Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
In this example, perhaps 3 minutes. In other places 3 minutes would cause carnage to the timetable. The issue is that the 3 minutes would still need to be attributed somewhere for delay reasons. Whether you think that is right or wrong is a different matter, but it would probably be attributed to "waiting connections - not authorised" or "authorised outside connectional policy" (reference). That would then need to be explained and would cost some 'money'. Utlimately no bother if the train has no other interchanges and reaches its destination on time (as it may well have done here), but that can't be guranteed.
And that is where it is time to ask - does that attribution directly benefit the passenger or the freight customer?
The modern railway has all sorts of internal contractual stuff that is just a waste of money and doesn't sit on the critical path to "punctually and safely moving people and stuff", which is the purpose of the railway. Things that don't directly support delivering the railway's fundamental purpose need simplifying out, particularly where (as in this case) they directly negatively impact that purpose.
Asking a guard to explain a one-off 5 minute delay is an utter waste of everyone's time. But if you get a 5 minute delay on that train at that station 5 days out of 7, or if one member of staff is involved in a disproportionately large number of delays than others*, then it is time to do some root cause analysis and fix the problem (such as faulty timetables). Obviously, just like other ITIL* stuff, the threshold to trigger root cause analysis can change as appropriate, but doing RCA on a one-off incident** is just a waste of time.
* Information Technology Infrastructure Library, a set of standard processes used in most IT Service Management contexts - my job, and something I increasingly become convinced can be applied in principle to almost any context of "stuff" happening to "stuff".
** One of the recent episodes of Signals to Danger highlighted a case where a driver had had multiple SPADs, but it took a very near miss which was investigated by the RAIB to find the root cause - his suffering from obstructive sleep apnoea, and thus effectively being half-asleep on the job over a prolonged period.
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