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Topic: Easter Engineering Work (Read 2378 times)
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Lee
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Update link. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7308097.stmNetwork Rail's boss has promised the company will do "absolutely everything" to ensure engineering work over the Easter weekend is finished by Tuesday (link below.) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7308802.stmChief executive Iain Coucher sought to reassure passengers that the transport chaos of New Year, when works over-ran, would not be repeated. Speaking at Rugby station, which was closed, Mr Coucher said 80% of the network was running as normal and a full service would resume on Tuesday. He said: "I can guarantee that we will do absolutely everything that we need to minimise the chance of any kind of over-run.
"We have learnt our lesson. We are very confident that we can do all the work we have to do over these four days." There were no trains between Birmingham and London, so passengers heading to the capital were transferred by coach to Northampton, where they resumed their rail journey. The BBC's Daniel Boettcher said people were "grudgingly" accepting, but the situation was to get worse as there would be no coach transfers on Saturday. |
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« Last Edit: March 22, 2008, 01:23:58 AM by Lee »
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Lee
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« Last Edit: March 25, 2008, 11:23:35 AM by Lee »
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Industry Insider
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Relatively minor overruns this morning that following the Xmas mess-ups have been pounced upon by the press. Unfortunately the complex nature of many lengthy possesions and the tight timescales they are held under means that these sorts of overruns (affecting a few hours in the morning after) are inevitable on occasions. It just takes one thing - the onset of bad weather after work has started, for example, to put work many hours behind.
Whilst Rugby and Liverpool Street at Christmas were obviously flawed and to use the buzzword 'lessons needed to be learned' from them, I believe that to criticise NR too heavily for the type of disruption this morning is counter-productive as it will only lead to NR making absolutely sure it always finishes on time - In other words MUCH longer possesions or MUCH less work being carried out during them. That would lead to the line being closed over more weekends and actually harm passengers more.
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Industry Insider
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One of those horrible little trashy free London papers that totally clog up all the seats on the evening peak trains gave much negative comment on the issue, saying that Network Rail had basically promised no overruns and that the whole country had been let down by them. A slight over-reaction, of course, but it also used the opportunity to 'break the news' that train companies record trains as on time when they arrive late.
Nothing new there of course - since John Major's Citizens Charter led to the Passengers Charter, local trains are classed as on time if under 5 mins late at their destination and long distance ones if they are under 10 mins late, but I have often wondered why, in these days of modern technology, their can't be a fairer way of working out the average delay to a train?
For example, ask any commuter whether, in a given working week they would rather:
a) Have their train on time four days, but delayed by 90 minutes one day, or
b) Whether they would like their train on time twice and delayed by 5 mins on three occasions.
I imagine they'd say the latter as over the week it's a sixth of the delay in terms of minutes. However, with the way performance targets, and therefore compensation are worked out, 'a' would score 80% and 'b' would score just 40%. And bear in mind this is recorded at the trains destination where your journey may have been delayed yet padding in the schedule meant that it made up the time later en-route.
The majority of trains now have their arrival time at the majority of stations recorded automatically (or in a few cases manually) through the TOPS/TRUST systems. It would be a much fairer system to work out the average delay (recording early arrivals as minus figures too!) to really work out just how punctual our train service is, and as a result reward/penalise the TOC's in a way which would be much more representative of what the average passenger experiences.
The technology is now there to make this possible. Thoughts anyone?
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Graham Ellis
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It's a tough one on measurement; the more complex you make the system, the more likely it is to not be understood, and to offer loopholes through which operators can improve their performance to the disbenefit of the user.
My thoughts (for what they're worth). How about a simple "average lateness" figure, for arrivals as ALL stations, together 10% and 90% markers. For example:
On average, trains arrived 4.5 minutes after the time they were due.
10% of trains were in excess of 15.3 minutes late
90% of trains arrived within 2.2 minutes of the time they were due.
I am, I think, against giving credits for early arrivals. That would simply encourage running ahead and getting out-of-slot, and if people arrive early - well - they often have to hang around anyway. so "Early or on time" is just 0 minutes late.
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Industry Insider
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Although he/she have got their minutes mixed up:
I'm pretty sure ALL operators have to follow these rules: Local trains arriving 0-4 minutes late are classed as 'on time' and Long distance arriving 0-9 minutes late are classed as on time, not 10 and 15 minutes as the article quotes.
Also, just to clear up, there are not an army of timekeepers at all the stations recording whether the local train from Greenford arrived 4m 56s late and is therefore on time - most stations (all of the large ones) have automatic reports generated from when the train passed the signal that is immediately before the platform. A certain amount of time is then added due to the average time it takes for that train to get to the platform from that signal, though this is not totally accurate. For example, a train may be signalled into Paddington 'permissively' (i.e. on top of a train already at that platform) and in these cases a driver has to approach much slower for obvious reasons.
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Industry Insider
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It's a tough one on measurement; the more complex you make the system, the more likely it is to not be understood, and to offer loopholes through which operators can improve their performance to the disbenefit of the user.
My thoughts (for what they're worth). How about a simple "average lateness" figure, for arrivals as ALL stations, together 10% and 90% markers. For example:
On average, trains arrived 4.5 minutes after the time they were due.
10% of trains were in excess of 15.3 minutes late
90% of trains arrived within 2.2 minutes of the time they were due.
I am, I think, against giving credits for early arrivals. That would simply encourage running ahead and getting out-of-slot, and if people arrive early - well - they often have to hang around anyway. so "Early or on time" is just 0 minutes late.
That's the beauty of my proposal Graham, it is unbelievably easy to interpret. Granted it will be quite a complex system to administer, but the results 'trains arrive at stations on average 1 minute and 43 seconds late' are totally indicative of what delays have occured. I do certainly take your point about not giving credit for early arrivals though. |
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