Scuse my ignorance, but if a station has a stop signal at the end of the platform (Yes I know they dont all have them) then cant that signal be held at red till the train is in the platform with some sort of approach control. The signalling would have to know if the train is a stopper so non-stoppers are not held. up.
Just an idea....
That would seem like a good idea, but it does affect the timings. Failure to stop at a red is considered a much worse cockup that failure to stop at the right place on a platform. As such, my train operating company's Professional Driver Policy requires me to slow to 30mph at 300m from a red, 20mph at 200m from a red, and 10mph at 100m from a red; there is no matching requirement for stopping at a platform. A brake step 2 stop onto an 80m 4 coach platform with a proceed aspect would be done from ~25mph at platform start.
For example, between Chichester and Southbourne there is a signal on the end of each platform with no intermediate signals and the signalling system can be set to either fast mode (i.e. if there is no train in the sections ahead of you the signal will be green and the Automatic Half Barrier crossings will work as you expect) or slow mode (signal stays at red and barriers stay up until train near signal, barrier sequence starts and signal clears to green when barriers down). The reason for "slow mode" is that trains stopping in stations and picking up wheelchairs etc can dwell so long that the crossings timeout and have to be reset with signaller intervention. Fast trains run through on greens, stopping trains approach every signal/platform on a red. Normally on a stopping service you will struggle to gain time if you are delayed. On the rare occasion the signaller accidentally gives you the fast setting you can easily make up 30-45 seconds per station.
As I stated, it ISN'T just about leaves. You can get places where the railhead gets contaminated, especially by all the junk in the air floating around some heavy industrial areas. Chuck in some early morning dew and a train can slip like a **** !! At my TOC we have a few stations where its well known a train can slip even in the summer, on a dry day, where there are NO trees.
Anyone who has driven their train behind a water jetter knows how much of a nightmare a clean, slightly damp, set of rails can be.
But yeah, leaves on the line
No trees near the end of Gatwick's runway. Apparently they don't mix well with airliners. But after the ancient freighters and aeroflot have taken off over the Brighton mainline it can get interesting!
What also makes this very strange is that the drivers do the same routes day after day after day; how can they forget a stop that almost every single non-IC service calls at?
Between Brighton and Portsmouth there are 23 stations. There are therefore 8,388,608 possible stopping patterns in each direction (2*2*2*2...23 times), and that is ignoring those trains that terminate short at Littlehampton or West Worthing or Portsmouth Harbour. Up until the COVID induced timetable changes, there were only about 8 of those 8 million stopping patterns that were actually used. Either you were a slow train stopping at every station, or you were a semi-fast stopping at the middlings and busys, or you were a fast stopping only at the busys. There have always been a few trains to catch drivers out (e.g. at chucking out time for the nice school at East Worthing, the fast trains used to stop at a sleepy halt). But since the COVID timetables have come in, it sometimes feels that the decision for each individual train have been made by a toss of a coin for each station.
As an example, there are many trains during the day that do all stops Littlehampton to Portsmouth and Southsea. The return working is always the mirror image, except for just one train that is not booked to stop at Bedhampton.
In some ways, I suspect that the current abundance of weird stopping patterns might actually reduce the number of Failures To Call and Stops Out Of Course, because drivers are at a heightened level of anxiety!
I look at it like shelling peas. It is a simple monotonous task that a dumb robot would never get wrong. You've got a bag of peapods and you go:
Peas in pan
Pods in bin
Peas in pan
Pods in bin
Peas in pan
Pods in bin
Peas in bin
Pods in pan
Oh, for f**ks sake. It is such a simple task, how could I have possibly got it wrong...
I have previously messed up. Several days in a row where every train I drove was a semi-fast were followed by the day where I was driving a stopper and some idiot misbehaved at a foot crossing. When it became clear he wasn't going to ruin the paintwork I took power and carried on ... straight through the station I was supposed to stop at next. We do the same routes day after day, but that in some ways is the problem, not the solution.