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How Often Does a Driver Forget to Stop at a Station and What Are the Consequences?

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RailWonderer

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I was on a train to Liverpool St and the driver passed Stratford although it was booked to stop, and once we had passed, the driver made an announcement apologising and saying that he forgot to stop.

In all my years of using trains all over the UK, I have not once ever had this. What happens if the TOC finds out? does the driver get cautioned?

What also makes this very strange is that the drivers do the same routes day after day after day; how can they forget a stop that almost every single non-IC service calls at?
 
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GadgetMan

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We're human. Some times get distracted by other things like restrictive signals, emergency speed restrictions, a train fault light/message appearing in cab, a GSMR message broadcast among many possibilities. Sometimes its due to issues from personal life playing on your mind.

As to how often? I can only speak for myself. I've missed 1 in approximately 75,000 stops in 8 years. A combination of the previous 20+ trains I'd driven did not stop at that station and following a much slower running train on cautionary signals.
 

43066

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In all my years of using trains all over the UK, I have not once ever had this. What happens if the ToC finds out, does the driver get cautioned?
What also makes this very strange is that the drivers do the same routes day after day after day, how can they forget a stop that almost every single non-IC service calls at?

In all my years of driving trains, I’ve never had it either. And I hope never to (no comment on whether I’ve come close).

It’s far easier to do than you might think. Driving intercity routes makes it worse than if you’re doing “see a station stop” metro work: you stop a lot less and the stopping patterns are more varied. If you only put the brake in when you see the station, you’ll stop half a mile beyond it!
 

RJ

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It's pretty rare. It happened one morning when the train I was on sailed straight through Waterloo East after a very, very late brake application and the train skidding somewhat. It's understandable that stops can be forgotten but not many passenger trains towards Charing Cross skip Waterloo East. The explanation given was that "the brakes didn't come on", which I suppose is true if they're not applied in time. Before long the train got going again and terminated at Charing Cross.

I was on a train today that went straight through one stop. The auto announcer announced the next stop and I immediately thought "no it's not" given the speed we were going. It did stop beyond the station but eventually we got going again after a failed negotiation with the signaller to change ends and go back to serve the station. It was an unusual trip - the brakes came on heavily earlier in the trip and the driver announced that a safety system had to be isolated. Then we got looped for a late running express which didn't really benefit that express train, but made us about 15 minutes late. I actually felt bad for the driver and hoped their day got better. Everyone makes mistakes.

That particular line has a very complex stopping pattern between services - I wonder if this can be a contributory factor to forgotten stops. I was watching the progress of the journey and the following trains on Tornado and how the delay affected several services behind, a mix of skip-stop stoppers and trains going for dozens of miles with no stops.

Asides from these two instances, I can't recall it happening in all my years of travel.
 

Horizon22

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A fairly large TOC has about 20-50 a year. Considering how many trains run daily and how many stops each one makes, it will be a very very small % of trains. It's happened to be me once whilst working on board but that was a diagramming issue - my diagram said it was booked to call but we flew through right through - transpired the drivers didn't have the stop on!

It varies dependent on metro and mainline routes and normally occurs in peaks with irregular calling patterns. If it happens to a driver, they (or a guard if on board) will report it to the signaller, it will be relayed to the driver's TOC control and a manager will decide if the driver is fit to continue in the immediate and they might be met by a driver manager on route if welfare is needed. It will put down on the drivers record (to some degree, might not be serious) and likely to have a conversation with their manager at a later point about root cause analysis, mitigations etc.

In your case, it might well have been distraction and the driver mistimed his brake application as opposed to "forgetting" (and then decided to continue on) but its hard to know.

It's pretty rare. It happened one morning when the train I was on sailed straight through Waterloo East after a very, very late brake application and the train skidding somewhat. It's understandable that stops can be forgotten but not many passenger trains towards Charing Cross skip Waterloo East. The explanation given was that "the brakes didn't come on", which I suppose is true if they're not applied in time. Before long the train got going again and terminated at Charing Cross.

That could have been an impact of leaf-fall if it was in the Autumn.
 
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43066

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It's happened to be me once whilst working on board but that was a diagramming issue - my diagram said it was booked to call but we flew through right through - transpired the drivers didn't have the stop on!

It’s only a true failure to call if it’s on the driver’s diagram and they’ve blown through it. It’s also a very big deal if it happens, full safety of the line incident, taken off, investigation, medscreen etc.

That could have been an impact of leaf-fall if it was in the Autumn.

I’m impressed with that as an excuse, at Waterloo East of all places! Every train out of Charing Cross stops there, 25mph max: It isn’t exactly slippery… I say that as someone who signed it for a few years and has driven trains through it literally thousands of times…
 

Metal_gee_man

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It’s only a true failure to call if it’s on the driver’s diagram and they’ve blown through it. It’s also a very big deal if it happens, full safety of the line incident, taken off, investigation, medscreen etc.



I’m impressed with that as an excuse, at Waterloo East of all places! Every train out of Charing Cross stops there, 25mph max: It isn’t exactly slippery… I say that as someone who signed it for a few years and has driven trains through it literally thousands of times…
Yep that part of London is well know for its leafyness
 

RJ

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A fairly large TOC has about 20-50 a year. Considering how many trains run daily and how many stops each one makes, it will be a very very small % of trains. It's happened to be me once whilst working on board but that was a diagramming issue - my diagram said it was booked to call but we flew through right through - transpired the drivers didn't have the stop on!

It varies dependent on metro and mainline routes and normally occurs in peaks with irregular calling patterns. If it happens to a driver, they (or a guard if on board) will report it to the signaller, it will be relayed to the driver's TOC control and a manager will decide if the driver is fit to continue in the immediate and they might be met by a driver manager on route if welfare is needed. It will put down on the drivers record (to some degree, might not be serious) and likely to have a conversation with their manager at a later point about root cause analysis, mitigations etc.

In your case, it might well have been distraction and the driver mistimed his brake application as opposed to "forgetting" (and then decided to continue on) but its hard to know.



That could have been an impact of leaf-fall if it was in the Autumn.
The train was doing about 30mph into the station and overshot the platform by about 5 carriages in an area where lineside trees aren’t a big issue. I’m no expert but it’d be significantly more worrying if leaf fall was a factor!
 

ijmad

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I was once on a train where the opposite happened. Running late, driver announced that 'control' (not sure if signaller or TOC) told the him to skip several stops. Driver explained he thought this was unfair and would top anyway. Not sure what the consequences of that was!
 

PupCuff

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It’s only a true failure to call if it’s on the driver’s diagram and they’ve blown through it. It’s also a very big deal if it happens, full safety of the line incident, taken off, investigation, medscreen etc.

There's no such thing as a "true" failure to call, really, that sounds like a bit of a messroom myth. FTCs and Station Overruns happen for a wide range of reasons, some of those will be (as you describe) a failure to call which is attributable to the Driver, but some are attributable to external factors too, which can be just as important to investigate and learn from - but they're still FTCs, just not ones which will 'tarnish' a Driver's safety record. It's just that the ones which will be most visible to Drivers are the ones where they're pulled in for investigatory interviews and medscreening etc, they don't see the other ones where the learning's happening elsewhere.


The railway does have a bit of a thing for thinking "oh, it's only an incident if the staff member did something wrong" when in reality if you take that view then you're gonna miss out on the learning from the sizeable minority of incidents where more factors came into play than just a staff member's omission or ill judged action; and you're also going to lose engagement from the front line colleagues in the safety reporting and investigation processes because they'll see it as punitive.
 

itfcfan

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Around 2015 I was waiting for a train from West Hampstead Thameslink to Bedford on a Saturday morning. The standard service on that route is 2tph (the other 2tph run through WHP without stopping). I was at the St Pancras end of the platform and seeing the service arrive at speed I shrugged with surprise realising that the train was not going to stop (I use RTT so was pretty certain this was the correct service). The driver applied the brake and only the rear-most carriage of the train was in the platform when the train stopped.

I thought we'd have to wait 30mins for the following service, but to my surprise after a few minutes the driver changed ends and took the train back into the platform. The doors were released, we boarded the train. The driver changed ends and the train resumed its service. Am I right in thinking that correcting an overshoot like this is an unusual occurrence?
 

Mintona

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Not especially unusual to be allowed. It depends on if the signaller allows it or not, if there aren’t too many other trains around they tend to.

It’s also a very big deal if it happens, full safety of the line incident, taken off, investigation, medscreen etc.

In my experience that isn’t the case. I managed it once in 2014 and I wasn’t met, I wasn’t taken off, I wasn’t medscreened or investigated beyond sending an email to control detailing what had happened. I completed that day’s work and was back in on my same shift the following day. My manager never spoke to me about it.

It was my fault but my mitigating circumstances were that it was a train with an irregular calling pattern (the only one we had that did it), very early in the morning and as I departed the previous station the train developed a fault that caused me some investigation on the TMS and took my mind off the next stop. There was one passenger on board who wanted to get off and one passenger on the station who wanted to get on. Luckily the next station was two minutes away (I wasn’t booked to stop but did) so the chap who wanted to get off was able to change and get back within ten minutes. I felt sorry for the chap on the platform who had a longer wait for the next train but I was beyond the point of being able to return.
 

Ianno87

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The most common locations for such occurences are either:

-Fast Lines out of London that have stations where most fast trains don't stop but some so (e.g. Watford, Romford, Stevenage, Slough)
-Lines with skip-stop patterns (e.g. Coventry corridor), particularly when there's an odd pattern at certain times of day

Various signs around the network are placed as an aide-memoir to drivers to remind them to think about their next stop, e.g:

-Stratford Platform 10 has a sign reading "Romford?"
-Leaving Stansted Airport towards London there is a sign reading "Stansted Mountiftchet?"
-Bolton Platform 3 has a sign that reads "Drivers: Where is your next stop?" (for Moses Gate/Farnworth/Kearsley)
-Pretty sure the ECML approaching Grantham (from Newark) has a "Grantham?" sign somewhere in the Barkston area
 

davews

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Was once on a train from Wokingham that failed to stop at Crowthorne. When it stopped at Sandhurst there was quite a line of people asking the guard what had happened, not sure what he said. Yes, it does happen, and apparently at Crowthorne it happens quite a lot.
 

AM9

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Around 2015 I was waiting for a train from West Hampstead Thameslink to Bedford on a Saturday morning. The standard service on that route is 2tph (the other 2tph run through WHP without stopping). I was at the St Pancras end of the platform and seeing the service arrive at speed I shrugged with surprise realising that the train was not going to stop (I use RTT so was pretty certain this was the correct service). The driver applied the brake and only the rear-most carriage of the train was in the platform when the train stopped.

I thought we'd have to wait 30mins for the following service, but to my surprise after a few minutes the driver changed ends and took the train back into the platform. The doors were released, we boarded the train. The driver changed ends and the train resumed its service. Am I right in thinking that correcting an overshoot like this is an unusual occurrence?
I certainly remember more than one overshoot incident in the early '70s when I used to commute on the GEML. They were at Witham, where an irregular pattern of peak services meant that not all trains stopped there. On at least two occasions the down train had cleared the Braintree branch junction and had to reverse back into the station. I can't be sure, but it was less than 5 minutes before we started reversing, and as the trains were 305 or 308 types, we weren't aware of the driver changing ends, so assumed that the train was driven in reverse (is/was that possible) maybe with the guard in the back cab?
 

Snow1964

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I was a passenger on a train where it happened about 35 years ago, at Pokesdown. Must have been some local power cut as platforms were dark. Driver must have realised late and did emergency stop but front missed station by about 4 carriages

But it was a slammer, and passengers wanting to get off just dropped down to ballast and walked back to platform ramp in the dark.
 

24Grange

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I once read the opposite in one of the reference books. GWR in the 1930's. busy summer Saturday. Train booked to stop at Exeter St Davids. Train comes in and slows to a stop. Driver sticks his head out and says " I think I'm supposed to stop here?"

He had been routed into the middle line, without a platform interface !! Obviously signalling routing fault. It didn't say how they resolved it !
 
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Only time I can recall it happening was at South Croydon when a few weekday East Grinstead trains were scheduled to stop at South Croydon. One day we sailed through to Sanderstead and most of us walked an extra 10-15 minutes back home. It was the classic irregular stopping pattern which had fooled the driver. I think this was over 20 years ago, though def post October 1997.
 

Furryanimal

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This has reminded me of the week Cwmbran station opened in 1986.On day five after opening,i was waiting for a train to Cardiff at Friday teatime and the train came into view and went thundering through the station!
Understandable perhaps.......
The driver slammed on the brakes and reversed back to the station.Probably shouldn’t have!
Must have been a shock for those on the train.
 

adc82140

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A fairly large TOC has about 20-50 a year. Considering how many trains run daily and how many stops each one makes, it will be a very very small % of trains. It's happened to be me once whilst working on board but that was a diagramming issue - my diagram said it was booked to call but we flew through right through - transpired the drivers didn't have the stop on!
Had that one on the fast HST out of Paddington, first stop Twyford. Flew through Twyford, the TM explained on approach to Reading that the driver's diagram had a mis print.
 

4COR

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I've only seen it once - many years ago, but a little odd given it was Whyteleafe, London bound at the end of the morning peak, where the train sailed through - I don't think there was ever any planned skip stopping at that time.

Not so bad given the short walk to Upper Warlingham...
 

trebor79

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Waiting at Attleborough early one morning in 2019, the level crossing barriers went down and the 755 appeared round the bend much faster than usual. I thought "Oh, this must be an ECS move or something, our train must be a few minutes behind". I swear it hit the end of the platform at about 60mph. Fortunately the 755's can stop almost as quickly as they accelerate and the driver did manage to stop it just wholly within the platform (It's much longer than is needed for 4 car trains) and we all trudged to the far end to get on.
 
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dk1

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It’s far easier than people think to have a failure to call (FTC) as due to speed & braking distance, it only takes a small lapse of concentration & even worse at stations you rarely call at or if you have been all week on say a ‘fast’ turn. Suddenly the distant comes off & you accelerate only to realise when it’s far too late. It takes doing the job of train driving to understand sometimes.
 

ChiefPlanner

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The very famous FTS at Bedford (Midland) - where the great and the good were awaiting a return to London , having just had the new HQ of National Freight Corporation opened - arrangements made for 2 extra resturaunt cars to be attached to an up Sheffield - all looking forward to a sumptious high tea, Specially cleaned class 45 or 46.

Train appear in the distance and tears through at line speed - showing a flash of the scarlet attired stewards,

Someone had failed to issue a stop order at Leicester.
 

father_jack

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This has reminded me of the week Cwmbran station opened in 1986.On day five after opening,i was waiting for a train to Cardiff at Friday teatime and the train came into view and went thundering through the station!
Understandable perhaps.......
The driver slammed on the brakes and reversed back to the station.Probably shouldn’t have!
Must have been a shock for those on the train.
I think the same thing happened at the 1980s reopening of Yate.
 

OliverH68

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Couple of times my old morning train to work sailed through it's first calling point from the siding (Bicester North). Think it then started as normal from Haddenham & Thame!

Another occasion, the same train overshot Haddenham by about 1 1/2 carriages, but that was due to some pretty dense mist/fog that morning. Couldn't reverse back into the platform so onto High Wycombe it was.
 

The exile

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Have experienced this as a passenger twice in the 40 or so years I can remember. Once at Chippenham where the brakes first came on very hard as we shot through the platform at full speed. Delightful smell of original HST brakes, flying tea and coffee and eventually came to a halt about a mile down the line - long wait before ignominious reversal to the station. Odd, as everything booked to stop. Less odd, but equally surprising to those already in the vestibules waiting to get off was sailing through Durham on a northbound HST. We were already about 50 minutes late and I have a suspicion that this was arranged but not communicated. Certainly no one waiting on the platform.
Plenty of overshoots in Germany requiring climbing down to the ballast ( usually only a few more inches than normal). Only r we member one in the UK. Unfortunately that was at a terminus!
 

Ianno87

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I've only seen it once - many years ago, but a little odd given it was Whyteleafe, London bound at the end of the morning peak, where the train sailed through - I don't think there was ever any planned skip stopping at that time.

Not so bad given the short walk to Upper Warlingham...

I've personally:
-Seen a Pendolino slightly overshoot Milton Keynes, and the have to set back
-Been on a (then) ATW service that overshot (I think) Shifnal and then had to set back.
 

voyagerdude220

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Not quite the same, but I remember a few years ago an Edinburgh bound Pendolino happily took the route offered at Wolverhampton into platform 5- the south end bay platform. After a considerable delay it got shunted into a far more suitable platform and terminated at Wolverhampton.
 
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