Were any London Underground operations affected by this? I guess Overground was affected due to the power cut at Clapham Jct.
The Victoria Line was completely suspended for quite some time!
The Tube was very badly affected in places. At one point the situation on the Victoria Line was looking akin to what happened to Thameslink... just underground!
pretty simple.
30 minutes to (incorrectly) perform boot up sequence.
another 6 1/2 hours trying to diagnose what went wrong
That’s not at all what happened.
I suspect 313s rule on the Moorgate route this weekend.
It does concern me how the 700s will perform in the winter when ice causes chaos on the overhead. I hope they are not going to be sitting down for hours if we get cold mornings.
They’re good in the winter, except the saloon heating, which can be abysmally unreliable.
Planned evacuation. But in any event nothing was running, so even if it had been ‘self evacuated’, it would have been less of a problem than normal.
At least one uncontrolled evacuation occurred in the area. Can’t confirm if it was the train pictured, but I strongly suspect it was. At least two other trains had major disorder reported onboard.
Were the 387s OK? I'm on one now and I think it's short formed (4 not 8) and no WiFi and it's whistling a bit like a door hasn't shut tight but that might just be the forecast high winds arriving early.
The whistling is probably a dodgy rubber door seal or one of the emergency hopper windows not being locked shut properly.
London North Western wasn't accepting any tickets so if you live in St Albans for example, you were prevented by using the TOC to travel from London to St Albans via Watford Junction.
Not sure what kind of service they had but I'm sure they always accepted TL in the past?
When LM was a GoVia company, ticket acceptance was easy. Now that they are Abellio, it is done less often.
However I know for a fact that LNW did accept TL tickets, as I know several people who went that way no problem (and had tickets checked).
Yes, LNR were accepting TL tickets, though I seem to recall that this took a while to get on the website.
It is not done less often because it’s now an Abellio TOC. There is no real link there. GTR ask for LNR to accept their tickets regularly, and it’s virtually never refused. Only the long distance operators (LNER and VTWC) tend to occasionally refuse to accept GTR tickets, but that’s changing, since LNER have been through a bit of a bad patch and had to ask for a lot of help themselves.
Did the service normalise from noon like GTR said or are trains and crews still out of position leading to cancellations?
Thameslink service recovery was astonishingly good. Virtually the whole service startup was flawless after about 0500 on Saturday, with just a few Sutton/Wimbledon cancellations to start with.
The only major issue for much of the day was a 20mph speed restriction through Clayton Tunnel - even the major trespass issue at Wimbledon was cleared up quickly.
I am told that most of the controllers worked 16 hour shifts on Friday/Saturday night in order to pull it off... hats off to them (HM Government have sent thanks...)
Shed load of cancellations on the GN side tonight. No idea if they’re related to last night’s shenanigans. I suspect not as this is quite normal at weekends for GTR, despite the largest driver recruitment campaign in railway history over the last 5 years.
It’s largely down to inflexible driver contracts and rostering. Although some drivers had to book on later today after finishing later last night.