Trains marked "Suspended" in old timetables.

[Main Line]

I've noticed that in some old GWR/WR service timetables trains are marked suspended (including most of the summer Saturday holiday trains to the west).  Does this mean that the train definitely did not run at all during the period of that timetable (but the path was retained) or would an order have been given on a specific day for the train to run?

[tigerburnie]

I wondered about this, it is also on some of trains in the Great Central working timetable too only in this case it looks as though it applies to some stations only and that the train seems to have run just not stopping at certain locations, some trains do seem to have not run however, it seems to be only express passenger services.

[Kris]

Were the TT's wartime ones? 

[johnlambert]

If it's like the WTTs I've seen they will be from the early post-war years (1946-47). I had wondered what Suspended in the WTT meant so I'd love to hear the eventual answer.

[The Stationmaster]

Literally what it says - the path is there but the train itself is suspended and if it's anything like it was in later years it is not resourced so there is no loco and train crew diagrammed to it.  But the path is protected by virtue of being published in the book so no one will time another (permanent TT) service foul of it although short term planned trains effectively could be planned through it unless the path was activated by short term planning.  Having a quick look at one GWR (1948) STT it also shows one suspended train as 'RR' which suggests that it probably was activated by Notice and diagrammed accordingly Iona special traffic basis.

[Rivercider]

Yesterday I was looking in one of my books about the Moretonhampstead Branch, there are several timetables shown.

 

July to September 1935 shows some Suspended trains, two examples being

2.15pm 'passenger' Newton Abbot to Moretonhampstead, and 3.15pm 'passenger' Moretonhampstead to Newton Abbot.

Though it also shows a 2.15pm 'Auto'  Newton Abbot to Bovey, and 3.30pm 'auto' Bovey to Newton Abbot (in the same times from Bovey as the 3.15pm Moreton), which does run.

 

cheers

[Main Line]

The timetable in question is dated September 1949 and has all of the Summer Saturday services marked as suspended and in some cases dates are specified at the top of the column.  Considering the timetable would have started at the end of the summer period I was wondering if it was the case that the trains were simply suspended until the next summer if no Summer Saturday trains ran at all until later in the 1950s.

Edited January 19, 2018 by Main Line

[Mike Storey]

Literally what it says - the path is there but the train itself is suspended and if it's anything like it was in later years it is not resourced so there is no loco and train crew diagrammed to it.  But the path is protected by virtue of being published in the book so no one will time another (permanent TT) service foul of it although short term planned trains effectively could be planned through it unless the path was activated by short term planning.  Having a quick look at one GWR (1948) STT it also shows one suspended train as 'RR' which suggests that it probably was activated by Notice and diagrammed accordingly Iona special traffic basis.

 

Were they what eventually became "Q" paths?

[Phil Bullock]

Same in late 60s WTTs when freightliner services were evolving - there were paths in WTT published but I don't think the trains in question ever ran

Phil

[The Stationmaster]

Were they what eventually became "Q" paths?

 

Sort of.  I'm not sure when the change happened (probably early - mid 1970s?) but an edict was issued that trains shown in the WTT had to be resourced.  This led to the introduction of 'Manned Conditional' trains which quite often had partial Q (runs as required) paths because they existed in terms of resources but were on somewhat less sure ground when it came to having a path.  To protect paths for these trains, particularly company trains a system using Y paths evolved which gave a train paths to two (sometimes more) widely separated destinations, or from two (or more) widely separated starting points or in extreme cases a selection of starting points and a selection of destinations with a common path for as much as possible of the journey in between - all of those was of course for freights.  passenger trains technically were no longer be supposed to be shown as suspended although in some cases they turned into dated paths.

 

The passenger situation changed again with privatisation where passenger and freight train paths were protected by contract (in some cases quite literally and in detail) but they weren't necessarily resourced - didn't matter as long as you were paying for them - and they weren't shown as suspended (but might well be dated.

 

What happened on the freight side, with varying degrees of sophistication was a mixture of permanent timetable paths (resourced), some permanent timetable Y paths (e.g. for oil trains and the fertiliser traffic from Ince and Elton).  Plus we used something called MAP trains - MAP standing for Manual of Agreed Pathways - in other words the paths existed, usually only in outline form, but the trains were not resourced.  The big advantage of MAP trains was that they saved work when trains were called for on a special traffic basis which was very common with some customers = e.g. the Mendip quarries.  What I did on the Western took the system to an even greater level of sophistication as I scrapped timetable supplements and reissued our freight WTTs every 8 weeks with their areas of coverage aligned to panel box control areas or sections of route with manual signalling and this avoided the need for Signalmen to update their simplifiers - in fact the WTT format was more akin to a simplifier in some respects.  But I also revised the way we used our MAP book and moved paths between it and the WTT to reflect what the freight business sectors wanted for any upcoming timetable change or contract including taking trains from the WTT to the MAP book if they were running but some of the MAP paths were left in the WTT described as Q (so directly equivalent to suspended in that respect).  

 

On the Western we carried about 800 WTT freight paths and about 450 MAP paths but apart from saving planning work what it also allowed was very quick response to business sector requests - we used to accept WTT alterations down to one working week before implementation and sometimes we did it in less time (the record was 3 working days).  As a result of making those changes I was able to take out two short term planning jobs and thus had two happy faces at my office door when we decided which volunteers for redundancy we could let go (it was usually a team decision about who went).   In TLF days my colleagues were still working on 1 month lead times and one of them had only just reduced his from a 6 week lead time; the former LMR MAP book had over 800 trains in it and was so out of date in the early 1990s that some of the paths were still timed for an 8F.

[Mike Storey]

Sort of.  I'm not sure when the change happened (probably early - mid 1970s?) but an edict was issued that trains shown in the WTT had to be resourced.  This led to the introduction of 'Manned Conditional' trains which quite often had partial Q (runs as required) paths because they existed in terms of resources but were on somewhat less sure ground when it came to having a path.  To protect paths for these trains, particularly company trains a system using Y paths evolved which gave a train paths to two (sometimes more) widely separated destinations, or from two (or more) widely separated starting points or in extreme cases a selection of starting points and a selection of destinations with a common path for as much as possible of the journey in between - all of those was of course for freights.  passenger trains technically were no longer be supposed to be shown as suspended although in some cases they turned into dated paths.

 

The passenger situation changed again with privatisation where passenger and freight train paths were protected by contract (in some cases quite literally and in detail) but they weren't necessarily resourced - didn't matter as long as you were paying for them - and they weren't shown as suspended (but might well be dated.

 

What happened on the freight side, with varying degrees of sophistication was a mixture of permanent timetable paths (resourced), some permanent timetable Y paths (e.g. for oil trains and the fertiliser traffic from Ince and Elton).  Plus we used something called MAP trains - MAP standing for Manual of Agreed Pathways - in other words the paths existed, usually only in outline form, but the trains were not resourced.  The big advantage of MAP trains was that they saved work when trains were called for on a special traffic basis which was very common with some customers = e.g. the Mendip quarries.  What I did on the Western took the system to an even greater level of sophistication as I scrapped timetable supplements and reissued our freight WTTs every 8 weeks with their areas of coverage aligned to panel box control areas or sections of route with manual signalling and this avoided the need for Signalmen to update their simplifiers - in fact the WTT format was more akin to a simplifier in some respects.  But I also revised the way we used our MAP book and moved paths between it and the WTT to reflect what the freight business sectors wanted for any upcoming timetable change or contract including taking trains from the WTT to the MAP book if they were running but some of the MAP paths were left in the WTT described as Q (so directly equivalent to suspended in that respect).  

 

On the Western we carried about 800 WTT freight paths and about 450 MAP paths but apart from saving planning work what it also allowed was very quick response to business sector requests - we used to accept WTT alterations down to one working week before implementation and sometimes we did it in less time (the record was 3 working days).  As a result of making those changes I was able to take out two short term planning jobs and thus had two happy faces at my office door when we decided which volunteers for redundancy we could let go (it was usually a team decision about who went).   In TLF days my colleagues were still working on 1 month lead times and one of them had only just reduced his from a 6 week lead time; the former LMR MAP book had over 800 trains in it and was so out of date in the early 1990s that some of the paths were still timed for an 8F.

Very interesting, and more sophisticated than I ever saw on the SR or the ER in BR days. We just had Q paths for summer and bank holiday relief boat trains on the SR (SED and Central), and the equivalent on the ER for passenger reliefs, primarily on Leeds and York terminators, for Easter, some summer weekends and Christmas. All freight paths (on the SED and on the KGX divisions anyway) were fixed, whether they were used each day (of planned days) or not. The bulk of these were internal user and STP only got involved for Departmentals on major jobs, or overruns beyond the scope of Control Specials. Control Specials were more often used for late freight runners, especially for delayed train ferry traffic.

[The Stationmaster]

Very interesting, and more sophisticated than I ever saw on the SR or the ER in BR days. We just had Q paths for summer and bank holiday relief boat trains on the SR (SED and Central), and the equivalent on the ER for passenger reliefs, primarily on Leeds and York terminators, for Easter, some summer weekends and Christmas. All freight paths (on the SED and on the KGX divisions anyway) were fixed, whether they were used each day (of planned days) or not. The bulk of these were internal user and STP only got involved for Departmentals on major jobs, or overruns beyond the scope of Control Specials. Control Specials were more often used for late freight runners, especially for delayed train ferry traffic.

 

I managed to change the South Western side a bit after I took over control of freight planning on what had been the Southern Region in 1992 but the South Eastern was very much a 'no go' area jealously guarded by Bill Mcreedy and it was sensible to leave the timings situation well alone I very quickly decided.  Similarly within the Inner Area it made considerable sense not to touch the timings situation although I had already altered various aspects of freight manning on the Central Division (much to the chagrin of Brighton Drivers when we moved the Ardingly stone job to Old Oak Common/Acton as that improved the economy of manning the Y path stone trains.  There would undoubtedly have been further changes as I only had a year with full control of freight traincrew diagramming on the former Southern before TLF was split asunder (and I departed for the passenger railway).