superkev
Established Member
The northern website give details short (and long) formed trains but as far as I can see not how many carriages there supposed to be.
K
K
To me it seems in a par with say announcing trains are late or early but not publishing a timetable as to when they are on time.
K
That's what I was trying to say.Surely it's obvious what the OP is saying?
If TOCs go to the effort of highlighting when a train is short formed, why do they not also provide information of what the diagrammed formations are in the first place?
(Good question btw)
To me it seems in a par with say announcing trains are late or early but not publishing a timetable as to when they are on time.
K
Surely it's obvious what the OP is saying?
If TOCs go to the effort of highlighting when a train is short formed, why do they not also provide information of what the diagrammed formations are in the first place?
(Good question btw)
The northern website give details short (and long) formed trains but as far as I can see not how many carriages there supposed to be.
K
Understand now. GWR and ATW (if the latter bother to post) show them on Journey Check but do not highlight if actually short formed on Departure Boards, just quoting the number of carriages.
Depends on how they are described.
"This train is 2 coaches short today." is equivalent to saying "This train is 5 minutes late today."
"This train is 2 coaches short today. It is booked 10 coaches." is equivalent to saying "This train is 5 minutes late. It is booked to depart at 19:00."
"This train is formed of only 8 coaches today." is equivalent to saying "This train is expected to depart at 19:05 today."
The only possible use I can think of in the latter case (which AIUI is how Northern normally describe short-formations on their website) of the normal booked formation is to potentially gauge how busy a train is likely to be, but train lengths are determined by a number of factors not necessarily all directly related to how busy the train is expected to be. Some busy trains will be formed of 2-car and some 4-cars may be much less busy due to one of the unit being mainly for stock movement. Local knowledge will be far more useful in those cases.
A train short-formed as a 2-car is likely to be very busy in the peaks regardless. A 4-car depending on the geographical location may be busy and a 6-car will almost certainly have spare room on most Northern routes even in the peak.
If you are desperate to find out about booked formation, twitter desk is there to help.
That said it is not a difficult one to implement, but it is hardly a big deal if not done.
GWR certainly do.
Is there a link which shows diagramed no of coaches?GWR certainly do.
GW CIS takes the number of coaches directly out of Integrale (the stock allocation software) - unfortunately either the feed or the CIS software is somewhat dim-witted, so if the number of coaches changes enroute, CIS can't work out what to display so shows nothing.
Its the CIS software I believe, the CIS system shows the same messages for each service at every station. Therefore it can't show different things before and after the attachment or detachment. Obviously this keeps the information consistent between stations, but as these messages are used to show formation it dosen't quite work when the formation changes en-route.
GWR could do with taking the formation out of the messages and putting it after the TOC, that is what other TOCs do to get around this I think.
GWR could do with taking the formation out of the messages
No, you can put different information at different stations for the same train. It's the auto-population of the number of coaches field that is dim-witted, and the consequent effect it has on block edits that populate the NTI Line 1 Comment with "Formed of X Coaches". The number of services which divide enroute make such manual alterations impractical, and the frequency with which such trains are short formed etc make doing it as a block edit impractical as well.
Before the upgrade to Integrale the system could interpret the data coming out of Genius just fine, and would even correctly announce that the train divided enroute with X carriages to Y and Z beyond.
I'm not sure what you mean by putting the info after the TOC - there is no facility to change the ordering of information within announcements within ATOS LICC, at least not at an operator level. Even then it wouldn't help, the issue is one of translation: the CIS system cannot interpret Integrale's way of putting out formation changes, and so removes all formation when it doesn't understand the data it is getting to prevent it showing incorrect information. Again, it worked fine with Genius so I suspect the issue is with Integrale, but I don't know for certain - it wouldn't surprise me if LICC was at fault.
Source - I worked on GWR CIS before my present role with the company.
It doesn't tell you when the stock is locked out of use. So you get a 7 or 8 car lash up of 165s and 166s with only the rear set in use.
Interesting stuff! Thanks for that!
Did you work at GWR before they got the new CIS system for all stations? Was the old HSS system any better in your opinion? (I know FGW didn't use the formations very often, if at all, back then).
I was referring to what London Midland do, where the formation is displayed like 'A London Midland service formed of 4 coaches', scrolling directly after the calling pattern, but given what you have said now it is possible they use a different source to what GWR use.
Does the CIS know through its sources when units are locked out of use then, Integrale or whatever?