Poor service from the railway companies

[oldchapie]

It seems that according to the news channels the snow and ice have caused a great deal of trouble for the travelling public.Having expereanced working in bad conditions just how difficult it is to get things moving. There are the problems of getting blocked lines cleared and the availability of train crews and other lineside staff I can tell you it is no joke
The privitised railways are not public services anymore therefor do not run a service if they can save the cost of openig a line.To give an example.on the East coast line the overhead wires have been brought down so why not use a loco to haul the train. Ah there is a problem we don"t own any and in any case we do not have drivers with traction know dear! BR failed sometimes but at least they tried.

[Robin Summerhill]

Right, where shall I start

It is easy to look at the past through rose tinted glasses, and I can give you quite a few examples of monumental balls-ups in the days of a nationalised British Railways. But the difficulties we have now, and especially when there is any form of disruption going on (such as the recent cold snap), are almost completely the result of the way that privatisation was handled and implemented.

If you do a Google search on "stupendous incompetence" you will find that 28 of the first 30 results mention the Department of Transport! 'Nuff said?

John Major was looking at the railways through rose tinted glasses when privatisation first became Tory party policy in 1991. He wanted to see a return to the "Big Four" or similar. For reasons that I won't bore you with here (but I would recommend the book "Eleven Minutes Late" by Matthew Engel which is full of the detail) we didn't get that. We got a splitting of the railway infrastructure from the Train Operating Companies (TOCs), and the major rot set in from that point.

To expand on what oldchappie has to say above, TOCs operate specific services using specific types of traction. Their drivers will probably not have traction knowledge of any other. This can frequently lead to the ridiculous situation where a train is sitting in a station waiting a driver, there is a driver from another company sitting on his backside in the mess room, but one company can't "hire out" their spare driver to a TOC that wants one because he doesn't know the traction.

This is of course a far cry from steam days, when a driver was expected to get on the thing and drive it, irrespective of the type of engine. It is also a long way from the situation that existed pre-privatisation somewhere like, say, Bath Road where the drivers were experienced on and had traction knowledge of all the diesels that were allocated to the depot.

There is also the matter that there are no longer engines standing spare. The recent (last summer) episode of 34067 Tangmere climbing out of Weymouth unassisted was due to the failure of the assisting diesel, and there being no "spare" engine to put on the job the right side of Basingstoke!

The East Coast example mentioned by oldchappie is another interesting one from this point of view. The overhead wires were down, so presumably the Engineers had been instructed to put them back up again. Presumably they would have needed absolute occupation to complete the work and, even if it was possible to run trains past them at reduced speed, there would be no diesel available to tow the electric train anyway!

To this lack of ability to make drivers flexible, and the lack of spare engines, we must add the fact that TOCs get fined these days if their trains are late. So, no train ever waits for a late running connection these days becuase if they do they get fined for it, and/ or the connecting service is probably not one of their trains anyway so they're not interested from that point of view.

Welcome to our modern railway in 2010!

[jules]

Just one quick point: It was an EU directive that demanded the separation of track owner from train operator, thereby allowing Open Access ...

[oldchapie]

Robin I know full well about the cock ups , but on the ground at least the staff tried. Now you have stated very well what a monumental Majors privations turned out to be and of course the EU interfering in our country.Rember private is supposed to be more efficient which is no joke for the public trying to get on a train that is going to arrive at its destination. I do hope that any non railway personal read and digest what you having written particuly those damed menaces called politicians who
might find out just how stupid they are. Enough said.

PS I am soory to be so angry on this forum please understand that all though I am retired I still think of the good people I had the priveledge to work with
Colin

[simon]

Just one quick point: It was an EU directive that demanded the separation of track owner from train operator, thereby allowing Open Access ...

No the EU requires seperate accounts to allow open access, not seperate legal entities and not different ownership of the entities.

[Robin Summerhill]

Just one quick point: It was an EU directive that demanded the separation of track owner from train operator, thereby allowing Open Access ...

The book I mentioned earlier, Eleven Minutes Late by Matthew Engel (ISBN 978-0-230-70898-3) deals with this on page 248. I quote:

"Some enthusiasts for privatisation have insisted that trains and infrastructure had to be separated to comply with European legislation. This is true but mad: other countries have dealt with this requirement by small accounting procedures, not by a multi-billion reorganisation"

Well worth a read

This is not the place for me to indulge in a political argument over the rights and wrongs of the EU, but it does highlight a fact which is often overlooked in the UK. EU directives are issued by the EU but their implementation is left to member countries own legislatures.

The majority of "EU law foisted upon us" is, in truth, an over-interpretation by Whitehall of the original directive.

[jules]

other countries have dealt with this requirement by small accounting procedures, not by a multi-billion reorganisation

Very true! That's why DB (Deutsche Bahn) and SNCF are still in one piece and we have two dozen profit motivated TOC's, a failed Railtrack and now Network Rail ... Still, Whitehall knows best

[Robin Summerhill]

I do hope that any non railway personal read and digest what you having written particuly those damed menaces called politicians who might find out just how stupid they are. Enough said.

Oh the politicians know full well what a balls up was created in 1994. They also know that there is more public money going to the railway now than there was in the days of nationalisation.

They also know that to sort it out would cost yet more billions and, unfortunately for the current government, it was one of a similar political persuasion who introduced the dog's breakfast of a system in the first place.

Doing anything about it would therefore be a political hot potato. Far easier and cheaper for the Transport Minister to appear on TV and castigate the current railway management, rather then do anything positive to improve the situation

[stopblock]

To sort out this mess of a so called modern railway would mean parliment admitting to being wrong. It doesnt matter which colour party started the ball rolling neither them or the opposition will ever admit it was a mistake. To correct the errors would be political suicide and would probaly earn them a generation in the political wilderness.

[Mitch]

Can I just add a comment from a different angle?
Yes, the railway could have been better prepared for the recent extreme weather, and yes, incidents of extreme weather seem to be more common in recent years, but as a front-line member of staff I would like to assure everyone that we do our best in circumstances such as these.
Trains may run very, very late but crews adopt the Dunkirk spirit and see them through to their destination.
On Christmas Eve I was booked to work 1V66, the 16.08 Edinburgh - Bristol Temple Meads, back from York to Birmingham. It was heavily delayed in Scotland because of a set of frozen points. My control office rang me to ask if I'd go to Newcastle to relieve it. Of course I would; people were trying to get where they needed to be for Christmas and if we declined to work well past our rostered hours a lot of plans would have been ruined.
The railway has changed drastically over the past twenty years, but the traincrew spirit hasn't: we bitch and moan, but we get the job done!

[Robin Summerhill]

Can I just add a comment from a different angle?
Yes, the railway could have been better prepared for the recent extreme weather, and yes, incidents of extreme weather seem to be more common in recent years, but as a front-line member of staff I would like to assure everyone that we do our best in circumstances such as these.
Trains may run very, very late but crews adopt the Dunkirk spirit and see them through to their destination.
On Christmas Eve I was booked to work 1V66, the 16.08 Edinburgh - Bristol Temple Meads, back from York to Birmingham. It was heavily delayed in Scotland because of a set of frozen points. My control office rang me to ask if I'd go to Newcastle to relieve it. Of course I would; people were trying to get where they needed to be for Christmas and if we declined to work well past our rostered hours a lot of plans would have been ruined.
The railway has changed drastically over the past twenty years, but the traincrew spirit hasn't: we bitch and moan, but we get the job done!

I think in truth 'twas ever thus, although in days gone by Birmingham men (we used to use that terms in far off days because women weren't allowed anywhere near a footplate ) wouldn't have signed the road to Newcastle!

Not that lack of route knowledge in those days stopped the more "enterprising" getting a good day out and knocking up the overtime.

There was one particular secondman at Bath Road who I shall simply refer to by his christian name - "Henry" (some of the older hands around here might know of him - he went to Westbury later) who "volunteered" to the Fratton (Portsmouth) foreman to work to Brighton and come home later on the cushions some time around 1974. That ended up as about a 13-hour turn

[Robin Summerhill]

Can I just add a comment from a different angle?
Yes, the railway could have been better prepared for the recent extreme weather, and yes, incidents of extreme weather seem to be more common in recent years, but as a front-line member of staff I would like to assure everyone that we do our best in circumstances such as these.
Trains may run very, very late but crews adopt the Dunkirk spirit and see them through to their destination.

I certainly don't blame the staff on the ground for what happened. The blame lies in the virtual total lack of infrastructure and equipment to deal with it.

Comparing what has happened over the last few weeks with what happened, for example, in the 1962/63 winter, you find very many differences. Trains certainly ran late in that winter, trains got cancelled, lines were blocked etc, but at least such things as snowploughs were available. I read somewhere in another group recently that there are no snowploughs on the railway south of Derby these days (happy to be shot down in flames if that is wrong - simply repeating what I read).

There was also a plentiful supply of spare engines in those days. The Midland main line service would have ground to a halt because the Peaks were freezing up for a pastime, were it not for the fact that umpteen Scots and Jubilees had recently been put into store and could be steamed again to run the service until such time as the problem with the Peaks were solved. In other parts of the country, steam locomotives were hauling DMUs and EMUs around that could not move under their own power.

Staff also tended to live closer to their place of work in those days, so you didn't get many cancellations because the drivers couldn't get in. St Phillips and Barton Hill was full of Barrow Road men's houses, and Totterdown full of Bath Road men. I have become almost completely out of touch with footplate staff these days, but one driver I still see regularly lives in Corsham and is based in Didcot. He doesn't drive a car, so his means of getting to work is bus or taxi to Chippenham and get the train from there. Plenty of opportunity to get delayed on that commute!

Such is progress

[StrawberryLine]

I take my hat off to the front line staff of the TOC's who without doubt have made a tremendous effort to keep their side of the business running under the most trying of circumstances. Their only thanks is to see the media and popular press running down their efforts without a mention of them. No doubt the upper management had already embarked on their Christmas break. Haven't they got "Thunderbirds" on the east coast main line?