I absolutely agree. I have worked in CONtrol with the good the bad and the ugly. There are however way to many misconceptions about what "we" do and how we manipulate what we do do fiddle PPM and delay minutes.
"I Wish", is my standard reply.
I tend not to have too much time for that in and amongst the nitty gritty of running a SAFE railway first, then a punctual and fully staffed (Fleet / satations / Crews) amidst all of the infrastructure worries, the passengers and recovery thereof (buses (including the RTAs the become involved in), taxis, connections other operators), the getting the information right (CIS, Websites, media), CCTV monitoring, CCTV profiling, Facebook and of course the ever present Twitter that needs monitoring - oh the weather, trespass, fatals, aircraft with dodgy landing gear.
We do look at PPM (constantly!), we do look at delay minutes as well but the times that we make decisions based "because" of either are remarkably low. Mostly because if we get whatever the problem is sorted as quickly as we can, the PPM will recover quicker. Only on a day where trains are running very reliably with no incidents do we tend to get involved in making tiny tweaks to get trains in on time over another. These tend to be days that are 90% + and when we have time to intervene. It is a misconception that when the service plummets to a horrendous state that we spend all our time looking to deliberately turn trains short, cancel them or skip stops just to improve PPM or save minutes. It is a fact that we do this to recover the train service for the greater good of everybody and a bi product may be what people think we are setting out to do. Every single person that has a stop they wanted skipped, a train terminated short that they are kicked off of or one that is simply cancelled has every right to feel hard done by and every decision made to do this is not taken lightly.
Cancelling a 12 coach morning peak train has the potential to directly affect 800 peoples day, that's people going to work late, that's people going to medical appointments missed or late, that's job interviews with apologies at the beginning, that's people going home from work late to bed, people going to sports events late, airport check ins getting tighter and tighter and of course some train cranks with something to shout about on their favourite fora when they get in or immediately on tapatalk. Not forgetting the twitteriaty.
So much does the above affect the way we work that I have seen people come into the job who simply cannot make the call as they do not want the
responsibility of making that decision.
This is not a whinge by the way all of the above is exactly why I do my job, I love it, I love the variety and most importantly I do love the days I walk out of the door with 99% PPM and hardly any delay minutes, that's because I am likely to have done very little and everything in the jigsaw puzzle has slotted together nicely. It's when I walk out of the door with 67% PPM that I am peeved, there will be 9000 "minute" incidents and my first instinct is that I let the passengers down and the PPM figure is a consequence of that, not the other way round.
) meant I could minimise the time I was 'in the way' on the up fast line (but still comply with the driving policy) unlike some other drivers who appeared to sh*t themselves and crawl at 20mph from Raynes Park to Wimbledon buggering up the fast trains behind them.