Govia Thameslink 3rd new timetable in 2 months

[njee20]

Southern do declassify first on particularly overcrowded trains quite regularly, of which that doesn't appear to have been one by all accounts. I'm pretty sure Hayfield isn't actually listening to logic though, merely taken in by tabloid journalism and a curious sense of entitlement-by-proxy for the passengers!

[hayfield]

So you agree then, that the "beleaguered customers" are fully entitled to use first class if they want? What if he was eating, should they be entitled to some of his food too?

 

When there are special circumstances like the Thames link debacle then Certainly I think yes, As for food and refreshment, look at what the air industry has to do. As for sharing his own food that is his personal property, however as for the senior leaders of this company are concerned, they failed to provide the service they provided, no idea what this chaps job is and weather he is culpable or not, but as a senior manager surely his first job is for customer safety and the image of the company he represents. Don't forget they were charging the full going rate for a very substandard product

 

After listening to the first parts of the Select Committees sitting, the chairman of the overseeing group stated in hind sight the implementation process should have been postponed, and it was GTL that was clearly stating they would be ready for the change of timetables. Which happened to be far from the truth.

 

I see you have failed to reply about passenger safety and the duty of staff to prevent it !!. Revenue should always take second place to safety 

[njee20]

So the correct thing to do would have been to manhandle people back down the train to the empty seats?

 

Personally I sometimes travel in coach 1, fully accepting that it'll be busier, but it's more convenient. I'm not whinging that I should sit in first rather than further down the train where it's quieter.

 

They were in a situation entirely of their own making. In fact the problem wasn't even the 'overcrowding', rather the presence of the manager which folk saw as unjust. That doesn't entitle them to sit there, sorry. It's not about safety at all, that's utter bobbins. If it was about safety then no one should be allowed to stand at all.

 

The airline industry is irrelevant. Should you be able to use first class if you're finding economy a bit full? There's almost certainly staff travelling up there on reduced/free tickets.

[hayfield]

The train was not overcrowded though, there were (reportedly) free standard class seats in other carriages. Trying to sit in first class without a valid ticket is fare dodging just like trying to travel without any form of ticket is.

 

If it were an overcrowded train then the rules may be relaxed, but if it's not then I see no reason to allow people to ignore the conditions of carriage that they signed up to when they bought their standard class ticket. Just because they want to travel in carriage 1/8 rather than 6/8 is not good enough.

 

What of people who paid for first class?

 

 

What about the poor customers who paid for trains that failed to turn up !!. I agree in normal situations you are correct, but GTL are fully at fault about not providing the advertised service, they need all the good publicity they can get and need to show a bit of contrition to their long standing customers. Certainly where I work it is every employees responsibility to keep both staff and customers safe. As for terms and conditions they have failed to provide the service they signed up to. What about all those travellers whose trains were cancelled and the remaining trains severely overcrowded.

 

You state that sitting in a first class compartment with a standard class ticket if fare dodging. Could it be said that taking money for services you do not intend to provide is fraud !! Or charging full price for a knowingly substandard product deception. I guess the answer to the last two technically is no.  As I said these are not normal services and not normal times for GTL, customers have been greatly affected and a greater level of customer care is the minimum required. Surely the answer is suspend 1st class until a proper service is resumed. And all staff to go the extra mile for customers not just the customer facing employees

[njee20]

I'm right in saying that you're not a customer of GTL Hayfield? Why are you so aggrieved for them? I am a customer of theirs, and actually the current service is still immeasurably better than it was 2 years ago during the strikes. Were you shouting that everyone should be allowed in first class then? Why not just abolish tickets altogether?

 

There are rules, which are (IMO) fair, and are 'flexed' when it's appropriate; such as on overcrowded peak time trains. Like it or not it is not up to passengers to decide whether they are entitled to sit in first class (clue: they're not, any more than they're entitled to a seat full stop). There are mechanisms in place to compensate people for delayed or cancelled journeys, and they're far better than other TOCs. If safety is your genuine concern then you need to champion the abolition of standing on trains, first/standard class isn't relevant. If those people were materially safer sat down then they should have been ushered to standard class seats, not entitled to sit in first just because it was a few metres closer to the barriers at Victoria.

 

Anyway, I'm out, you're just saying the same thing over and over which is misinformed and wrong. Repetition does not change that fact.

Edited July 16, 2018 by njee20

[hayfield]

Southern do declassify first on particularly overcrowded trains quite regularly, of which that doesn't appear to have been one by all accounts. I'm pretty sure Hayfield isn't actually listening to logic though, merely taken in by tabloid journalism and a curious sense of entitlement-by-proxy for the passengers!

 

I don't take papers, so your tabloid theory is out, but have listened to some extracts from 2 select committee sittings and for several years commuted from the suburbs to the west end.

 

GTL is under threat of loosing its franchise, they had every chance according to the chairman of the implementation committee to say they were not ready, they had been red flagged since January. You cannot stop somethings going wrong, but its how the company and its employees react. I would assume for many GTL employees who face the customers its been hell over the past few weeks, could GTL supported both them and their customers better, I think the answer is yes

 

There is also a bigger picture of too many cooks in the system, in my opinion its been split into too many parts making doing anything far to difficult, but that's for another thread

[hayfield]

So the correct thing to do would have been to manhandle people back down the train to the empty seats?

 

Personally I sometimes travel in coach 1, fully accepting that it'll be busier, but it's more convenient. I'm not whinging that I should sit in first rather than further down the train where it's quieter.

 

They were in a situation entirely of their own making. In fact the problem wasn't even the 'overcrowding', rather the presence of the manager which folk saw as unjust. That doesn't entitle them to sit there, sorry. It's not about safety at all, that's utter bobbins. If it was about safety then no one should be allowed to stand at all.

 

The airline industry is irrelevant. Should you be able to use first class if you're finding economy a bit full? There's almost certainly staff travelling up there on reduced/free tickets.

 

 

When economy is full on aircrafts travelers are regularly upgraded for free, massive inducements are given to travelers who have a valid ticket to miss the plane they are booked on, so your analogy failed.

 

As I said in the situation GTL has found its self in, the best thing would have been to declassify the 1st class compartment. In my opinion trains should not be overcrowded, like busses they should have a limit on how many customers they can carry, surely given the situation GTL were in, what a great piece of PR letting customers use these empty seats would have been !! Talk about self inflicted wounds.

[lmsforever]

Southern are wrong what ever they do, public condemnation ,union problems, DFT interferience   what next. The franchise was far to big to start with.There should have been two coordinated groups north and south of the river ,then the bedevilled Southern grouping could have had a bit less to worry about.The management are obviously culpable with regard to the timetable problems but so are NR the lack of communication is worrying after all everybody is only a click away.

[jjb1970]

Few seem to be considering that this PR incident was caused by a manager acting "like a pillock". He is presumably a senior manager because he has certain talents, one of those talents should be judgement and an ability to recognise when acting like a pillock is likely to just cause more problems for his employer. Context is everything. Somebody said that if this incident had taken place on another franchise nobody in the media would have paid any attention. That is probably true, and there is a good reason for it being true - the management of other TOCs don't appear to have displayed the same utter ineptitude of this one on top of the long term labour dispute which had already left the reputation of the franchise bruised and battered. OK, management can fairly point to DafT for forcing DOO operation on them, and NR need to take some of the blame for the time tabling mess, but antagonising passengers needlessly just because a senior manager is a pillock is stupid. A half decent manager should have been able to handle this incident without creating a social media muck storm.

[Oldddudders]

I'm afraid that management of a TOC is largely predicated upon the bottom line, rather than understanding, still less caring about, the product. As such, railway passengers/customers, particularly on commuter railways, are regarded as largely captive. Just buy your season ticket and shut up, willya? One Route Manager I worked with in my final days had last worked for Tie Rack. His ability to read and interpret £ results was not in doubt - but what did he know of the railway?

[caradoc]

Hi there,

 

I was part of the team involved in that coverage and I can assure you that there was no disappointment that there seems to be a discernible improvement.

 

Indeed, many staff (including me) use these trains and need them need them to be reliable and punctual!

 

Cheers

 

Ben A.

 

Thanks Ben, fair enough, today's coverage by the BBC was fine. However the general impression given (to me anyway) is that the UK media, including the BBC, like nothing better than a 'chaos on the railways' story.

[caradoc]

When economy is full on aircrafts travelers are regularly upgraded for free, massive inducements are given to travelers who have a valid ticket to miss the plane they are booked on, so your analogy failed.

 

As I said in the situation GTL has found its self in, the best thing would have been to declassify the 1st class compartment. In my opinion trains should not be overcrowded, like busses they should have a limit on how many customers they can carry, surely given the situation GTL were in, what a great piece of PR letting customers use these empty seats would have been !! Talk about self inflicted wounds.

 

How would a limit on the number of passengers allowed on a train be enforced ? 

[great central]

How would a limit on the number of passengers allowed on a train be enforced ?

All on a basis of space allocation and every passenger has a boarding card and only allowed onto the platform for their particular train? Miss one and you wait until there's another free space. As for the amount of time, and staff, this would take to administer. Just add it to the price of the tickets. Oh and journeys that currently take, say, half an hour best allow half a day for.

Passengers will cluster in one particular position at times despite being informed that there is ample space in another part of the train. Used to amaze me when I worked to Birmingham, a three coach train crammed at one end near the stairs yet very sparsely populated a coach length away

[Zomboid]

I see it within a single vehicle. People standing by a door whilst there are 2 of us 10m away in a bay of 6. (Not that having extra space bothers me, just so long as the standers aren't moaning about not getting a seat).

[The Stationmaster]

Being bored while the TV was full of football & tennis, I was watching these recently - Parliamentary Select Committees on Railway Timetable Changes and Railway Network Committee:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0b969j7/select-committees-railway-network-committee

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bb2qqc/select-committees-railway-timetable-changes-committee

 

Not sure whether they've been mentioned on here before but they give some very interesting background on recent difficulties.  The second one linked (Railway Timetable Changes) is just about Thameslink, with Chris Gibb and Chris Green being the witnesses.

 

I've just been listening to part of the second one and i must admit to being rather puzzled by what Chris Gibb is saying.  Introducing any timetable change is a complex business, standing aside, the question of infrastructure change which also featured here but a lot of it can be boiled down to some very clear and extremely simple things - numbers and dates.  And virtually all of those can be set up to a year before the timetable introduction date and can be readily monitored at high level against a gant chart or even against a simple list - all you need to know is what things are involved, when they need to be completed if they are on the critical path, when they need to be completed if they stand outside the critical path and so on.

 

How on earth do people think we managed timetable change on BR?   Driver 'skills' (lack of)  being identified so late on sounds stupid to me - clearly someone was spinning yarns in that area, down to GTR in that instance.  Timetable delay seems - as was already thought - to be a much wider issue.  Clearly however there does seem to be a lack of early consideration of trainplan issues - witness Chris Green's statement that 'we looked at timetable first'.  

 

It appears to me from past experience that a lot of emphasis was placed on a timetable led train service rather than a trainplan or resource integrated development of a  trainplan.  And as Chris Green made clear one outcome of the timetable process delay was extremely late identification of driver requirements - at the beginning of May!!

[Claude_Dreyfus]

When economy is full on aircrafts travelers are regularly upgraded for free, massive inducements are given to travelers who have a valid ticket to miss the plane they are booked on, so your analogy failed.

 

 

No it didn't. I can't just rock up to Business or First class on a plane because economy is full and expect a seat with an economy ticket. If the airline decide to upgrade me than that is their decision, and happy days for the customer! But often people who want to travel economy and find a flight is full cannot travel...even if there is space in Business.

 

As Nick says, Southern regularly declassify first class when a train is exceptionally busy - but only really if there are cancellations elsewhere, or the train is short-formed. You can't just sit in first class, chances you you will get caught and potentially given a penalty fare. For standard class passengers who have to sit down, southern have a good number of priority seats.

 

As many have pointed our, the manager was correct by the letter of the law. In the current climate, his approach was at best ill-advised. I hope an element of customer service training is in order for him at the very least.

 

I await the journey home with interest... especially the aforementioned 18:03 and its additional Redhill stop, which has caused chaos further down the line for the last few weeks.

[31A]

It occurred to me that he didn't actually go into m

 

I've just been listening to part of the second one and i must admit to being rather puzzled by what Chris Gibb is saying.  Introducing any timetable change is a complex business, standing aside, the question of infrastructure change which also featured here but a lot of it can be boiled down to some very clear and extremely simple things - numbers and dates.  And virtually all of those can be set up to a year before the timetable introduction date and can be readily monitored at high level against a gant chart or even against a simple list - all you need to know is what things are involved, when they need to be completed if they are on the critical path, when they need to be completed if they stand outside the critical path and so on.

 

How on earth do people think we managed timetable change on BR?   Driver 'skills' (lack of)  being identified so late on sounds stupid to me - clearly someone was spinning yarns in that area, down to GTR in that instance.  Timetable delay seems - as was already thought - to be a much wider issue.  Clearly however there does seem to be a lack of early consideration of trainplan issues - witness Chris Green's statement that 'we looked at timetable first'.  

 

It appears to me from past experience that a lot of emphasis was placed on a timetable led train service rather than a trainplan or resource integrated development of a  trainplan.  And as Chris Green made clear one outcome of the timetable process delay was extremely late identification of driver requirements - at the beginning of May!!

 

It occurred to me that Chris Gibb didn't actually go into much detail about what the Industry Readiness Board actually did, or who amongst its attendees did what.

[hayfield]

How would a limit on the number of passengers allowed on a train be enforced ? 

 

Simple limit the number of tickets issued, a computer can easily allocate the correct number

[njee20]

Simple limit the number of tickets issued, a computer can easily allocate the correct number

 

Hahahahahahahahaha! That's brilliant.

 

So advanced tickets only now, as the computer has to know what train you're on. How do you allocate the tickets? Is no one allowed to catch a train from East Croydon into London ever again, as they're all full on arrival?

[scouser]

Hahahahahahahahaha! That's brilliant.

 

So advanced tickets only now, as the computer has to know what train you're on. How do you allocate the tickets? Is no one allowed to catch a train from East Croydon into London ever again, as they're all full on arrival?

If you are really interested in safety, each carriage should have a maximum amount of people allowed in it. For real safety this number should never be exceed. Maybe if this was how it worked then the required number of trains might be provided!

[Claude_Dreyfus]

Commuter trains have been full and standing into London since God was a boy. It is an occupational hazard of working in London (or any other major conurbation for that matter) that you will stand for some, if not all of your journey. Most accept that, but of course a fair few grumble. The big benefit for many commuters is the high frequency of services, a benefit completely lost by ticket allocation...which would be unworkable given the flexible nature of most season tickets (particularly the annual gold cards).

 

Trains are getting busier, and whilst there is a growing number of employers looking at more flexible ways of working, you cannot escape the rush hour. Trains cannot get any longer or more frequent on the current infrastructure, so other, smarter, options are required.

[Oldddudders]

Hahahahahahahahaha! That's brilliant.

 

So advanced tickets only now, as the computer has to know what train you're on. How do you allocate the tickets? Is no one allowed to catch a train from East Croydon into London ever again, as they're all full on arrival?

  

Commuter trains have been full and standing into London since God was a boy. It is an occupational hazard of working in London (or any other major conurbation for that matter) that you will stand for some, if not all of your journey. Most accept that, but of course a fair few grumble. The big benefit for many commuters is the high frequency of services, a benefit completely lost by ticket allocation...which would be unworkable given the flexible nature of most season tickets (particularly the annual gold cards).

Trains are getting busier, and whilst there is a growing number of employers looking at more flexible ways of working, you cannot escape the rush hour. Trains cannot get any longer or more frequent on the current infrastructure, so other, smarter, options are required.

Thankyou both. I cannot believe some of the suggestions further up the page - especially on a forum where one might imagine people know a thing or two about railways. Reliability, timetable feasibility and discipline in train despatch are the only ways to run a commuter railway worthy of the name. The ridiculous station dwell-times I see all over the C21 railway are a disgrace. Sloppy operation prevails.

 

And my credentials for commenting so harshly? 4 years as an Area Controller, including London Bridge Central. Station Manager at multiple locations on the South Eastern, including Charing Cross, Cannon Street and London Bridge. Traffic Regulator in London Bridge PSB. Operating Assistant, SE Division. I know a bit about running this sort of railway.

[hayfield]

Hahahahahahahahaha! That's brilliant.

 

So advanced tickets only now, as the computer has to know what train you're on. How do you allocate the tickets? Is no one allowed to catch a train from East Croydon into London ever again, as they're all full on arrival?

Those with season tickets can book their place on a train, but the easy way is for the operators to put on more and longer trains, why should they bother to do this when they can get away with a system which allows them to get away with massively overcrowded trains, money for doing nothing.

 

As for doing nothing, new trains are capable of transporting more people, the new timetable reputedly allows for more trains etc. you are quite right that employers offering flexible working could ease the situation. But whilst there is no financial incentive to change why should they bother

[njee20]

There are so many flaws in your comments it’s genuinely not worth picking apart.

 

Like Olddudders I’m disappointed that a forum ostensibly used by people who ought to know something about railways has really gone this way. The Daily Mail comments section has more informed posters. Please stop, you’re verging on looking silly.

 

On the plus side, the 18.03 ex LBG has just left Horsham having not stopped at Redhill, and is only a couple of minutes late. I imagine I can turn around and wave at Claude_Dreyfus too!

 

Long may it continue.

Edited July 16, 2018 by njee20

[Oldddudders]

Those with season tickets can book their place on a train, but the easy way is for the operators to put on more and longer trains, why should they bother to do this when they can get away with a system which allows them to get away with massively overcrowded trains, money for doing nothing.

 

As for doing nothing, new trains are capable of transporting more people, the new timetable reputedly allows for more trains etc. you are quite right that employers offering flexible working could ease the situation. But whilst there is no financial incentive to change why should they bother

How are new trains capable of carrying more people? A 12-car slam door train had very little floor space that could not be occupied by people. What have the latest trains got that augments that?