AlterEgo
Veteran Member
Birmingham New Street is also a place where crews change, catering is loaded and unloaded, and where some trains perform a reversal.
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Can platform staff hold a train (within reason)?
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Western Sunset
Established Member
And there's the rub.
We seem to either have:
1. It's the passenger's fault, by not taking an earlier train or not trying to find the guard to try to arrange a connection.
2. It was the guard's fault for not being proactive in asking if anyone had another outward train at BTM.
3. The railway network is so busy that really nothing can be done to improve things.
4. Connections are a nice thing to have but don't bank on them in any way, shape, or form.
Falcon1200
Established Member
That statement has got me well and truly baffled - In the Limited Stop trains topic you argued for additional infrastructure so that such services could run; Surely that is exactly what HS2 will facilitate, on the busiest route in the UK ?
I think 1 and 2 are both part of it - the passenger does need to take responsibility for their journey, as they may be the only one making it (or even that particular connection), but the guard should also have an awareness of likely popular trains. Although this is likely to only be 1 or 2 destinations (London being the most likely). I think 4 is a consequence of 3, and there's not really much that can be done about 3 without withdrawing trains completely.
People run in many situations. Most do not drop dead. I'll always run if I think I can make it.
There are many other reasons why it isn't worth it. Injury (to yourself or others), damage (to yourself or somebody else's things), delay to the train as they either let you on or wait for you to stand clear, causing concern or alarm among people (staff, police or members of the public) who may think you are running for reasons other than trying to catch a train.
If your journey is critical enough that you need to make a specific train, you should be planning your journey and leaving enough time to catch it. Sometimes you can't help it, but I've usually found a fast power-walk from further out is far more effective at getting to the train on time than an outright sprint from the barrier. If it's not critical enough to know the train times in advance, then you can catch the train after the one you're running for.
I'm not saying the passenger is at fault for the missed connection, I also don't think they should have to start their journey earlier. I do however think, that it's perfectly reasonable that they should speak to the guard if concerned about a connection.
The guard may not have realised people were going to miss connections, they may have been under the impression that there were more regular connections at that time of day. Or it may have have just not occurred to them to check. One thing is for sure, a request to hold certainly wouldn't have made things any worse.
Really don't understand why the op would make no request to the guard but then kick off at platform staff. I really don't think that's an acceptable way of treating people
And what do you recommend if there is no guard, or the guard’s in another part of the train that the passenger can’t access?
That would not be the case on this journey. Would have been a 3 car train max. The entire delay was picked up at the station at which the op boarded, so the guard would have been extremely visible to them
Yes, I’m aware of that. But in more general terms what should a passenger do?
How is the guy on the platform at New Street supposed to know that there's 5 minutes available up the line?
And even if there might be 5 minutes available at Rugby who is to say there isn't another constraint between New Street and Rugby?
I'm not sure what the processes are in Doo land, I don't work or travel a huge amount on doo trains.
My replies are directed towards this particular situation.
Suck it up, Catch the next service and claim delay repay
Just as they would with Airlines or buses, or traffic or road closures/diversions or any other situation that might cause a delay to a planned itinerary. These things do happen.
On my way to work recently there were unadvertised road closures on the motorway slip road that caused me to drive an additional 10 miles in the opposite direction so that I could join the slip road, did I kick off at the staff on the close slip road? No I did not, I got on with it
Without reading all 7 pages here, I think the OP is missing the actual point that BTM is a 10 minute connection station, so a 9 minute connection is not a valid one, therefore the whole thread is totally pointless, because actually nobody should have done anything if it isn't a valid connection?
Of note not maybe in terms of mainline connections, but in terms of mainline in to branch line connections, in my job role I would always support station staff "doing the right thing" if it meant branch lines going a minute or two late for the sake of fare paying customers on a valid connection, on a route where the train will make up time in an ample fashion.
5. It's not even a connection!
Of note not maybe in terms of mainline connections, but in terms of mainline in to branch line connections, in my job role I would always support station staff "doing the right thing" if it meant branch lines going a minute or two late for the sake of fare paying customers on a valid connection, on a route where the train will make up time in an ample fashion.
and
5. It's not even a connection!
That's interesting it gives that option, unless of course it has changed from a 10 minute station since the last time I looked in a pocket timetable!
ah I see, I totally misread the OP - my apologies!!! I read it as the 0834 departure for some reason, night shift eyes.
I did not say that you had. I was merely giving examples of how even modest padding in the schedules can quickly make rail (even) less competitive than other modes.
As I said earlier, all of these proposals entail delaying everyone all of the time in order to benefit the minority of passengers who might miss connections some of the time. My general view (and that of ‘the railway’) is that this is not a proportionate approach to take.
As has been said, the delay attribution process exists in large part to weed out and rectify issues such as extended station work and so forth so this does not justify your proposed approach either.
Shrop
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Yes, I'm all for more rail infrastructure, I've just always thought the Chiltern route for HS2 is the wrong way of doing it.
Because he works on the railways and ought to know his job? Or, given that the standing time at Rugby was part of the schedule, then someone who is aware of this might just make the guy at Birmingham aware that in certain circumstances it's reasonable to hold the train for around 30 seconds? Which, when added to the full minute that it stood at New Street with its doors locked, would have been enough for passengers to board. Not every connecting passenger is elderly and/or with mobility issues that risk having to wait longer than this.
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Dr Hoo
Established Member
I'm not sure that I would fit the profile of a typical passenger but I do make most trips for 'genuine reasons'. The classic 'places to be, people to see, things to do'.
As a someone who depends on the local Hope Valley service that essentially only takes me to Sheffield or Manchester Piccadilly in the context of this thread. There are many connectional opportunities at these stations; if am travelling anywhere remotely timebound I always allow an extra hour en route (regularly needed) and often, on checking that a local service has left its origin significantly late or has been cancelled, will immediately drive from home to Chesterfield or Macclesfield to pick up my intended longer distance train still broadly on Plan A. This keeps the hour's contingency in the bank for when it may still be needed on Leg 3 from Leicester, Birmingham New Street or wherever.
Some people might describe this a 'suck it up'. I prefer to think of it as just getting on with life in a way that minimises stress all round.
"His job" is to dispatch the train safely and on time, knowing the pathing of each and every train you dispatch is not reasonable nor remotely possible. New street is a very busy station and a train sitting in a platform means no more can get into it. There can then be a quick build up of trains waiting access to platforms.The dispatch system especially at New Street means that once the doors are locked it's quite a lengthy process to open them. Its certainly not a case of just opening them up again and at certain times you would never go, there would always be someone running for the train. A line has to be drawn and that's the Departure time.
The 5 minutes at Rugby is a bit of a red herring anyway, if the train presents late at International, where something can be crossing out of platform 5, and again at Coventry where trains cross from the Nuneaton and Coventry lines, you are likely past the 5 minute threshold and likely to lose further time at every pinch point and delay other services too.
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AlterEgo
Veteran Member
It really is impossible to make laypeople believe trains can lose time in the way those of us who have been on the inside describe. The dispatcher referred to by @Shrop knows, amongst other things, how easily 30 seconds turns into 2 minutes and how that proceed aspect, covering the road out of New Street, is infringing on the movement of the trains he can see waiting in the station throat.
Shouldn't this have been in the "Forum jokes" section???
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
One from today. Between *60 and 90 seconds* late off New Street, snowballed into a +9 delay. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:C50312/2021-12-04/detailed#allox_id=0
dk1
Veteran Member
This comes up so much on twitter. But my train is booked in at the same time as my connection leaves so it will only take a minute. Well firstly saying it’s due in the same time is often stretching the truth. Transfer between trains will still take at least 2 minutes & that’s for those who are pretty agile. Those less able bodied then take another couple of minutes then dispatch has to start. The final result is then a delay of 7 minutes or more. As drivers we often get feedback of delays incurred due to a mistake we have made. This can be only a couple of minutes at start but the knock on effects caused a further 36 minutes of delay for example. It soon mounts up.
Peter Mugridge
Veteran Member
The consequences of a hold can be quite a chain reaction if things go wrong in the right way...
In the late 1980s, it was still generally possible for anyone to request a reasonable hold if they had tight connections - and it is probably no coincidence that this was abolished not long after a particularly spectacular and incompetent screw up.
An evening passenger from Farnham one Saturday noted that there was a possible double connection, but that each was particularly tight and that missing either would add about half an hour to the journey, which was to an intermediate station between Raynes Park and Epsom. Faced with this potential hour of delay, a request was made at Farnham that the connections at both Surbiton and Raynes Park should be guaranteed, and this was agreed.
Upon approaching Surbiton, the train ground to a halt and the passenger, looking out, could see a red signal ahead and that another train was occupying the up fast platform. Five minutes later, no slow train had come past and the other train was still blocking the platform ahead. Then there was an announcement about a points failure at Surbiton, and realisation slowly dawned that the train ahead was the one that was supposed to be in the up slow platform and was being held...
The passenger then went along the train to find the guard and explained why the train in front was not moving - the guard then contacted the driver, who was then seen climbing down and using the signal post telephone, a couple of minutes later the train in front moved off and the passenger was finally on the platform, now some 20 minutes late, waiting for the next stopping service.
This the passenger duly boarded and after switching back to the up slow it deposited him at Raynes Park, expecting to have another long wait.
It then became obvious that all the down slow services were late as well. Apparently nothing had come through for about half an hour.
What transpired was that British Rail had indeed held the second connection as well... but at Wimbledon, not Raynes Park. Nobody had thought to release it either after the earlier error at Surbiton ( of holding a service for the one stuck behind it ) had become apparent, nor to check what exactly was going on - which should have been done within minutes.
When a hold instruction goes wrong, it can go really very wrong.
This was in the days when the Farnham and Basingstoke services still split and joined at Woking, so not only did they now have a whole half hour segment of the suburban services running with delays of between 5 and 40 minutes, they also had a late running batch of inbound fast line services with delays of 5 to 25 minutes, one of which - with the heavier end of the delays - would need to split when going back out to serve two different destinations and then rejoin to different inbound units on their way back again. The entire South West Division timetable would have been disrupted to some extent for the rest of that evening.
In the late 1980s, it was still generally possible for anyone to request a reasonable hold if they had tight connections - and it is probably no coincidence that this was abolished not long after a particularly spectacular and incompetent screw up.
An evening passenger from Farnham one Saturday noted that there was a possible double connection, but that each was particularly tight and that missing either would add about half an hour to the journey, which was to an intermediate station between Raynes Park and Epsom. Faced with this potential hour of delay, a request was made at Farnham that the connections at both Surbiton and Raynes Park should be guaranteed, and this was agreed.
Upon approaching Surbiton, the train ground to a halt and the passenger, looking out, could see a red signal ahead and that another train was occupying the up fast platform. Five minutes later, no slow train had come past and the other train was still blocking the platform ahead. Then there was an announcement about a points failure at Surbiton, and realisation slowly dawned that the train ahead was the one that was supposed to be in the up slow platform and was being held...
The passenger then went along the train to find the guard and explained why the train in front was not moving - the guard then contacted the driver, who was then seen climbing down and using the signal post telephone, a couple of minutes later the train in front moved off and the passenger was finally on the platform, now some 20 minutes late, waiting for the next stopping service.
This the passenger duly boarded and after switching back to the up slow it deposited him at Raynes Park, expecting to have another long wait.
It then became obvious that all the down slow services were late as well. Apparently nothing had come through for about half an hour.
What transpired was that British Rail had indeed held the second connection as well... but at Wimbledon, not Raynes Park. Nobody had thought to release it either after the earlier error at Surbiton ( of holding a service for the one stuck behind it ) had become apparent, nor to check what exactly was going on - which should have been done within minutes.
When a hold instruction goes wrong, it can go really very wrong.
This was in the days when the Farnham and Basingstoke services still split and joined at Woking, so not only did they now have a whole half hour segment of the suburban services running with delays of between 5 and 40 minutes, they also had a late running batch of inbound fast line services with delays of 5 to 25 minutes, one of which - with the heavier end of the delays - would need to split when going back out to serve two different destinations and then rejoin to different inbound units on their way back again. The entire South West Division timetable would have been disrupted to some extent for the rest of that evening.
Indeed. I remember several years ago tracing knock-on delays after a passenger held the doors open on a morning up train to London (Orpington, I think it was). As the day went on everything snowballed and, ultimately, the last train north from Inverness got cancelled.
Spartacus
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Here's a good one. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:C95400/2021-12-04/detailed 1 minute overtime at Finsbury Park, leaving a total of 2 minutes late. That 1 minute overtime has caused over 160 minutes worth of delay!
To be blunt that's rubbish. The job of a dispatcher is to safely dispatch a train on time. Watch the dispatchers at a busy station like New Street and you'll see they move from one train to the next and so on. Given the complexity of the timetable there's no way they could know for every single train they dispatch if there's standing time and if there's a pinch point between the current location and the standing time. You seem to miss that point - just because there's X mins standing time at a station along the route, it doesn't mean that if it leaves the current station a little late everything will be fine and it won't cause further delays down the route before that point.
In situations where this can be managed (e.g. Cornish branch lines) it is. But working under the constraints of the current railway framework mean that it's not possible to go around holding trains left right and centre.
If it takes a full 60 seconds from starting dispatch to the train moving, you can't simply say 'well the doors were locked for a minute before the train moved, there would have been time to wait 30 seconds for passengers then start dispatch' as you couldn't compress the 60 seconds worth of procedure into 30 seconds.
Not to mention the fact that on, for example, a single delayed Ilkley to Leeds train in the AM peak you might have passengers wishing to connect to trains to York, Sheffield, London, Birmingham and more. Would you hold every single train for connecting passengers?
If every single train dispatcher, guard and driver put a minute or two into their trains here and there with the network as it is with total autonomy then it would fall to bits.
There is no such thing as a 30 second wait. Sod's law dictates if you wait 30 seconds it will be two minutes. Two minutes becomes five, etc.
You might know there's a runner and wait. Then the slightly slower person appears and lunges for the door, so you can't dispatch with them chucking themselves at the train. Then the lift door opens and Mrs Miggins with her suitcase who needs a quick hand up on to the train or a family with pushchair have appeared and suddenly you've sat there with a green signal locking the job up for several minutes.
Control is a tricky job balancing the needs of everyone to get the best overall result. I'm happy to leave that level of decision making to them and the signallers.
The exception being I won't see my train away from a cross platform change to an infrequent service with the train arriving into the station at my dispatch time where I know the doors will open before my train actually moves because that could cause me to knowingly create an unsafe situation. In that case waiting a short time is justifiable. I've never yet caused a problem by hanging on for less than 2 minutes with the Grantham to Skegness or Newark to Lincoln connecting trains for a late running ECML service and if I see the last connection of the day is running late and it'll be less than 5 minutes I will proactively ring the Control myself for permission to wait for it rather than have someone have to arrange 10 or 15 taxis.
Station controllers/managers/supervisors will convey any formal decisions on holds to the platform staff, or Control will contact the traincrew, where possible.
Basically I use my judgement, but that won't be influenced by angry passengers and beyond very basic limits it's something I'll defer to Control on.
Something’s gone wrong and I can’t quote posts, but I’ll say a couple of things.
1) the concept that someone who works for the railway should know, in detail, everything about every train they deal with - location of extended dwells from all services at New St in this example - is just fanciful. It’s just not possible.
2) New Street and Temple Meads need to work like clockwork, like any busy hub. If a train has the signal, and is ready to go, it needs to go. In my days of investigating delays I well remember a train leaving an important hub a minute or two late (I forget which hub) and by the end of the day 1,000 minutes delay had been racked up. And that was just the delays to individual trains of more than 3 minites; add In all the 1 and 2 minute delays and it could well have been twice that.
3) the big point. We run this railway for passengers, and intend to run it so that the most passengers benefit overall. However with a billion passengers a year you simply can’t please all of them all of the time.
4) actually, the bigger point. Mrs BR missed a connection at an important hub this afternoon. The hub concerned has a number of routes, and connecting everything to everything conveniently simply isn’t possible. However she’s cross - at me, obviously. As I said you can’t please some people any of the time!
1) the concept that someone who works for the railway should know, in detail, everything about every train they deal with - location of extended dwells from all services at New St in this example - is just fanciful. It’s just not possible.
2) New Street and Temple Meads need to work like clockwork, like any busy hub. If a train has the signal, and is ready to go, it needs to go. In my days of investigating delays I well remember a train leaving an important hub a minute or two late (I forget which hub) and by the end of the day 1,000 minutes delay had been racked up. And that was just the delays to individual trains of more than 3 minites; add In all the 1 and 2 minute delays and it could well have been twice that.
3) the big point. We run this railway for passengers, and intend to run it so that the most passengers benefit overall. However with a billion passengers a year you simply can’t please all of them all of the time.
4) actually, the bigger point. Mrs BR missed a connection at an important hub this afternoon. The hub concerned has a number of routes, and connecting everything to everything conveniently simply isn’t possible. However she’s cross - at me, obviously. As I said you can’t please some people any of the time!
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