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The State of UK Rail - some personal experiences


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  • RMweb Gold

 

As for the idea that railways were originally designed to operate in the manner of "turn up and go", I think you will find that almost all railway historians will disagree with you, prior to 1947 and for long distance travel anyway. The fact that the requirement to reserve on such services declined during the 1960's and 1970's, was a reflection of the fact that very few trains were regularly full anymore (other than peak commuter services and certain other popular individual trains). The increased requirement to book in advance has been a reflection of increased demand, but originated in BR's (quite successful and unique to European railways at the time) drive to fill trains up again.

In my collection I still have some 'Seat Regulation Tickets' from the 1950s/1960s. When we travelled from Birmingham to the West Country in those days most weekend trains were either 'Seat Reservation' or 'Seat Regulation' controlled to prevent overcrowding. For seat regulated trains when you bought your ticket you got a second one with the train details and reporting number on. It entitled you to a place on that train but not a specific seat, a bit like the old Ryanair cavalry charge to the plane. When you got to your destination you picked up a regulation ticket for the return working one or two weeks later. If ticket sales were heavy an unregulated relief which was a runs when required service in the working timetable would be manned up to take the surplus.

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Very little to do with privatisation and franchising. BR started the idea of cheap, advanced bookings, with the Inter-City Savers and similar, in the 1970's. The BR Intercity business sector then took it further in the 1980's with "revenue management" based pricing (based on airline practice - fuselage P&L) and recruited an ex-airline wizard to master-mind it all. Such advance purchase tickets were never inter-changeable to other services (other than in major disruption) and were the source of exactly the same frustrations as today.

 

Except that in the BR days when there was disruption you didn't have to worry about which operators had agreed to accept other operators' tickets during disruption. So I think the frustrations today are worse.

 

In my experience, the fragmentation of passenger operators has little impact on passengers most of the time since the majority of journeys are either on any-operator tickets (so it doesn't matter whose train you catch) or advance tickets (where you catch the train on the ticket which is of course run by the appropriate TOC). Where it falls down generally is during disruption with an operator-specific ticket when you can't necessarily just jump on the most convenient train to get where you're going, or with any ticket when you need to travel on another day because of disruption to one operator but the operator on a different part of the journey won't accept the ticket as valid.

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One thing VTEC were very bad at was laying on replacement bus services when there was major disruption, it was usually a case of trying to find an alternative route that still had trains running and no one was prepared to say which these were.

 

Something which, I'm afraid, is likely to always be an almost insurmoutable situation...

 

It's one thing in the case of planned engineering work, such things are planned out many months in advance...

 

However, in the case of a major disruption caused by exceptional or unplanned events, just where do you find an entire fleet of coaches to replace just a single EC train (they're 9 coaches remember), never mind a full service, at 5 minutes notice. Also sufficient spare drivers, with sufficient driving hours, available for them?

In the case of disruption due to extreme weather, there's also the matter of whether it's safe, or even possible, to use road alternatives.

Edited by Ken.W
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I travelled on the 16.34 Euston-Birmingham service yesterday. It is the first time I have made such a journey on a Sunday for a very long time.

The short route from the underground was closed and so I had to brave the hoards in the main concourse. The platform number was on the screen as I arrived at 16.18 and the ramp down to the barriers was packed solid. I think many of them were aware of just how quickly the train would fill. There was also a small number of arriving passengers fighting their way up the ramp against the tide. I just managed to grab one of the few remaining seats. By departure time it was worse than a tin of sardines with many people having large bags of clothes shopping and many others having wheel on cases. A family near me had a young lad who was asking to go to the toilet. The chance of doing that was just about zero. I often get the last off peak train on a weekday and I reckon there were more people using the train yesterday than on most of the occasions when I have travelled during the week. It is good to see that the trains are popular, but the frequency at busy times on a Sunday is just not enough. Especially as weekends tend to see more family groups using the service.

Bernard

 

It's surprising the extent to which Sunday afternoons have become virtual peak time.

 

At Newcastle, on a Sunday afternoon from noon till 6pm, there's 21 (yes, Twenty-One) trains for Kings X, all but 3 of which are through from Edinburgh, and 11 are between 12:25 and 15:00.

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Hi

 

No different to some of the Italian trains I traveled on 2016. In fact you could actually see the track out of the bottom of the toilet.

 

Cheers

Paul

But not on one of these, which is the directly comparable Italian train to the UK Intercity services I was commenting on. If you choose a slow IC train in Italy you really do get what you pay for!

 

post-26975-0-22027900-1541550059_thumb.jpg

 

Colin

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Surely they are only NR staff at NR managed stations.  At TOC managed stations they will be that TOC's staff.  Or has it all changed, again.........?

A lot of the NR managed stations have TOC staff manning them.

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The UK is basically a seven day society now. I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's the city centre of my home city was pretty much dead on Sundays and the Sunday rail service was awful. I think the first train to London was early afternoon with the various other services little better. And of course for rail there are a lot of people travelling back to their place of work after a weekend away or at home on Sunday evenings. I spent 6 months when I was working in London but my family were still up North and there was nothing quiet or off peak-ish about Sunday evening WCML trains to London.

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It's surprising the extent to which Sunday afternoons have become virtual peak time.

 

At Newcastle, on a Sunday afternoon from noon till 6pm, there's 21 (yes, Twenty-One) trains for Kings X, all but 3 of which are through from Edinburgh, and 11 are between 12:25 and 15:00.

When I was involved in the 1970s/80s it was virtually impossible to get a possession beyond 1600 on Sunday on the main routes in the Birmingham area. There were even instances where we had to pass booked services between 1600 and 2300 before resuming a full block until 0600 Monday
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One thing which has quite surprised me, is the enormous numbers of students travelling at weekends; the trains through Bristol, Plymouth and Exeter are choked with them on Friday and Sunday. I suppose it’s a function of the enormous numbers of students, full stop. Add in the enormous increase in people working away from home, because of the widespread collapse of worthwhile employment in the provinces and the huge ramping-up of housing costs, and people can neither afford to stay put, nor go where the work is.

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Something which, I'm afraid, is likely to always be an almost insurmoutable situation...

 

It's one thing in the case of planned engineering work, such things are planned out many months in advance...

 

However, in the case of a major disruption caused by exceptional or unplanned events, just where do you find an entire fleet of coaches to replace just a single EC train (they're 9 coaches remember), never mind a full service, at 5 minutes notice. Also sufficient spare drivers, with sufficient driving hours, available for them?

In the case of disruption due to extreme weather, there's also the matter of whether it's safe, or even possible, to use road alternatives.

I understand that but EC and National Express both 'made an effort' and did put on some replacement bus services on short notice. Virgin never achieved this during my time commuting although I believe they achieved it once after I stopped.

 

It was amusing on one such 'bustitution' due to severe flooding just north of Doncaster station during the EC tenure when we went on a mystery tour of Doncaster as the bus driver was, obviously, not local and took 2 hours to get from there to York.

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. When you got to your destination you picked up a regulation ticket for the return working one or two weeks later. If ticket sales were heavy an unregulated relief which was a runs when required service in the working timetable would be manned up to take the surplus.

 

And that is the huge difference between then and the modern system.

 

Capacity was tailored to the number of people travelling, rather than using variable fares to attempt to tailor the number of people travelling to the capacity available.

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However, in the case of a major disruption caused by exceptional or unplanned events, just where do you find an entire fleet of coaches to replace just a single EC train (they're 9 coaches remember), never mind a full service, at 5 minutes notice. Also sufficient spare drivers, with sufficient driving hours, available for them?

In the case of disruption due to extreme weather, there's also the matter of whether it's safe, or even possible, to use road alternatives.

 

While it is difficult to make buses appear out of nowhere, and I've had some journeys where sufficient buses have been provided surprisingly quickly, I have been surprised at the number of times in the past that when bad weather has prevented trains running, the railway companies have said that poor road conditions mean that road replacement can't be provided, yet regular bus and coach services seemed unaffected

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The UK is basically a seven day society now. I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's the city centre of my home city was pretty much dead on Sundays and the Sunday rail service was awful. I think the first train to London was early afternoon with the various other services little better. And of course for rail there are a lot of people travelling back to their place of work after a weekend away or at home on Sunday evenings. I spent 6 months when I was working in London but my family were still up North and there was nothing quiet or off peak-ish about Sunday evening WCML trains to London.

 

And yet public transport on Sundays in the UK is generally worse than the rest of the week or non-existent. 

 

In particular, it's common for bus routes to provide a minimal service on Sundays and shut down completely in the evenings, when people might want them for the last leg of a rail or coach journey home from the weekend.

 

I don't know to what extent that reflects actual usage now or historical factors such as increased pay on Sundays making services less viable.

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While it is difficult to make buses appear out of nowhere, and I've had some journeys where sufficient buses have been provided surprisingly quickly, I have been surprised at the number of times in the past that when bad weather has prevented trains running, the railway companies have said that poor road conditions mean that road replacement can't be provided, yet regular bus and coach services seemed unaffected

Northern tried in the snow earlier this year, but since I didn't see any ordinary buses running either I'm willing to believe they tried their best.

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While it is difficult to make buses appear out of nowhere, and I've had some journeys where sufficient buses have been provided surprisingly quickly, I have been surprised at the number of times in the past that when bad weather has prevented trains running, the railway companies have said that poor road conditions mean that road replacement can't be provided, yet regular bus and coach services seemed unaffected

In a lot, if not most, areas, roads with a scheduled bus service are a priority for gritting; if the rail-replacement bus services had to use other routes, then it's possible these hadn't been done.

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When I was involved in the 1970s/80s it was virtually impossible to get a possession beyond 1600 on Sunday on the main routes in the Birmingham area. There were even instances where we had to pass booked services between 1600 and 2300 before resuming a full block until 0600 Monday

 

Much the same on the WR as Sunday evenings were recognised that far back as being one of the peak travel periods for longer distance passengers.  Possibly encouraged by Weekend tickets but just as much, if not more so, a symptom of social change and mobility, and available spending money, as people moved to London (in particular) for work and travelled home occasionally at weekends so came back on Sunday evening in order to get to work on Monday morning.

 

Elsewhere, and no longer on the Western, In the early days of Railtrack I found it a real problem to get it through to the possession planners on South Zone that Sunday afternoon/evening was our second busiest (by a small margin) time of the week because we had a very heavy weekend travel pattern (Friday afternoon/evening was the busiest but there tended to be a slight spread for return journeys over Sunday/Monday).

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And yet public transport on Sundays in the UK is generally worse than the rest of the week or non-existent. 

 

In particular, it's common for bus routes to provide a minimal service on Sundays and shut down completely in the evenings, when people might want them for the last leg of a rail or coach journey home from the weekend.

 

I don't know to what extent that reflects actual usage now or historical factors such as increased pay on Sundays making services less viable.

 

On my local line near Glasgow the basic train service is half-hourly, seven days a week, albeit with no peak hour extras on Saturday or Sunday, and a later start on Sunday. In contrast one of our two local bus routes does not run on Sunday, at all, and the other which is half-hourly Mon-Sat is hourly on Sunday and only runs between 0900 and 1800. 

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On my local line near Glasgow the basic train service is half-hourly, seven days a week, albeit with no peak hour extras on Saturday or Sunday, and a later start on Sunday. In contrast one of our two local bus routes does not run on Sunday, at all, and the other which is half-hourly Mon-Sat is hourly on Sunday and only runs between 0900 and 1800. 

 

My local line is half-hourly during the day Monday to Saturday. On Sunday it gets the day off.

 

Local rail services in Cardiff are extremely poor on Sundays, though a lot better than they were 10 years or so ago when they were virtually non-existent.

 

And, since this thread is all about comparing the UK to the vastly superior railways abroad (or not), I will concede that the idea of vastly reduced or no service on Sundays does seem to be a particularly British phenomenon, with a similar service 7 days a week being common elsewhere in Europe. (It is notable that the Thomas Cook has separate sections for Sundays in the UK timetables but not generally in other countries).

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And, since this thread is all about comparing the UK to the vastly superior railways abroad (or not), I will concede that the idea of vastly reduced or no service on Sundays does seem to be a particularly British phenomenon, with a similar service 7 days a week being common elsewhere in Europe. 

 

That is very true, but I think you have a different meaning to the one I can think of - in most of France, Spain and Italy, the same spartan, rubbish service is run 7 days a week (away from the capitals and a few other major conurbations).

 

In most of England, South Wales and Southern Scotland, you have local and main line service, almost all day frequencies across the board that many in Europe can only dream of. Hourly? Forget it here, outside the Parisian region, and the TGV to Lyon and Lille. Half hourly,or every 20 mins? Only the RER and RATP and some city tram systems. Only Switzerland can match the UK, and the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Germany, Denmark and Austria come close, but no cigar.

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Having just come back from our place in the Charente where 8 months on the local but important Limoges to Angouleme line remains closed because of track defects (rotten sleepers allowing gauge creep). Even delegations of local Mairies has failed to get action from SNCF. We may have our issues in the UK but in France it feels that unless it's a direct artery to Paris forget about investment

 

Colin

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Having just come back from our place in the Charente where 8 months on the local but important Limoges to Angouleme line remains closed because of track defects (rotten sleepers allowing gauge creep). Even delegations of local Mairies has failed to get action from SNCF. We may have our issues in the UK but in France it feels that unless it's a direct artery to Paris forget about investment

 

Colin

 

Quite so, but to be fair to SNCF Reseau, they have actually done a lot of work on the route at the western end (according to La Vie du Rail). They did day the whole route would take a year, but then work seems to have stopped.

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Chabanais end seems untouched so much so going over the level crossing at Exeduil it was difficult to determine what was the mainline and what was the previously disused 5yrs +. siding.

 

Although with the N141 deviation at Roumazieres needing to impact the line it maybe a decision to leave it until the new rail over road bridge is installed

 

Some local comedian has suggested the velo rail maybe looking to expand

 

Colin

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I find one of the barometers of a rail service is to experience how easy it is to get to wherever it is you have to go. I travel a fair bit around the world and in terms of just being able to go to a station and get somewhere British railways do a lot better than most in my experience.

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That is very true, but I think you have a different meaning to the one I can think of - in most of France, Spain and Italy, the same spartan, rubbish service is run 7 days a week (away from the capitals and a few other major conurbations).

 

In most of England, South Wales and Southern Scotland, you have local and main line service, almost all day frequencies across the board that many in Europe can only dream of. Hourly? Forget it here, outside the Parisian region, and the TGV to Lyon and Lille. Half hourly,or every 20 mins? Only the RER and RATP and some city tram systems. Only Switzerland can match the UK, and the Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Germany, Denmark and Austria come close, but no cigar.

 

A good place to compare this is Comines which lies on the Franco-Belgian border with an SNCF station at one end of the town and an SNCB station at the other end.  A major difference in the level/frequency of service on any day of the week although admittedly the SNCF station is a branch terminus, which of course means it has an even worse service than might be the case if it were a through station.

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  • 2 weeks later...

When I was involved in the 1970s/80s it was virtually impossible to get a possession beyond 1600 on Sunday on the main routes in the Birmingham area. There were even instances where we had to pass booked services between 1600 and 2300 before resuming a full block until 0600 Monday

Chaos on services to Waterloo this morning due to over-running engineering works....

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