The big losers from this are the stations where TPE are the main service provider and there's either no daytime alternative/no daytime alternative prepared to help out. Stations such as Chester-le-Street, Yarm, Thirsk, Malton, Scunthorpe and the intermediates between Stalybridge and Huddersfield. Lockerbie and Reston less so as at least Avanti and XC respectively do help when asked. Nobody ever does for Chester-le-Street or Thirsk, despite the presence of frequent LNER and XC services past both. In the case of Chester-le-Street TPE are quick to dump the passengers onto LNER, as for some reason TPE seem to think it's somehow LNER's responsibility to get those people to Chester-le-Street and it's LNER's staff who end up getting people taxis when TPE abandon them at Newcastle or Durham.
It's easy to go on about Leeds - Manchester and Manchester - Liverpool as TPE's biggest markets and that may well be the case but at least there's a slower reliable alternative from Northern for those flows. There isn't for many of the stations north/east of Leeds and Doncaster, and they're the places where TPE's unreliability is the biggest problem.
I sense a freedom of information request coming on regarding the issue of other TOCs being asked to make additional stops. Either nobody wants to help TPE out, or TPE aren't actually asking other TOCs for help. Or possibly a combination of both.
In many cases it is not just part cancellations , they will cancel a full round trip for 1 member of crew missing on a circuit that might iclude 5 or 6 different crew changes . So as to avoid stranding the unit somewhere that NWR won't be too happy about like leeds or Man Vic they just cancel the trip throughout .
It may be that the staff booked to work those trains were on duty and available - however, due to an uncovered part of a job later on - the sets for those particular days haven’t even left the depot.
For example, train comes off the depot and goes A-D to D-A to A-D and back to A again in one day. On this day there are no crew “spare”. If on trip 4/4 there is no driver to take the train from C-B, what happens? There is no one available to put the train on to a depot after trip 1,2 or 3. You can’t just leave a train in a through platform at a major station, and as a result trips 1,2 and 3 all get cancelled due to a small break in the chain later on in the day - long after the crew booked to work trip 1,2 and 3 have probably booked off.
This is exactly what happens and it's why it often looks like there's staff sat around doing nothing when services are cancelled. That's because there often is staff sat around doing nothing, only the reason they're doing nothing is because TPE haven't got enough staff to cover a different part of the diagram. However I can't help notice the impression given by TPE is ever increasingly one of 'can't be bothered', with seemingly no/very little adjustment of diagrams done when other TOCs with shortages (albeit smaller shortages) such as LNER will make an effort to run as much as possible.
There'll be an element of Network Rail not wanting units stuck in certain locations such as Man Vic, but there are places units could be left without being too much of an issue and even that doesn't often happen, for example it isn't going to be anything more than a minor inconvenience if an 802 was left in Newcastle P11 for 8 hours.
Indeed, First were actually getting to grips with the issue, under a competent MD (unlike the one a few years ago who was responsible for wrecking route cards, First are culpable for appointing that one and keeping him in post until virtually all of the senior leadership said "it's him or me". Matthew Golton will be a sore loss.
I'm not so sure about Golton. He may have been better than the previous MD but the decimation of route and traction cards continued under his reign at TPE. Newcastle have now lost 185s from their traction cards which makes crew rostering even more difficult, as for Liverpool - Newcastle you now need 4 crews that all sign both the route and 802s, rather than just 4 crews that sign the route, as previously if any of the crews didn't sign 802s there's was still the option to use a 185. Which means now there's the possibility there being enough crew in the right place to run a service, but the service still can't run because there isn't any single type of traction that all of them sign. This was under Golton's leadership, not that of the previous MD.
There isn’t an ORR instruction to stop. Indeed there can’t be, as what TPE are doing is entirely in accordance with the Network Code.
It might not be formally an "instruction" but the ORR have told TPE to stop.
There was a points failure east of Leeds which stopped the job. Diversion via Castleford was a possibility but not for me because I don't sign the diversion. I used to, but training days have been taken out of my link because in the words of my glorious "leader of the year" area manager "training days are a unnecessary throwback to when off train safety briefs were held and were used by conductors as an easy day off" and therefore I have been unable to refresh the rout and keep it live because - and again in her words - "where a depot does not have any booked work over a given route, release will not be granted to refresh that route"
On the later trip to Newcastle I cleared Darlington just in time for a person to be hit by a train on Platform 1, but that resulted in my next working out of Newcastle to have 2 trainloads of TPE passengers as the previous service was cancelled - P Coded - plus acceptance for a cancelled LNER departure - as a result of limited track capacity and already running late due to signalling problems at Dunbar - on board. I was unable to do anything to manage that train other than maintain first class and ensure I could still despatch the train from the rear carriage which needed careful managelent because TPE will NOT allow 802s to be despatched from the rear cab, despite both GWR and LNER using rear cab despatch BY ROUTINE, because and again I qiote the leader of the year, "LNERs despatch proceedires are different because they have MK4s" - I am referring to AT300s, not IC225s. Please explain to me how despatching from the rear cab of an Azuma woumd be any different to a Paragon or a Nova 1, they are all AT300s!
If that's what "leader of the year" is like then I hate to imagine how bad the rest of them must be... Unless of course the title of "leader of the year" is given to the worst one.
As for her comments about Mark 4s, successfully dispatching a southbound Mk4 set from the rear cab would be quite some achievement, considering that the 91s don't have guards panels!
