: Sorry I wasn't answering, your colleague in front just passed the signal. Control: Sorry, Com (obviously not real name), we were just dealing with the fatality at [redacted], Control: Can I call you back, [name redacted] just dropped a *clanger, and they are just calling in.
There is so much going on across the network, local area, depot, staff member, that often, you just aren't the priority at that moment in time. Sometimes they are trying desperately to organise alternate routes, relief crew, etc. You just need to hold fire before the wrong decision gets made.
*insert proverbial
Very true. Whilst the one person making the inbound call might have a legitimate and important query about the next depature from their station, or is a crew member working out if their train is running, there's could be a dozen people wanting the same information or have similar but differing queries/needs.
From the interesting feedback it is apparent how much pressure control staff are under in disruption. When there is an option of making a decision quickly, be it optimal or to an extent sub optimal, it will presumably have the potential to alleviate the pressure on "the other side of the coin" i.e. the front line staff endeavouring to assuage the increasingly frustrated flesh and blood passengers/customers in person particularly in situations where the front line staff themselves are in a state of being no better informed than the pax. And yes, I can see that this is a difficult and delicate balancing act.
Information flows are very important. The controller making the decision isn't always the one actually broadcasting the decision expect to those immediately in the know (normally the driver, and signaller manager/supervisor / train running controller). They are reliant on that information being disemminated via various channels (CIS / secondary phone calls / messaging systems) which all trickle down. It is not something the railway has ever got brilliantly right and only gets harder as the service has intensified over decades. I think it's almost impossible to everything 100% correct, 100% of the time, especially when an incident is in its early stages.
Also nobody has a crystal ball. Doing A, B, C might seem best but give you a new issue at D which was hard to envisage an hour earlier. And sometimes there are sometimes where you only have one or two options given the immediate circumstances and it is known this will cause more problems down the line.
A difficulty being that, with some staff, twiddling their thumbs starts being seen as their right, and are affronted when they have to step up to the plate at times of stress, negating the expense of having them there in the first place.
Depends what the situation is. Sometimes when all trains are at a stand on a significant portion or even all of a controller's route, you just have to wait it out. Sure you can consider plans and alterations (i.e shuttle services) but you don't necessary know when the lines will be reopened.
An incident earlier this week was interesting.
On Tuesday I was on the 17.23 from Waterloo to Exeter. Non-stop to Basingstoke. My destination was Whitchurch. Train was a class 159 plus a class 158. Before we left, the guard apologised that the lighting wasn't working in carriage no. 2. Somewhere before Woking he announced that he'd just been informed that the train would be terminating at Salisbury because of a defect. Passengers would have to wait there for an hour for the next train onwards. I assumed the defect was the lack of lighting in carriage 2. The train was running at line speed and there didn't appear to be any problem with accelerating and keeping moving. I thought passengers would be happy to sit in the dark west of Salisbury, or move into another carriage - where by then there would probably be space - rather than have to wait an hour. It seemed unlikely there was a staffing problem as there were staff already on the train. Surely, I thought, there must be another unit in Salisbury depot that could replace our faulty one.
Near Farnborough the guard announced that another unit had been found and would be waiting at Salisbury to take passengers forward. They would, however, need to change from the train they were in to the new one. There were lots of sighs of relief.
This incident seems to me to illustrate the sort of difficulty that controllers face. Should they have told the guard to announce the termination at Salisbury and the consequent delay, and lead to many passengers phoning their home to ask someone to drive there to pick them up? Or should they have waited till they could advise the guard that an alternative unit had been found? Passengers like to know about a problem as early as possible. Perhaps the best course of action would have been to advise passengers that the train would terminate at Salisbury and that a replacement unit was being sought; and that the guard would advise passengers once it had been arranged, or what to do if one could not be found. But as it was necessary to get arrangements under way for a replacement unit as quickly as possible, and there may have been other issues going on as well, I can understand why the controllers handled it the way they did.
And this is overall a relatively minor incident for a controller to handle - a one-off, termination short of destination. People will endeavour to get things back as booked, but sometimes there are no options, and sometimes the situation unfolds mid-incident (e.g. checking with fleet a unit is available, it is fit for service, a driver can bring it off the depot / swap the unit, identify maintenance requirements end of day etc.) and things take time.
Overall, it would be great to have say double the amount of controllers, but if 90% of the time they are there not doing anything, people will start to question the cost of it all. Bad rail managers often see controllers sitting around chatting and go "Why are we paying all these people so much?!" whereas good rail managers go "ah, railway is running well for our passengers today then!".
It's definitely a hard job, and it is why the roles are generally some of the higher paid in most companies requiring a lot of different skillsets, experiences and knowledge. This is not to say there are not good and bad staff, like you'll see anywhere and one controller dealing with disruption might get a different result to another controller. I guarantee you that things are more complex than they seem - even those who work intensively within the railway don't have a full appreciation of it until they see a control room in full disruption!
