Scotrail Franchise - Abellio

[Mordac]

Could somebody please explain the term "post truth"?

I've heard of post-modernism, post-feminism, post-Marxism, etc, but have never heard of post truth.

Is "post truth" another form of corporate bollocks speak nowadays, similar to "pushing an envelope"?

It's a new meme being pushed by the left to explain away their inability to win elections. You can safely ignore it, much like the political slurs of the past, it means whatever its speak wants it to mean at any given time.

 

[takno]

Sorry if this is the wrong thread to post this question. I have a friend who uses this company on the Milngaive line. They sit near the drivers cab and they can sometimes hear an announcement in the cab that is something similar to:

"In two minutes - 'something here'

Does anyone know what the full announcement is and what's the purpose of it? It's not an announcement the whole train can hear apparently but only when sat near the drivers cab. I believe the trains are Class 334.

Sounds like it could be a Driver Advisory System - something that sits in the cab and tells the driver how fast to drive to avoid having to slow down at signals and reminds them when to stop etc.

 

[47271]

It's a new meme being pushed by the left to explain away their inability to win elections. You can safely ignore it, much like the political slurs of the past, it means whatever its speak wants it to mean at any given time.

I would totally agree with you, if only something as interesting as an election had been happening in Scotland this autumn.

Up here the most exciting thing we can find to hitch this piece of political jargon to right now is a broken down train in Princes Street Gardens.

 

[DriverXYD]

Sorry if this is the wrong thread to post this question. I have a friend who uses this company on the Milngaive line.
They sit near the drivers cab and they can sometimes hear an announcement in the cab that is something similar to:

its the DAS system, it makes an announcement to the driver to let him know he's approaching a booked stop & reminds the driver of the trains length just in case he's forgot

as for the DAS, they've started to fit them to the older 318's & 320's, its also got a few new features added to it like having the option to configure the trains length
up to 12 cars instead of the current 6 car limit, its also got a nifty new trick that estimates your precise arrival time at a station to the second.

 

[Highland37]

I would totally agree with you, if only something as interesting as an election had been happening in Scotland this autumn.

Up here the most exciting thing we can find to hitch this piece of political jargon to right now is a broken down train in Princes Street Gardens.

Or more likely that is what the BBC reports. Scotland is a country that voted to be a region. No point in expecting national standards when the population doesn't want to be an equal among nations. We need to recognise that Scotland is a region and confirmed that status just two years ago.

The media is just and extension of the very parochial outlook Scotland has.

 

[amcluesent]

Can someone precis the whole Scotrail adventure please?

We'd already had :

- The 'big man' incident
- the profiteering by a nationalist from the Glasgow Airport rail link compulsory purchase and resale
- the dire service on the Borders railway
- last minute wrangling that nearly stopped the Flying Scotsman tour
- The strikes over increasing DOO services around Glasgow
- Disruption from Queen Street high level closure
- Chronic overcrowding and stops being missed

The tipping point was the train breakdown blocking all 4 lines at Haymarket and Humza using that incident to grandstand about renationalisation rather than show any effort on getting a grip, although he did acknowledge he knew nothing about transport as we've seen.

 

[Highland37]

We have also had,

- Ordering and new contract for the brand new stock for the Caledonian Sleepers
- New stock ordered, and being delivered, for the newly electrified lines
- Newly electrified lines, more than at any previous point in any political make up of the Scottish Parliament
- More frequent trains
- New Borders Railway
- British nationalist representatives (Tories and Labours etc) trying to make hay out of things that were out of the control of the Government
- cost over runs on the Inverness - Aberdeen project as Network Rail seems to be unable to forecast costs in any accurate way
- Queen Street works to prepare the station for electrification
- The same level of over crowding that previously existed
- Many more trains on the Mallaig line, run by WCR
- Continual effors by others to make out everything is bad and it's all the fault of one man, from the comfort of nice internet names
- And best of all, more people using the railway.

 

[ld0595]

- Disruption from Queen Street high level closure

That's hardly Scotrails or anyone's fault though - Queen street had to be closed for track renewal at some point anyway. I think (and I'm sure many others would agree) that the disruption was handled exceptionally well during the closure.

 

[Carntyne]

We'd already had :

- The 'big man' incident
- the profiteering by a nationalist from the Glasgow Airport rail link compulsory purchase and resale
- the dire service on the Borders railway due
- last minute wrangling that nearly stopped the Flying Scotsman tour
- The strikes over increasing DOO services around Glasgow
- Disruption from Queen Street high level closure
- Chronic overcrowding and stops being missed

The tipping point was the train breakdown blocking all 4 lines at Haymarket and Humza using that incident to grandstand about renationalisation rather than show any effort on getting a grip, although he did acknowledge he knew nothing about transport as we've seen.

'dire service on the Borders railway'

Someone's buying into the media chaos.

Big man incident was about 3 years ago as well.

Chronic overcrowding? Bit much. Trains busy at peak time? Who knew?

Services have always been expressed when they're running late, absolutely nothing new about it at all.

 

[amcluesent]

Rail fare freeze demand after fresh delays

More than 60 trains a day were cancelled or significantly late inside a month, the latest official figures have shown.

The figures are a fresh headache for transport minister Humza Yousaf who has been under pressure to turn around performance under Dutch operator Abellio.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/transport/rail-fare-freeze-demand-after-fresh-delays-1-4315651

 

[Carntyne]

60 trains out of 2000 odd a day seems OK to me to be honest.

 

[47271]

Rail fare freeze demand after fresh delays


http://www.scotsman.com/news/transport/rail-fare-freeze-demand-after-fresh-delays-1-4315651

Can you (or The Scotsman, or Neil Bibby) post a link to the source data please, it might be me being thick, but try as I might I can't find this new information on orr.gov.uk?

 

[Goldfish62]

It's a new meme being pushed by the left to explain away their inability to win elections. You can safely ignore it, much like the political slurs of the past, it means whatever its speak wants it to mean at any given time.

The Wikipedia definition makes much more sense.

 

[Highland37]

Rail fare freeze demand after fresh delays


http://www.scotsman.com/news/transport/rail-fare-freeze-demand-after-fresh-delays-1-4315651

So you are saying that 97% of trains ran on time and were not cancelled? Well done Humza I say. Thanks for bringing such excellent performance to our attention. It's the ultimate in parochial SNPbad mentality to see this as a huge problem.

The Daily Fail and Scotchman aren't worth the paper they are written on. The DF is even quoting 65 now.

 

[380101]

So you are saying that 97% of trains ran on time and were not cancelled? Well done Humza I say. Thanks for bringing such excellent performance to our attention. It's the ultimate in parochial SNPbad mentality to see this as a huge problem.

The Daily Fail and Scotchman aren't worth the paper they are written on. The DF is even quoting 65 now.

doesn't look as good "crowing" about how well they are actually performing as it doesn't sell newspapers or make a good political soundbite.

If they stopped holding ScotRail services on a daily basis to allow late running Virgin, XC and TPE to either depart or arrive then at least half of all delays would be no more! Most Virgin trains will easily make up 2 or 3 minutes, unlike the bulk of Scotrail services which are so tight to try and achieve more and more services at each timetable change.

 

[najaB]

It's a new meme being pushed by the left to explain away their inability to win elections. You can safely ignore it, much like the political slurs of the past, it means whatever its speak wants it to mean at any given time.

No. It's a commentary on the rise of 'social media as a news source' phenomenon which has resulted in the demise of facts and the demonisation of experts.

There was a recent poll conducted in the USA which showed that 67% of people who voted for Trump believe that unemployment has risen under Obama, that the stock market was down, that the trade deficit was up, etc. and voted for Trump because he promised to stop the rot. The only problem is that none of those things are actually true.

Here's a link to a video where this is explained and another one to a fact check site. However, in the post truth world people won't click on either link because the facts conflict with what they already know.

I'm not particularly left wing (I'd describe myself as centre-right) but post truth scare me.

 

[Mordac]

No. It's a commentary on the rise of 'social media as a news source' phenomenon which has resulted in the demise of facts and the demonisation of experts.

There was a recent poll conducted in the USA which showed that 67% of people who voted for Trump believe that unemployment has risen under Obama, that the stock market was down, that the trade deficit was up, etc. and voted for Trump because he promised to stop the rot. The only problem is that none of those things are actually true.

Here's a link to a video where this is explained and another one to a fact check site. However, in the post truth world people won't click on either link because the facts conflict with what they already know.

I'm not particularly left wing (I'd describe myself as centre-right) but post truth scare me.

So politicians tell porkies. This is not news to me or anyone else who knows anything about politics. It's the fact that this is being presented as: 1) a new phenomenon, and 2) somehow exclusive to the right that makes it a completely meaningless novelty term.

 

[Realfish]

No. It's a commentary on the rise of 'social media as a news source' phenomenon which has resulted in the demise of facts and the demonisation of experts.

The public are right to treat expert testimony with suspicion. The BBC have a growing habit of smuggling activists onto their programmes as 'independent experts' (who will echo their own opinions) - evidenced by serving up regular appearances of our old friend Woolmar, without ever mentioning his political affiliations.

 

[najaB]

So politicians tell porkies. This is not news to me or anyone else who knows anything about politics.

Politicians have been telling porkies for as long as there has been politics. What has changed is the ways that they are reported and the way that news content is created - traditional media have always tried to ensure that the information they present is at least true (even if presented in a biased way) - new media has no such compulsion.

Many 'news' sources make no apologies about putting out content that they know has no factual basis whatsoever.

Consumption of news has changed entirely as well. Traditional media operated in a broadcast environment - they had no way to track what stories you showed an interest in and so needed to at least try to appeal to all sides. New media uses tracking stats to ensure that you get fed a diet of stories that match your interests. The result of which is that people have lost the ability to see any side other than their own.

This very thread is an example of that - the term 'post truth ' is dismissed as "a new meme being pushed by the left" rather than acknowledging that there is a problem with increasing numbers of people not being able to critically analyse the information they are presented with regardless of political affiliation.

You may or may not be familiar with 'Pizzagate' - it's a story being pushed by right-wing media that claims that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizzeria in DC. The only issue with this story is that there isn't a single shed of actual evidence to support the accusations (the pizzeria doesn't even have a basement!). On Saturday before last someone went there armed with an assault rifle to 'investigate' what was going on and shots got fired. Fake news has the potential to get people killed.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

The public are right to treat expert testimony with suspicion.

Increasingly though, they don't have the ability.

 

[Mordac]

Politicians have been telling porkies for as long as there has been politics. What has changed is the ways that they are reported and the way that news content is created - traditional media have always tried to ensure that the information they present is at least true (even if presented in a biased way) - new media has no such compulsion.

Many 'news' sources make no apologies about putting out content that they know has no factual basis whatsoever.

Consumption of news has changed entirely as well. Traditional media operated in a broadcast environment - they had no way to track what stories you showed an interest in and so needed to at least try to appeal to all sides. New media uses tracking stats to ensure that you get fed a diet of stories that match your interests. The result of which is that people have lost the ability to see any side other than their own.

This very thread is an example of that - the term 'post truth ' is dismissed as "a new meme being pushed by the left" rather than acknowledging that there is a problem with increasing numbers of people not being able to critically analyse the information they are presented with regardless of political affiliation.

You may or may not be familiar with 'Pizzagate' - it's a story being pushed by right-wing media that claims that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizzeria in DC. The only issue with this story is that there isn't a single shed of actual evidence to support the accusations (the pizzeria doesn't even have a basement!). On Saturday before last someone went there armed with an assault rifle to 'investigate' what was going on and shots got fired. Fake news has the potential to get people killed.

So the whole concept is completely falsifiable. If you disagree with its correctness, you're part of the 'post-truth' politics yourself.

This just goes back to a very old trope which is that the people who disagree with you are deluded, or suffering from 'false consciousness,' or being misinformed, and if only they got the right information, they would see the light and we'd all live in a left-wing hippy dippy utopia.

I'm someone who probably would be labelled as an 'expert': I'm an academic economist. There's an old saying that an economist is a man who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing. This is commonly stated as a criticism of my profession, but at its core is a valuable truth: science, be that economic science of any other, can inform you of the constrains placed upon your action (so economics can say that doing x will have costs of y, and even this is often subject to significant uncertainty), but it cannot tell you whether y is a price worth paying. That depends on one's values, and those are not subject to expert determination! In a democracy, we've decided that the way to solve conflicting value claims regarding government action is through the ballot box. And political discourse can aim to persuade people to change their values, but I would argue, is fundamentally dishonest if it suggests that expert determinations have made these obsolete or irrelevant, especially when experts routinely smuggle in their political commitments into their "expert" testimony, as Realfish alluded to.

 

[najaB]

So the whole concept is completely falsifiable. If you disagree with its correctness, you're part of the 'post-truth' politics yourself.

As I stated earlier (and posted a link to) recent polling shows (among other things) that some 40% of people surveyed who voted for Trump honestly believe that the Dow Jones has fallen during Obama's time in office when it has actually more than doubled.

I don't care what term you use for this - you can call it post-truth or not - but when that high a percentage of people believe something to be true when it isn't, and reject anyone who presents actual, verifiable figures as a shill for 'mainstream media' or 'the establishment', then society has a problem.

Edit: Just wanted to add - this isn't a partisan issue, I'm sure there are people on the left who equally believe things that aren't true. Anyway, this probably isn't the best thread for these discussions so I'll stop now.

 

[NotATrainspott]

doesn't look as good "crowing" about how well they are actually performing as it doesn't sell newspapers or make a good political soundbite.

If they stopped holding ScotRail services on a daily basis to allow late running Virgin, XC and TPE to either depart or arrive then at least half of all delays would be no more! Most Virgin trains will easily make up 2 or 3 minutes, unlike the bulk of Scotrail services which are so tight to try and achieve more and more services at each timetable change.

However, a Virgin train late in Glasgow may well have a cascading effect all across the WCML and related lines. The only way to avoid this is to have copious amounts of padding in the timetable, and without expensive infrastructure changes the only way to do this is to extend journey times, which no one would like.

 

[380101]

However, a Virgin train late in Glasgow may well have a cascading effect all across the WCML and related lines. The only way to avoid this is to have copious amounts of padding in the timetable, and without expensive infrastructure changes the only way to do this is to extend journey times, which no one would like.

it mostly late arriving Intercity services that cause the problems in Central and Waverly. Most of them have a decent amount of turn around time so waiting an extra 2 or 3 minutes shouldn't affect them too much or affect services behind them too much either. Allowing the intercity to run does however result in plenty of delayed Scotrail services and they definitely have a knock on affect to alot of other services.

 

[me123]

However, a Virgin train late in Glasgow may well have a cascading effect all across the WCML and related lines. The only way to avoid this is to have copious amounts of padding in the timetable, and without expensive infrastructure changes the only way to do this is to extend journey times, which no one would like.

Delaying a local Scotrail train can have exactly the same effect. Edinburgh-Helensburgh trains run pretty much coast to coast, and interact with the bottlenecks at Haymarket and Partick (for example). So a delay to one of those trains can have significant knock-on effects throughout the Central Belt and beyond.

 

[amcluesent]

ScotRail has admitted breaking a pledge that its busiest rush-hour trains will not miss station stops.

ScotRail stressed that missing out stops was not designed to get trains to their destinations on time.

Managing director Phil Verster said it was purely to reduce knock-on delays to other trains using the same routes by avoiding them also being held up behind a late-running service.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/transp...missing-out-stations-despite-pledge-1-4315175

 

[XC90]

ScotRail has admitted breaking a pledge that its busiest rush-hour trains will not miss station stops.


http://www.scotsman.com/news/transp...missing-out-stations-despite-pledge-1-4315175

Is anyone else sick of the Scotsman, Sunday Mail, Neil Bibby, Kezia Dugdale, etc constantly knocking ScotRail? One of the better TOC's in the UK and all they do is criticise. So many services on old infrastructure, they should focus on Network Rail instead of demoralising Scotrail staff who work bloody hard to provide a service. Kilwinning labour MP on twitter today having a go at Scotrail for signalling problems - couldn't make it up!

 

[47271]

Is anyone else sick of the Scotsman, Sunday Mail, Neil Bibby, Kezia Dugdale, etc constantly knocking ScotRail? One of the better TOC's in the UK and all they do is criticise. So many services on old infrastructure, they should focus on Network Rail instead of demoralising Scotrail staff who work bloody hard to provide a service. Kilwinning labour MP on twitter today having a go at Scotrail for signalling problems - couldn't make it up!

Yes, we're all sick of it, the whole of Scotland's sick of no hopers criticising the broadly competent, that's generally what this thread has been saying for the past month.

Good Point ploughs on regardless though, God love their dedication to the cause. [emoji38]

 

[Clansman]

Yes, we're all sick of it, the whole of Scotland's sick of no hopers criticising the broadly competent, that's generally what this thread has been saying for the past month.

Good Point ploughs on regardless though, God love their dedication to the cause. [emoji38]

This.

What I'm sick of most is how people are quick to point fingers and exorcise political bias in a situation of which, let's face it, would happen regardless of which party is in charge. People need to get their facts right in terms of who they are placing responsibility on, such as blaming Scotrail for infrastructural failures of which the responsibility lies with Network Rail, or blaming Scotrail and the Scottish Government for the shortage of DMUs when;

1. there is a UK wide shortage of them

2. there is a mass order of EMUs which will add double the capacity in the next few months and years

...both of which take time to rectify, and we are nearing the time when years of planning will pay off and take effect.

I'm not saying Abellio are doing a great job at the moment (or any political party for that matter), but for god sake some people need to get a grip and realise that change takes time and no amount of playing the blame game or exercising political bias is going to make the situation any easier for anyone in terms of moving forward.

 

[Mordac]

This.

What I'm sick of most is how people are quick to point fingers and exorcise political bias in a situation of which, let's face it, would happen regardless of which party is in charge. People need to get their facts right in terms of who they are placing responsibility on, such as blaming Scotrail for infrastructural failures of which the responsibility lies with Network Rail, or blaming Scotrail and the Scottish Government for the shortage of DMUs when;

1. there is a UK wide shortage of them

2. there is a mass order of EMUs which will add double the capacity in the next few months and years

...both of which take time to rectify, and we are nearing the time when years of planning will pay off and take effect.

I'm not saying Abellio are doing a great job at the moment (or any political party for that matter), but for god sake some people need to get a grip and realise that change takes time and no amount of playing the blame game or exorcising political bias is going to make the situation any easier for anyone in terms of moving forward.

Exorcising political bias would probably really help everyone in the dispute! The problem is that they've been exercising it too often

 

[adrock1976]

Is anyone else sick of the Scotsman, Sunday Mail, Neil Bibby, Kezia Dugdale, etc constantly knocking ScotRail? One of the better TOC's in the UK and all they do is criticise. So many services on old infrastructure, they should focus on Network Rail instead of demoralising Scotrail staff who work bloody hard to provide a service. Kilwinning labour MP on twitter today having a go at Scotrail for signalling problems - couldn't make it up!

Are you certain it was a Labour MP?

The only Labour MP in Scotland is Ian Murray, the representative of Edinburgh South (and was also active in the "Save the Jambos" campaign).

Otherwise, I am with you on the above points.