Train departing before replacement bus arrives

[68001]

Wonder if any one could advise on a situation I found myself in on Friday morning I boarded a replacement bus from Grimsby town to market rasen to connect with the train to Lincoln & Newark north gate on arrival at rasen the bus stopped short of the station leaving me and the other passengers with a short 5 minite walk to catch the train on a arrival at the station the train had already departed leaving us stranded at the station and having to contact emr to explain the situation and arranging a taxi to lincoln courtesy of emr question is should the train have waited knowing theres passengers on route
Should a complaint made regarding the bus driver

 

[omnicity4659]

Wonder if any one could advise on a situation I found myself in on Friday morning I boarded a replacement bus from Grimsby town to market rasen to connect with the train to Lincoln & Newark north gate on arrival at rasen the bus stopped short of the station leaving me and the other passengers with a short 5 minite walk to catch the train on a arrival at the station the train had already departed leaving us stranded at the station and having to contact emr to explain the situation and arranging a taxi to lincoln courtesy of emr question is should the train have waited knowing theres passengers on route
Should a complaint made regarding the bus driver

Rail replacement bus stop at Market Rasen is at the Tesco petrol station, which matches your description of a "5 minute walk".

 

[FuzzyDuck]

Since it was morning, wasn't there a slightly later train that you could have caught?

I can better that. A few years ago there were engineering works between Farnborough and Woking. Left London late evening and at Woking found the replacement bus to Farnborough. When we got there everyone got off, bus left and we all entered the station only to discover there were no more trains until the next morning (around 6 hours). Luckily by daughter was able to pick me up.

 

[Thornaby 37]

Should a complaint made regarding the bus driver

One thing for certain, whatever the cause of this situation, there is absolutely no way that the bus drivers was at fault.
Replacement buses have to comply with the same road traffic laws as all other road vehicles [including speed limits[, and no amount of planning when arranging replacement buses can predict when or where hold ups such as traffic jams will occur

 

[30907]

Since it was morning, wasn't there a slightly later train that you could have caught?

80min later according to the timetable


It's not obvious that the driver is at fault, but the schedule of 67min looks on the tight side for a (mini)bus even at 0500. EDIT: misread RTT, it was 88min.


A complaint to EMR might be in order: Market Rasen is normally unstaffed, so someone should have been tasked with checking that the bus had reached its destination. Or arranged for the vehicle to run to Lincoln in the first place.

EDIT: A small point, I am surprised that the bus didn't use the stop at the end of the station approach, only 200m away.

 

[Watershed]

Wonder if any one could advise on a situation I found myself in on Friday morning I boarded a replacement bus from Grimsby town to market rasen to connect with the train to Lincoln & Newark north gate on arrival at rasen the bus stopped short of the station leaving me and the other passengers with a short 5 minite walk to catch the train on a arrival at the station the train had already departed leaving us stranded at the station and having to contact emr to explain the situation and arranging a taxi to lincoln courtesy of emr question is should the train have waited knowing theres passengers on route
Should a complaint made regarding the bus driver

If the bus driver dropped you off at the intended RRB stop (which for practical reasons might not be at the station) and drove sensibly (i.e. using a suitable method of navigation if unfamiliar with the route) then I don't think there's any cause for complaint against them.

What there would be cause for complaint for, is against EMR corporately for failing to time the RRB in a realistic manner (at 5am in rural Lincolnshire there's hardly going to have been much traffic!) and for failing to ensure that guard is instructed to hold the train for the RRB.

Of course some ask how the guard should know whether the RRB has arrived, if it stops 5 minutes from the station. There might not be any passengers in it at that time of day, after all. But I'd say that's something within EMR's area of responsibility; they should be ensuring communication between the RRB driver and the guard (whether directly or via their Control). Alternatively they should make it easy for the guard to track the RRB - at the moment RRBs are largely a black box as far as passengers and crew are concerned.

Unfortunately the British rail industry really doesn't care enough, or have sufficient attention to detail, to get these kinds of things right. My experience of rail replacement journeys across many other countries is that whilst not all railways handle this perfectly, most do so better than British TOCs.

 

[hermit]

Where you would have cause for complaint is if the bus driver got lost en route. This happened to me on a Havant-Portsmouth Harbour RRB, where the driver took a seriously wrong turn at a roundabout and had to be redirected by passengers. The result was that I missed the IW ferry.

I think I did make a complaint, but since the connection missed was not an official one this would have been by way of a grumble rather than expecting any recompense.

 

[fandroid]

I had a much better experience in Lincolnshire with LNER. They cancelled the morning departure from Lincoln, but arranged an RRB. That arrived at Newark just in time for a southbound LNER train to stop ( unscheduled) and the latter was held until all bus passengers were aboard. The same train did a later unscheduled stop for connections to Boston. The surprise was that I wasn't much delayed by all this