Standing on a Sunday morning…

[BluePenguin]

Pricing people off entirely isn't exactly in the ethos of public service, either. I get moving people around trains, but fully pricing them off is different.

If anything, I believe that current tickets prices need to go down significantly if people are to abandon their cars. Some of us pay through the nose because we don’t have a choice, but many people do.

 

[The Planner]

2 weeks per year of service sounds pretty generous to me.

The issue will be that many of the more experienced will know that the old offers were much better such as the green, blue and red books.

 

[seagull]

As someone on a so-called "committed Sunday" roster, with no incentive or pay enhancement other than flat hours worked as overtime, I'd gladly see Sundays added properly to the working week for nothing more than the equivalent money added to salary that the current booked number of Sundays brings. Partly because it would also:

1) Mean that I could use annual leave to guarantee book a Sunday off, rather than relying on arranged cover or waiting for the roster to appear a couple of days earlier to know if I'm off,
2) End the ridiculous and quite dangerous practice of being rostered to finish at, say, 1 a.m Sunday morning after a week of late turns, then back in at, say, 3.30 a.m Monday morning for a week of early turns. Currently allowed because "Sunday isn't a rest day as it's not in the working week" - therefore the minimum of 36 hours rest between shifts when a rest day is rostered, doesn't apply. How ANY member of safety critical staff is expected to do this without being fatigued and possibly unfit for duty is beyond me. The ORR certainly don't recommend it, but theirs is guidance only, sadly.

However I do get that for those who work a significant number of extra Sundays over and above those booked, that solution would result in them losing earnings: however overtime is never guaranteed and so this is not a strong argument against bringing it into the week. The bigger argument, as mentioned many times before this post, is the extra cost in staffing increase.

 

[dk1]

2 weeks per year of service sounds pretty generous to me.

Oh that gives me 74 weeks pay. Add that to the excellent pension & its something I might look in to. Still sont think drivers will get much of a chance. We are too precious a commodity.

 

[bramling]

Under Inter-City in BR days they had exactly this. I think it was called "Directors' Reserve", and was across all the operational sub-sectors. Of course, in those times locos, couplings, etc were all standardised across the country. They used to turn up all over, Christmas peaks, West Country in August, charters, defective mainstream stock, etc.

What none of this overcomes is TOCs with sufficient stock, who choose to leave it in sidings all weekend and send out minimal formations, because the budget for costs takes no account of the additional revenue from high demand.

I think in places this is only part of the story. Commuter peaks are easy to plan for as demand can be more or less predicted to the letter from one day to the next, and there are ways of maximising stock utilisation by doing stuff like running non-stop ECS back to the country, running short workings, tinkering with stopping patterns, tinkering with stock allocation, et cetera.

For weekends this is much more difficult as things are at the mercy of factors like events and weather. Even a commuter TOC will be pushing their stock to double (or triple) up everything. For something like Northern - forget it, there simply isn’t the stock.

 

[Taunton]

For weekends this is much more difficult as things are at the mercy of factors like events and weather.

I can remember from my teenage years, when we lived on the Wirral electric lines, an article describing exactly this and how it was readily handled. Normally 3-cars off-peak, increased to 6 when the local management identified :

- Christmas shopping in Liverpool
- Fine weather (only) weekends for the beaches at West Kirby etc, judged on the morning
- Key football game in Liverpool

etc.

They knew the numbers. Could be done then. Why not now?

 

[Bikeman78]

I couldn’t agree more!
Although I might add that I find it quite annoying when people who do not work weekends or Sunday’s expect everyone else to do so and that everything should be open.

I'd be happy for shops to be shut on Sundays again. Most supermarkets are open for 15 or 16 hours the other six days of the week. Probably wouldn't solve the overcrowding problem on the Holyhead line though.

 

[bramling]

I can remember from my teenage years, when we lived on the Wirral electric lines, an article describing exactly this and how it was readily handled. Normally 3-cars off-peak, increased to 6 when the local management identified :

- Christmas shopping in Liverpool
- Fine weather (only) weekends for the beaches at West Kirby etc, judged on the morning
- Key football game in Liverpool

etc.

They knew the numbers. Could be done then. Why not now?

In the case of Merseyrail the simple answer is not enough stock. Remember they binned off a load of trains in the 1990s. Nowadays they barely manage to lengthen a handful of peak services.

I suspect the slightly longer answer is that there has been a subtle change in demand as well. Pre the last couple of decades it was no doubt viable to strengthen specific services, for example your beach example, because demand on a weekend was otherwise fairly modest. Nowadays you'd be looking at beach demand *on top of* all the other weekend traffic.

I'm never entirely sure why weekend use has exploded in the way it has to be honest. I can barely think of an occasion in my adult life when I've used a train for a weekend leisure journey, but then I don't live a 9-5 lifestyle!

 

[Need2]

I'd be happy for shops to be shut on Sundays again. Most supermarkets are open for 15 or 16 hours the other six days of the week. Probably wouldn't solve the overcrowding problem on the Holyhead line though.

I’d be happy to go back to half day closing on a Wednesday and only the odd paper shop open until noon on Sunday
Why is everything so rushed these days?

 

[Bletchleyite]

I’d be happy to go back to half day closing on a Wednesday and only the odd paper shop open until noon on Sunday
Why is everything so rushed these days?

I don't think most Sunday demand for rail travel has anything to do with supermarket shopping. Hardly anyone supermarket shops by train.

 

[yorkie]

I'm not entirely sure what the original focus of the thread is intended to be, but we seem to be straying into all sorts of topics now.

If anyone wishes to discuss anything covered in this thread in more detail, please create a new thread (if there isn't one already) in the appropriate section.

For example whether or not shops should open on Sundays would be best discussed in General Discussion.

Many thanks