see tfw journey check believe it was 24 alternations all were for full and standing trains
Just been looking at the twitter comments myself. I gather this maybe down to strengthening on the Newark - Crewe's due to racing at Uttoxeter and Stoke playing Notts Forest meaning there is a 4 car 156, 5 car 170 and a 6 car 156+158+158 special on the route today. Although this didn't stop the overcrowding as I went to catch the 1102 from Tutbury to Stoke. 156497 arrived full and standing and left with most of us still on the platform with a 2 hour gap until the next train. Meanwhile the 5 car 170 going the other way had spare seats so the 6 car special behind it was probably quite empty as well!
Cost? Who is paying? Even with overcrowding, I would imagine that EMR aren't covering their costs on the whole service.
In fairness, first six Nations game in Cardiff for two years that really isn't a shock!
The operator. Same as TFW cover the cost because the bus often got used and the cost of the bus was probably not much more than the cost of dealing with the angry passengers and delay repay etc.
Operator = the taxpayer. I imagine the DfT aren't able to cover the cost because the Treasury is seeking to reduce the considerable amount it is paying to keep the railway going.
Not a clue how TFW did it but they did.
I’m not aware of these types of things ever being enforced. The PA on most 15* units is not fit for purpose and not functioning to a standard I would consider acceptable to send out yet they remain the same for year after year. I used to get the first train of the day regularly in EMT days (first after an ECS from the depot) and it was 50/50 whether it would function acceptably.
I would count a large proportion of Meridians here too - kept breaking up today (and TM passed through really quickly, once, on the whole journey, so didn't really have a chance to let her know. Will drop EMR a line but I somehow doubt it will be fixed, it's been a problem on my journeys/carriages for a while.
With driver only preps now it’s extremely difficult to trace a PA fault, once it’s in service it really takes a passenger to tell the guard as they’ll probably not realise either. But then it takes a) a keen guard to report it and b) control to be bothered.
My point is that they DO send them out into service from the depot with broken PA. I don’t know who could stop them really, it’s not as if there’s an independent PA test person going around the country trying to check these things.
A driver should flag and refuse to take a faulty unit off shed, whether they’d know is another thing.
We can't blame EMR for TPE's problems. They've only just resolved their industrial dispute that threw major pressure onto TPE. (5B84 seems to have got away at 16.28 without passengers as ECS.)
Yes, it has. I’ve raised it several times with EMT/EMR and never had a satisfactory response. I would say it’s an issue on more than half my (reasonably frequent) EMR journeys these days.
Precisely. I’m not sure the current government cares, hence the aforementioned extent of the financial constraints affecting operators and the general sense of malaise surrounding the ‘customer experience’ that ensues. But it badly needs addressing, otherwise rail travel will, as someone else said in another thread on here, become a real ‘distress purchase’.
But people are complaining about overcrowding on this thread and taking a unit out due to PA fault creates more overcrowding.
Interested to see what the EMR guards we have here think about that one.
With half the service and sometimes short forms between Nottingham and Mansfield that’s not a bad idea although the connections at Retford at Worksop will be appalling.
They've not worked properly since TrainFX was installed (some were rubbish before that I'll allow). 5 plus years down the line it shows no sign of being reliably fixed especially when the units are running in multiple. Some are fine, others are not. This isn't a PA fault, it's an augmented system failing to work entirely.