Pardon me, but what’s “a connection”?
I was under the impression that such a thing no longer exists in the way it did when it was BR. Certainly you don’t see them in timetables any more.
There are connections shown in this GWR timetable…
Link. Also attached.
The connections are shown in light type.
Before you suggest that holding the train should be done everywhere - bear in mind that even if all the passengers are at the train door, it will take about 90-120 seconds to board them all and complete dispatch.
The trouble is, there are many stations where public timetables show the departure time as being either the same as the arrival time, or two or less minutes different. Including the linked to/attached timetable.
Even if the train is running on time, someone with a bicycle or a disabled passenger could well take two minutes to alight or board the train.
The amount of time it actually takes for ‘station duties’ is highly variable. If the train is nowhere near full, and only around ten or less passengers are alighting or boarding, if none of them have luggage or bicycles, or are disabled, it can take 30 seconds or less.
Conversely, if the train is busy (meaning three quarters or more full) and there are lots of passengers wanting to alight or board, plus people with luggage, bicycles or one or more disabled passengers, it can take three minutes or more for station duties to be completed.
With the current timetabling, I’m sorry to say that the railway just sets itself up to plan to fail. If you then add in the limitations of the infrastructure, well, it’s not really surprising that our so called train performance is pathetic.
Not a total solution, but as I said earlier, longer station dwell times and all trains having bigger (longer) allowances would help at least a little. Plus longer turnaround times at terminating stations. Then it would be easier to maintain trains to the planned timetable. Hence less late trains.
And if we want to run a complex service, money should be spent on making junctions more flexible, rather than going for the cheapest simplest layout. Including parallel/multiple/alternate routes over/through the junctions. Where possible, consideration should be given to improving the infrastructure at known bottlenecks. Including bidirectional signalling.
Improved journey times by having higher line speeds and faster, better performing trains is great. But not if this biases the high speed services to have tight timetables and such a high priority that it messes up other services on a routine basis.
I mean, even with the reduced timetable that we have, look at the current figures (as at 04:51)
PPM 57.9%, punctuality 64.5%, cancellation 13.5%. Note that I’ve not looked into why they are so bad at the moment. Is it any wonder that passengers are unhappy?