If the 4hr timetable was so dependent on all the infrastructure enhancements why on earth has the industry wasted anytime on trying to replan a timetable that is never going to work. Also again the industry has no leader that is prepared to put their head above the parapet and tell the DfT a it is.
If you mean the recent letter from NRs Timetable assurance team as quoted in this months MR seeks to shine a light on the issues of missing enhancements which maybe fair enough but why did any plan get this far if its fundamentally unachievable. To my mind Andrew Haines ought to have pointed this out to the DfT after the last time the revised timetable was aborted. As it now stands the industry looks foolish yet again although given the fragility of the ECML all too often and the ongoing train crew issues it does seem better to kick it into the long grass its not as if this govt is going to have defend it not happening now!
Thanks!
You mean the December 2024 timetable change on the East Coast Mainline has been cancelled? Is there going to be an official announcement?
Spring Budget 2024 (HTML)
www.gov.uk
Its not happening in Dec 24. Ive no doubt there will be a proper announcement.
He probably doesn’t even know for sure, will of just heard rumours like everyone else.
Us on this forum would never be guilty of that surely!
The invoking of Purdah as a reason why things like operational aspects of the railway can't be announced is to me an incredibly new concept and seems to be a mistaken one.
www.modernrailways.com
It's all someone else's fault. The Spring Budget was sooo long ago; and November so far away. Apparently there might be a General Election sometime, and time enough for a reshuffle or two, and for some NR and/or heads to fall or scapegoats to be cast into the wilderness. Passengers (customers)- who are they and why should they care or be cared about? One could despair, or sigh
My understanding is that it was communicated, both officially and unofficially, at that time that the journey time improvements which the Department has been very keen on for some years are not deliverable without sacrifices by many stakeholders, especially any rail users to and from Northallerton, Alnmouth and Bewick-upon-Tweed. Notably a good portion of which users would actually be part of the Conservative target voter or existing base, but of course that's nowt to do with Network Rail.
That's not the main issue with the timetable. The main issue is with freight paths.
So nothing had changed from the previous attempt to create a new timetable to deliver the benefits the expenditure on the enhancements were supposed to give seems a whole load of time has been wasted here to create the same outcome. Also not sure how any of the incomplete enhancements like extra track north of Huntingdon would ever solve the stations you've listed above.
Well best we spend some of that phase 2A saving sorting it out first before spend more on schemes further up the line enabling more services only see it not be realised because the key constraint hasn't been remedied.
ESG? Environmental, Social and Governance?
ESG - Event Steering Group. Network Rail jargon for the group who (attempt to) write the timetable.
Its a bit more than that, it considers all aspects such as infrastructure readiness (or not), TOC training, timetable change risks, operational readiness, performance, engineering access changes and so on.
This could surely be eased a bit by reducing the service at Welwyn North from two trains an hour to one train an hour or fewer. There is a much better service at Welwyn Garden City.
Thanks. So ... the kind of considerations that went into the electrification of the GWML, improvements at Castlefield, on Thameslink and the introduction of
