87015
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TI cancelled code is rostering
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Great Northern and Thameslink May 18 service changes
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bramling
Veteran Member
Whichever way the Thameslink / GTR apologists (who seem rather quiet at the moment) try to spin this as a fact of life, this is simply an unsatisfactory shambles. There is no excuse, this new timetable has been in the planning for many years. Already many of the deliverables have failed to be delivered by this May, now the remaining slimmed-down timetable can’t even be delivered on the day. The weekday service is also rapidly going down the proverbial toilet, the last year has been the worst I can remember
in 30 years.
I would like to see some people or institutions held to account for the way GN has gone from a reliable and dependable service a few years ago to an unreliable unpredictable shambolic mess. The service may as well be Mondays to Fridays only, as the weekend service is so unreliable.
So much for “everything will be just fine”. This just about sums up the arrogant I know best attitude of the Thameslink Programme. They clearly know best today, don’t they?
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Yes, it's unsatisfactory, but it's also an inevitable consequence of finalising one of the biggest timetable changes in history only a few weeks before it goes live. I would guess that there simply hasn't been enough time to finalise the new driver diagrams (an activity that is entirely the responsibility of the TOC, not Network Rail).
T-12 weeks isn't just there for the passengers, it's also there for the TOCs to do all the staff planning they have to do, and clearly they haven't been able to (fully) do it in time.
bramling
Veteran Member
Operating the advertised timetable is the bread and butter of a railway operation.
There is simply no excuse for failing to organise that.
People rely on the weekend service just as much as the morning peak.
The failure to deliver should be seeing resignations.
It certainly shouldn’t be regarded as inevitable.
Joe Paxton
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I'd be interested to read your critique of the new timetable (before it gets really put to the test this coming week), if you'd be up for offering it (positives as well as negatives!).
danthekyle
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What's particularly bad is how quiet Thameslink are being about it. Not a single tweet to alert people, and trains cancelled due to 'an operational incident'.
Clearly they knew yesterday that a lot of services wouldn't be running, but they didn't put a notice out to give people time to change their plans - they repeatedly said a full timetable would be running today.
Clearly they knew yesterday that a lot of services wouldn't be running, but they didn't put a notice out to give people time to change their plans - they repeatedly said a full timetable would be running today.
Utterly ridiculous situation.
Am about to go to London but have a bit of time to spare so thought I'd go Cambridge to East Croydon, just because I 'can' today - even thought I'd put up with a 700 for the novelty. But err... actually I can't, becuase most of them are cancelled.
GA all the way as usual, then.
Think I'll go back to GA for my regular commute for the next few weeks too, even if it involves getting out of bed a little earlier. Fortunately I have that choice, and I think this will be a good time to use it.
Am about to go to London but have a bit of time to spare so thought I'd go Cambridge to East Croydon, just because I 'can' today - even thought I'd put up with a 700 for the novelty. But err... actually I can't, becuase most of them are cancelled.
GA all the way as usual, then.
Think I'll go back to GA for my regular commute for the next few weeks too, even if it involves getting out of bed a little earlier. Fortunately I have that choice, and I think this will be a good time to use it.
Operating the advertised timetable requires first having a timetable, and the operators didn't have a finalised timetable from NR until a few weeks ago.
This whole situation was, sadly, inevitable as soon as the decision to de-risk the introduction of the Thameslink timetable (i.e. reduce the peak service from 20tph to 18tph) was taken with only six months to go. You cannot make such substantial revisions to a timetable at that little notice, at least not when there are so many other changes going on at the same time for Northern and TPE.
It's quite clear that NR simply haven't had the capacity in train planning to deliver a timetable change of this magnitude in the required timescales, and we are all thus paying the price. (And we will continue to pay the price in short-notice changes for engineering works for some months until they get caught up.)
87015
Established Member
Blaming NR is largely a complete red herring for GTR. Much of the delay to a final plan is from the GTR end and NR can only react so quickly. GTR can’t preach about T-12 causing issues when they haven’t been bidding T-18 for years, nearly always carry planning vacancies and that suggests, to me at least, a culture where planning just isn’t viewed as important high up despite the obvious passenger issues this causes.
It looks like the Kings Cross-Kings Lynn services are all calling at Stevenage, Hitchin, Letchworth and Royston in both directions today due to the cancellations of most of the Cambridge semi-fasts and some of the stoppers. I did see mention also of buses running between Letchworth and Cambridge to serve the village stations but don't know how frequent these are.
tsr
Established Member
It’s not just Thameslink / GN having issues with driver availability. Quite a few Southern cancellations as well. Selhurst/Norwood driver depots seem quite badly affected. There were copious rumours that Selhurst would cause issues this weekend, but I’d not heard the same for Norwood.
Why? Nobody is ever accountable no matter how much they screw up so you end up with the shambles in existence today.
bramling
Veteran Member
So Thameslink proposed something that was at best ambitious and at worst completely undeliverable (which many of us suspected). Then the industry wake-up happens and a decision to abandon many of the key deliverables comes, too late, and not helped by the Northern electrification issues occurring at the same time.
Heads should roll for this mess.
The 1322 off CBG was advertised as such. On the one hand, as the next semi-fast and all shacks were both cancelled, that’s probably as good as they can do. Was only 8-car though (wasn’t this 12 before the timetable change?) so I can imagine it was going to be a little cosy by KGX.
(I abandoned this at CBG and got the LST service instead - slower but far more comfortable).
I overheard someone asking the platform staff at Cambridge how to get to the villages given the next train was cancelled. The helpful reply was ‘There will be a train, or a bus, or a taxi, don’t know which yet’ (!)
I think we know now why they haven’t bothered to upload weekend timetables to the railplan site...
Class 466
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I’ve passed this on to get RTT to start showing it as that - it has nothing to do with planning!
tsr
Established Member
Critiquing the whole timetable is something I am barely qualified to offer and I shall provide a reason for that: everyone has their own fields of specialty and I reckon it's very likely that no single person will know all the details about why every choice has been made. Not even the big bosses at the very top! The GTR network is so big and cumbersome that applying the Thameslink timetable recast over many years is like getting uncooked spaghetti, making it into a meal and then expecting it to all fall back neatly into the jar, but in a completely different order.
What we will continue to see over the next few days and possibly weeks/months are teething problems and very protracted ones, but a lot of the principles of the new timetable are sound enough and should have been done many years ago. These include things like reducing stock splits/attaches (and running long fixed-formations on Thameslink, which has its pros and cons, but ultimately means the likes of FCC 4 coach 319s are a thing of the past!), increasing dwell times at stations, running a timetable which broadly includes the same pattern of routes to the same groups of stations running through the day or for a whole peak... there are good principles but there are also things which will confuse.
So long as everyone miraculously avoids some sort of major headache such as a loss of signalling on the Brighton Mainline, or a trespasser going walkies at somewhere especially inconvenient at 0745 on Tuesday, or a big puddle in a tunnel, I think the biggest problems will be with driver resourcing and - until everything has been shuffled into position - train positioning as well. The train positioning can really only get better at a reasonable rate, provided you have drivers for the empties - but getting drivers at all is something which has unfortunately sent everyone into panic mode in the last few weeks, so far as I can tell. Opening/closing whole driver depots and rewriting rosters are not casual activities and would usually be done over a much more lengthy basis, but merging them with new infrastructure and brand-new routes is going to mean cancellations if everything is not tip-top perfect.
I have mentioned the Redhill issue in direct response to another poster - the choices behind the destinations offered and the consistency/usability of services there is clearly a problem, and there will be others like it. There are also places where this once-in-a-generation (theoretically...!) opportunity has been completely overlooked. The Oxted lines, for example, retain almost all of the vulnerabilities they used to, with tiny timing tweaks - fast trains following stoppers, stock having to be positioned "just in time" to strengthen the frequency of electric London Bridge services during the peak, etc. However, there are some Southern routes which do stand to benefit. There is clearly a lot more thought than meets the eye when it comes to the Marshlink / East Coastway timetable, and I will be genuinely sympathetic to the planners if their efforts here fail, because they've tried hard and it would be such a shame if they do... and if the new services do work, they deserve to be recognised for it.
When it comes to the Brighton Mainline, linking the Victoria route with more stations would have been ideal, but I think there are other opportunities which people are blinkered against looking for, because "Victoria, Victoria, Victoria" has been the priority for such a lot of trains for so long. Under the new timetable, consider boarding an empty train (at origin) taking you to London Bridge, then a wander down the new concourse there to get to a train to Waterloo East, and going to work from there - well, when everything settles down, it could just balance a lot of the pressure between Clapham Junction (for SWR to Waterloo) and London Bridge (for Waterloo East), though it's a very tough gamble to play out. The TL project may end up balancing out stuff which it wasn't designed to help with, and people may in turn also not realise a lot of things - people still get confused between Kings Cross and St Pancras, and a lack of local knowledge means they don't know they are 2 minutes' walk from each other - things like this will only be bigger sticking points under the new TT.
The Metro routes will be undergoing such a dramatic reshuffle that a lot of people will be reacquainted with long-lost routes, but in equal measure, some journeys will become harder. A lot of people from East Croydon will find themselves changing at places like Streatham Common and waiting to get to Balham, because Tulse Hill isn't really any good as a new destination... and yet a lot of people will like the opportunity to go from East Dulwich to Gatwick Airport with one change, all day (for example, to take just one). Running half-way down the Tattenham Corner branch to Coulsdon Town is probably a good idea, but the extra stops at the likes of Carshalton will probably end up skipped if there's a need to claw back time, just like Ashtead, Ewell East and Cheam already find. The Guildford services are struggling on but it's easy to see how those might be culled. Horsham-Dorking and onwards still has unrealised potential. Longer WLL trains will be good, but let's hold on to see how reliably the stock performs - the 4 coach Dual Voltage 377s may be running in pairs, but they're also only getting older.
A lot of people have touched on the opportunities of Cambridge-Brighton and I do think it will probably prove to be popular with Gatwick travellers, or those wanting to access "that bit" of eastern Central London. The calling pattern is quite slick, it seems, but I think a handful more stops might be even better. More publicity for the Central Line Tube stations which "basically" interchange with City Thameslink could be good. If Crossrail / Elizabeth Line stuff proves reliable, Farringdon will be crazy busy. With so many airport travellers, it could be a bit of a deja vu experience if you have just travelled from an airport station.
Peterborough-Horsham is a bit of an odd one because of the inherent weirdness of two local-ish stopping services at each end combined with a fast-ish run in the middle. There are all sorts of risks for both the railway and passengers: dwell times at Gatwick (confusion with all manner of other routes is possible, perhaps less so than the clearly "mainline" Cambridge services); skip stopping when there are delays to be made up; interesting characters at the south end of the route through the estates of Crawley and Horsham; level crossings and complex junctions for which the train may be regulated a million different ways when it serves so many places; you name it!
Some of the Kent Thameslink routes will clearly be inconvenient for some people wanting faster trains and yet in some ways it feels like they are getting another Crossrail, just one which runs north/south across London. It may be for the greater good that such services do call at all shacks. Limiting some services to terminating at stations within or just outside the main London area, such as Kentish Town or even Luton to the north, means they will definitely feel like a local service to get into or out of London instead of a cross-regional service, I think.
With the Wimbledon/Sutton loop, I am still dismayed that we are not seeing a clean break when it comes to the use of junctions. Users around that area should have been pushing for better connections between Sutton and Horsham / the South Coast in one direction, and towards Clapham Junction and the WCML in the north. You could then have had a local service to Blackfriars to connect with services via St Pancras to the MML. A lot of the time this would have resulted in a web of level interchanges and even same-platform interchanges, providing a really good local link between Horsham, Epsom, Sutton, Wimbledon and then both sides of central London towards a myriad of destinations further north.
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class387
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Why not just send the passenger back south?
Thought I'd wander over and see the first day's workings at SNO. Didn't bode well when the 1035 up was 14 late and 1107 up cancelled, then descended into a complete ****show with no up services between 1137 and 1507, and similar in the down. Looks like there are back to back cancellations in the evening as well. National Rail Enquiries rather irritatingly doesn't list it under major disruption.
I've just been down to London for the day from Bedford - and whilst the main Bedford-Brighton line was generally OK, I'd say when I checked at St Pancras both when I arived at around 9am and departed at about 3pm, at least 3/4 of the Cambridge/Peterborough services due to run through the Canal Tunnels were cancelled. Entirely anecdotal, and to be taken with a huge pinch of salt, but some off duty GTR staff were sharing the declassified First section with me on the way down, and there was lots of talk of driver shortages which they reckoned could last a month or more (and affect weekday services too) - not a good start for the new timetable if this is true!
On an entirely unrelated note - as the timetable change is today and we've now essentially got two active threads discussing the same issue, I'm going to close this one and use the recently created one in NR General for ongoing discussion of the TL timetable changes. Please continue discussion in this thread.
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