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F*cking nightmare of a bastard commute

And now my train home is cancelled.

Aren't our trains just grand?

One of Europe's busiest and biggest stations is being partially rebuilt. This lasts for about two weeks and has been advertised long in advance. If you're a season ticket holder whose normal commute goes into Waterloo you get free travel for those two weeks. What is it that the hard-done-by people of Surrey would have liked to have been done differently?
 
Also: the south east of England has the best railway service in the whole of the UK and one of the most comprehensive anywhere in Europe. Commuter tickets are subsidised and let the people of the home counties live amidst pleasant countryside and have access to the best paid jobs in Britain. That same commuter-land rather consistently votes for governments who fail to invest in the railways and public transport in general. A cancelled commuter train from London generally means you get home half an hour or an hour late. Meanwhile, in other parts of Britain, if you commute by public transport you might be lucky if you have two services to choose from in each direction.
 
One of Europe's busiest and biggest stations is being partially rebuilt. This lasts for about two weeks and has been advertised long in advance. If you're a season ticket holder whose normal commute goes into Waterloo you get free travel for those two weeks. What is it that the hard-done-by people of Surrey would have liked to have been done differently?
Don't cancel the trains out of Victoria?
 
Don't cancel the trains out of Victoria?
I've just checked departures from Victoria this evening between 5 and 6pm. 43 Scheduled departures. 3 of them were cancelled. It seems to me relatively understandable that some things might go wrong when there's a temporarily altered timetable and when certain services are much busier than usual. But 3 out of 43 at peak hour doesn't indicate to me a wholesale catastrophic breakdown.
 
Also: the south east of England has the best railway service in the whole of the UK and one of the most comprehensive anywhere in Europe. Commuter tickets are subsidised and let the people of the home counties live amidst pleasant countryside and have access to the best paid jobs in Britain. That same commuter-land rather consistently votes for governments who fail to invest in the railways and public transport in general. A cancelled commuter train from London generally means you get home half an hour or an hour late. Meanwhile, in other parts of Britain, if you commute by public transport you might be lucky if you have two services to choose from in each direction.
Also: this is bollocks. When train after train is cancelled (ALL the trains to Horsham were cancelled for at least 90 minutes this evening), all trains are horribly overcrowded and then the ones that actually turn up are half-length to boot, when virtually no train ever arrives actually on time, and when you are paying £4000 a year for the privilege of this shit service, I think you have a right to note that things aren't great without some supercilious twat telling you that you should be grateful because it could theoretically be even worse.
 
I've just checked departures from Victoria this evening between 5 and 6pm. 43 Scheduled departures. 3 of them were cancelled. It seems to me relatively understandable that some things might go wrong when there's a temporarily altered timetable and when certain services are much busier than usual. But 3 out of 43 at peak hour doesn't indicate to me a wholesale catastrophic breakdown.
Fuck that. You think that a failure to run a full 7% of services is acceptable? And that doesn't even account for when it is your train (which only goes twice an hour) that is cancelled twice on the trot, at which point the failure rate is 100%.
 
Also: this is bollocks. When train after train is cancelled (ALL the trains to Horsham were cancelled for at least 90 minutes this evening), all trains are horribly overcrowded and then the ones that actually turn up are half-length to boot, when virtually no train ever arrives actually on time, and when you are paying £4000 a year for the privilege of this shit service, I think you have a right to note that things aren't great without some supercilious twat telling you that you should be grateful because it could theoretically be even worse.

This evening - Victoria-Horsham services:
1647 left 3 mins late
1720 cancelled
1750 cancelled
1820 left 10 mins late
1910 cancelled
1920 left 20 mins late
1940 left on time

Clearly not a good evening for those who use the Horsham service and if that happened every or most nights then of course that would be a terrible service; however here are the figures for the same services over three months preceding the Waterloo closure:

1647 ran on 93% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 6.5 minutes
1720 ran on 97% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 1.5 minutes
1750 ran on 98% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 1 minute
1820 ran on 100% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 1.5 minutes
1910 ran on 98% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 7.5 minutes
1920 ran on 100% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 1.5 minutes
1940 ran on 98% of all weekdays, average delay on arrival 6 minutes

I know there are issues with short-formed trains on many routes. A load of new trains have just been delivered for (ex)SWT and part of the whole purpose of the Waterloo upgrade is to massively increase capacity and allow longer trains to run.
 
Fuck that. You think that a failure to run a full 7% of services is acceptable?

What's acceptable, or realistic?

Do you know how reliability/punctuality in the UK compares with other modern European countries? A lot of people seem to think they do, but it turns out they haven't a clue.
 
These cancellations wouldn't happen with sufficient investment in infrastructure. Trains breaking down, signal failures, lack of staff -- it's all signs of money not being spent. There were no adverse weather conditions last night, there was no excuse.

It's a closed and highly predictable system. To the nearest 1%, 100% of services should run with the exception of a handful of days in the year. The same proportion should be on time. Most problems occur due to knock on effects, so eliminate this. Well resourced industries manage 99.5%+ success rates despite not having similar levels of control over their own affairs.

The fact that you are happy with a 7% rate of total cancellation, let alone all the trains that are late (which cause missed connections) is an appalling indictment of where we have got to.
 
I've not said that I'm happy with a rate of 7% cancellation. I said that things going wrong whilst very major engineering works are taking place is understandable. And that a 7% rate of cancellation during the peak hour does not indicate things going horribly wrong. I've also given you the real figures averaged over time that show a cancellation rate of around 2.3%.

I am always arguing for more investment in rail and public transport in general. I would like to see things work better. The truth is though that, compared to other rail systems around the world, ours isn't that bad. Chasing percentage points in reliability on a dense and very complicated network like that in and around London is very difficult, and expensive.

Can you give me an example of an industry that achieves "99.5% success rate" and then explain how this can be meaningfully compared to a rail network?

In my opinion the only meaningful comparisons are those with other rail networks (self contained new-build high speed lines are not meaningfully comparable). Whenever I look into this, it seems that where there are comparable examples, they may do better but it's not generally by a large margin. Feel free to point to any rail network anywhere in the world that achieves 99.5% of trains on time. To save you googling Switzerland: they achieve about 87% of trains running within 3 minutes of schedule.

I'd like to see you try and tell anyone who works on the railways that it's a closed system and highly predictable.
 
I was caught up in this this morning. A first for me in decades of commuting. My train was only held up for 15 mins or so before the cows were moo-ved on,

Trains delayed by cows on the line

I hope they apologised over the PA system for a 'bovine incursion' , I'd have given that a cheer if they did (this phrase has been used in the past, to much ridicule).
 
7:45 was cancelled this morning.
8:00 got to Raynes Park 30 minutes late then spent 10 minutes waiting before we were all turfed off.

So I’m 90 minutes into a 60 minute journey already and still a long way from Waterloo.

Another great morning of commuting.

ETA: arrived at work at 10:10, after leaving the house st 7:15.
 
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7:45 was cancelled this morning.
8:00 got to Raynes Park 30 minutes late then spent 10 minutes waiting before we were all turfed off.

So I’m 90 minutes into a 60 minute journey already and still a long way from Waterloo.

Another great morning of commuting.

ETA: arrived at work at 10:10, after leaving the house st 7:15.

Oh, I am so glad I don't commute into London any longer, working from home is a blessing.
 
Clapton station was closed this morning due to an unspecified incident further up the line :hmm: luckily I do have plenty of alternate routes into work.
 
So all one has to do to drive southwest London to a halt these days is read aloud from the bible, that's it?
It’s well established in the bible that if you want to have a go at God, you should correspond via the rail network:

2 Chronicles 32:17:

“He wrote also letters to rail on the LORD God of Israel, and to speak against him”
 
I think Matthew worked platform 5 at Woking...

Matthew
24:36
But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son...

25:13
Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour

24:27
For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man, on the delayed 1836 from Haslemere.

24:44
Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect, on the bus replacement service.
 
The name, which needlessly adds in two extra syllables, and words which don't easily run together, is certainly worse. As is the horrible livery which seems to be inspired by a surrey-dwelling city commuter's suit.
 
Due to a problem on the Victoria line this morning , I couldn't get on 2 trains in a row at Clapton this morning , trains were packed full of Victoria line refugees at Walthamstow. Gave up and walked to Rectory Road again.
 
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