WMR Having a Mare Today 16 March

As my title suggests, at least 3 trains in a row down the North Warwicks Line cancelled this morning, curtailed to Snow Hill due to no Crew.
Lucky to catch the one I did earlier. It's thrown my plans for shack coverage on said line up in the air!

There’s posters up at snow hill stating that there’s quite a bit of traincrew sickness today. Unfortunately the snow hill lines seem to be struggling for staffing as of late, with little sign of improvement any time soon.

Snow Hill lines were really bad today. I ended up on a packed football train, because the ideally timed train for kick-off was cancelled. From the realtime information available, it also looks like they have been sending at least one two-carriage tiddler around all day. On prior Saturdays I've seen them using the tiddlers for peak football trains to the Hawthorns and following cancellations of preceding 5-car services. They also seem to have cancelled the last trains of the day today (which is becoming standard on Saturdays).

Snow Hill lines has always had a reputation and still has, and will do so until further notice for shortages and cancellations Saturdays and evenings Mondays to Fridays for as long as I can remember going way back to around 2002. Year upon year it has been the same old shortages.

You're telling me! I've been down to London today and gave myself a choice of two options this morning: the 0703 (if I could get up in time) or the 0754 departure from Kidderminster which provided connections for arrival at Marylebone at 1015 or 1045 respectively. As things turned out, I was up in time for the 0703 although it was a bit tight. But I did have the presence of mind in my 'just woken' state to check if the 0754 was cancelled, in which case I could make a dash for the earlier one. Nope, the 0703 was cancelled, as well as the two Birmingham trains before it! And the 0754 didn't run beyond Snow Hill but as I was only catching it to Stourbridge Junction to pick up the Chiltern it didn't affect me.

I seem to remember that it was the same situation last time I went down that way on a Saturday last summer, only that time I had planned to catch the 0703 and had to make do with getting into London half an hour later than I wanted to.

And for some time now, there's invariably something chopped out of the timetable on Friday evenings as well. It really is p1$$ poor.

warwickshire said:

Snow Hill lines has always had a reputation and still has, and will do so until further notice for shortages and cancellations Saturdays and evenings Mondays to Fridays for as long as I can remember going way back to around 2002. Year upon year it has been the same old shortages.

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I disagree. Yes, if you go back to the turn of the century, Central Trains certainly had its 'problems' but things improved in the later years of the franchise. During my just under 4 years of commuting from 2004 to 2007, the number of days when things were really snarled up could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand and definitely didn't reach double figures. Then came the London Midland years, which saw new rolling stock introduced and resignalling between Stourbridge Junction and Droitwich Spa (exclusive), and it all seemed pretty reliable. The beginning of the downward slope can probably be traced back to LM's final year in 2017, but certainly after the enforced break in our lives in 2020/1 it has been a complete mess, and not just on the Snow Hill lines!

If you want a real shambles then it's necessary to go back to before the opening of the Jewellery Line in 1995, when Stourbridge Line services were part of the Regional Railways Central 'blob'. The penultimate Saturday evening service which I would regularly catch from New Street had the stock coming in from Shrewsbury and the crew coming in from Leicester (or was it vice versa?) which, suffice to say, was a recipe for disaster!