Chiltern abandoning West Midlands on Sunday

[driverd]

In times bygone, I believe this is where BR would have laid on a "footex". You'd have thought a charter operator could fill in this void quite nicely but, of course, no one wants to foot the bill.

 

[dmu fan]

Thankyou for the info.

 

[Travelmonkey]

A cynic would say they don't want the football fans at all, so they're making it so that they have to drive part of the journey ... hoping that many will decide that's too much of a faff, we'll drive the whole way, or to the edge of London for the tube etc.

Contrast and compare with LNER when Newcastle were at Wembley a few weeks ago...

Or even Peterborough recently, I saw a post of them adding extra calls too get fans down to London.

The railway will always attract sports fans but its daft to push the buck to LNWR & Avanti from Chiltern. If Warwickshire police are wise they'll have some units around the station to catch some of the unfit drivers before they kill someone.

I do feel for the crews on Avanti & LNWR they're gonna be rammed out.

Although not the 1st time blues fans are jerked around look how Broadsley station is treated by WMT.

 

[SynthD]

The normal Wembley intensive service uses all long trains, causing the warning about not serving Kings Sutton mentioned above. Has anyone said why this match needs this super intensive service? Is it the first time a high up enough team from Chiltern land has had a major event there?

 

[Bletchleyite]

As someone who is visiting high wycombe from Birmingham moor street, for a theatre show in June, what are the chances there will be disruption as duo lipo will be performing in Wembley the same weekend?

You'll be fine, concerts are generally a bit more relaxed in terms of arrangements with just extra Wembley calls in existing schedules typically.

Agree. The thing with this was that there would be very high demand *specifically from Birmingham* because City were playing. Concerts tend to draw from a much more spread-out area.

People moan about bustitution, but this is another level. the industry clearly has precedent now for any service to be summarily abandoned all day without substitution anywhere in the country at short notice due to an event in another part of the country concerned with a sport or entertainment I have no interest or involvement with, and to cap it all they don't even have to announce it on the national rail website. If the practice becomes more widespread, rail effectively becomes unusable at weekends.

A strike can as easily do that. Indeed I know of one (1) case of that being done for sport - this one - whereas there have been a lot of strikes over the years and usually on weekends too, plus unreliable voluntary Sunday services.

I don't think it was at short notice, was it? We just didn't get it reported here until quite late.

I don't, on balance, agree with the approach that was taken, but I think this can be overtalked in terms of its actual significance.

In times bygone, I believe this is where BR would have laid on a "footex". You'd have thought a charter operator could fill in this void quite nicely but, of course, no one wants to foot the bill.

Avanti and LNER have both laid on "footexes" in the past. There are two key differences between those two and Chiltern, though. One is that Chiltern is not a "long trains" operator and has a relatively limited number of short DMUs to play with, while LNER and Avanti have lots of very long trains (the 11 car Pendolino being the longest non-Sleeper domestic passenger train). Plus LNER and Avanti (particularly the former) have quite expensive walk-up fares and fake compulsory reservations so have the ability to price people around and off completely as well as putting up "sold out" as a dissuader, so can control how many are likely to show up, whereas Chiltern have low walk-up fares, no reservations and very few Advances, so they don't have that ability.

 

[RichardAsh1981]

Rail strikes have a minimum notice period, and generally make news headlines as soon as they are announced, so people have a reasonable chance of hearing about them. In this case it seems the information was not even on the National Rail website, which is supposed to be the source of truth for the UK railway.

I have also encountered similar behaviour from Merseyrail - a Liverpool team wins something and suddenly all connections through Liverpool are severed at a few days notice for a parade, regardless of what other events might have been booked on that day for months.

 

[The Planner]

So does anyone have any anecdotal evidence this was a catastrophe, or did it manage ok (apart from the signal problems)?

 

[CyrusWuff]

So does anyone have any anecdotal evidence this was a catastrophe, or did it manage ok (apart from the signal problems)?

A quick look at RTT suggests things ran as planned once the signalling issue was resolved.

 

[Bletchleyite]

And I suspect due to the very high level of car ownership in Chiltern's entire patch (Aylesbury I'd guess probably the lowest, but Aylesbury wasn't affected) I doubt too many people were unable to make their journey in some form.

I have very mixed views on this sort of thing but I suspect it probably did achieve what was intended.

 

[barbette165]

It doesn't seem to be mentioned yet on the Chiltern website, but (based on RTT) a similar Warwick Parkway southwards only timetable seems to be planned for Saturday 26th April for the FA cup semi-final featuring Aston Villa. There are two Wembley Stadium to Moor Street journeys after the match (but skipping Dorridge and Solihull) though no southbound journeys before the match.

Regarding last Sunday, I travelled through Warwick Parkway at about 10:15 on Monday morning, there were maybe 30 cars still in the, normally abandoned, furthest most car park.

 

[Class15]

As someone who is visiting high wycombe from Birmingham moor street, for a theatre show in June, what are the chances there will be disruption as duo lipo will be performing in Wembley the same weekend?

For future reference you might want to turn those ‘o’s in “Duo Lipo” into ‘a’s.

 

[birchesgreen]

Duo Lipo is that pop star who helps you learn a foreign language.

 

[D1537]

I note that the national press (well, the Mirror) has picked up the fact that Chiltern are doing the same thing for Aston Villa's semi-final next week, this time severing Solihull and Dorridge's connection to Leamington and points south (except by a 2-hour journey via Stratford involving a bus) on a Saturday.

Telling fans that they'd be better off getting a hotel in London on a Saturday night is ... interesting.

Daily Mirror

 

[Kite159]

I note that the national press (well, the Mirror) has picked up the fact that Chiltern are doing the same thing for Aston Villa's semi-final next week, this time severing Solihull and Dorridge's connection to Leamington and points south (except by a 2-hour journey via Stratford involving a bus) on a Saturday.

Telling fans that they'd be better off getting a hotel in London on a Saturday night is ... interesting.

Daily Mirror

Especially at some of the costs of anything half reasonable.

Not the best looks for Chiltern, but as they are getting paid regardless they don't care, as I presume it would have been stamped by a clueless civil servant at the DfT.