Nicholas Lewis
Established Member
There has to be an element of cost cutting here but also before Xmas an expectation that staff absences would increase and operators asked to have a contingency for it. The timing before Xmas was lousy as train planners would have been sorting out Xmas timetables especially where big engineering works were taking place and its taken a number of weeks to implement. In between this I can actually to see little of evidence, before TTs were reduced, of any operator suffering significant level of cancellations. Of course we now find ourselves with reduced TTs just as BoJo is about to celebrate we've beaten back Omicron and as a result no extensions of regs required and WFH guidance pulled next. However, DofT, with its puppeteer HMT, now liking the reduced costs will they sanction service restoration. My take is we will see little improvement until April and more likely not till the May TT change.Judging by dk1's comments, this is a cost cutting exercise, no doubt driven by DFT/Treasury, rather than any problems with driver availability. I've not encountered a single crew related cancellation on West Anglia since Covid started.
Also worth flagging up that this is the worst timetable since summer 2020. In January 2021, the 1628, 1837 and 1907 departures to Cambridge still ran. Stratford to Bishop's Stortford ran hourly with peak extras. There are far more people out and about now compared with January and February (or even April) last year so I'd expect more trains not fewer.