Timetable flab?

Do the railway companies deliberately build slack time into their timetables? Does 'timetable flab' exist?  If so, why do they do this?


Does 'timetable flab' exist?

OK, I'll start by saying that my 'evidence' is limited only to my observations over one month, but I reckon that this provides weight to the argument that slack time is built into the timetables for at least some trains.

Through July I've kept a log of outward and homeward journeys, noting the trains taken and arrival times at the destination.

For the last few weeks I've had no regular homeward train but I have taken the 07:00 from Bletchley to Euston on 21 occasions (every working day except Wed 21st).  
The official timetable for this morning commuter train is as follows:

0608   Rugby 
0618   Long Buckby
0633   Northampton (arr)
0637   Northampton (dep)
0649   Wolverton
0655   Milton Keynes
0700   Bletchley
0707   Leighton Buzzard
0743   London Euston

The actual arrival times in July for London Euston were:

Arrival    Days
0737         x6
0738         x4
0739         x7
0740         x1
0741         x0
0742         x0
0743         x1
0744         x2

(The 07:43 arrival was on Thu 18th when there was a signalling problem in the Berkhamsted area. One of the 07:44 arrivals was on Wed 7th when the switch onto the fast line at Ledburn Junction was affected by a late running Virgin train. The other 07:44 arrival was on Tue 13th when we were again delayed by a signalling problem.)

It surely can't be a coincidence that the 07:00 managed to get into London Euston ahead of schedule on 18 out of 21 days, averaging an 07:39 arrival instead of the scheduled 07:43.  

Network Rail and London Midland appear to have theor own operational schedule for this train which is different from the one they publish for passengers.  Once we cross over onto the fast line at Ledburn Junction we charge down south (probably with a Virgin train or two following us at a similar speed).  Then, a mile or two from Euston we slow right down, sometimes to not much more than walking pace.  We usually see a London Midland train pass us on its way north, and then we speed up again (my guess is we have to wait for that other train to clear the platforms). 

Immediately after we pull onto platform 11 at Euston we are chased off the train.  Before we've even had a chance to get off there's usually an automatic announcement telling us that the train is out of service, and we sometimes get the lights turned off while we are still picking up bags etc.  The station and train staff then make sure everyone is off and the doors are locked.  I haven't seen the train actually leave but I reckon that it pulls out before the scheduled 07:43 arrival time, probably to allow a following train onto the same platform.

Further evidence that this train has extra time built into it's schedule comes from a comparison with northbound trains with the reverse of the same station stops.  The trains which leave at 13 minutes past the hour and the 18:49 20:13, 21:13 which do Euston-Leighton Buzzard-Bletchley Euston are scheduled to do the same distance in 36-40 minutes.   Why should the southbound journey require 43?


So what's going on?  

I guess that there are several possibilities...

London Midland could be being pessimistic because they think that helps us.  "We probably can get you to London earlier but there's a risk we won't make it and we wouldn't like to let you down"? That could be ture, but I doubt it.

Maybe when London Midland and Network Rail last sat down to do a major timetable revision (the 07:00 has been around for a while) they expecting a slower journey down to London.  Perhaps they've missed the fact that the journey south isn't as problematic or unreliable as they feared.  Possible I guess, but difficult to believe.

That leaves us with a third option which is one that gets mentioned by the cynics whenever the railway companies claim service improvements.

Have London Midland built in a stack of slack time in the timetable to protect themselves should delays occur? The benefit for them manipulating the timetable for the 07:00 would presumably be: 

• The 07:00 can arrive 5-6 minutes after it's normal arrival time without missing the scheduled ETA. 
• There can be a delay of 15-16 minutes before the train is reported as officially late for the performance statistics reported by the Office of the Rail Regulation (the figures for delayed trains include only those that are 10 minutes or more behind schedule - see ... and statistics). 
• We can be 35-36 minutes late before London Midland have to pay compensation (0-29 compensation = zero, for 30-59 minutes they will give an annual season ticket holder from Bletchley £4 in rail vouchers and for more than an hour it's £7)

I guess there's two ways to look at this...  One way would be to ask if it really matters.  Day after day we get into London less than 40 minutes after leaving Bletchley so why complain?  I guess that those of us of a suspicious nature just wonder whether we are we being taken for a ride (I'm sorry for the terrible pun!)  


What do you think?      

The hammer mystery

A couple of weeks ago a fellow traveller raised a concern with the guard/ticket inspector on a homeward bound train.  He asked why the safety hammers were missing in our carriage.  What he was told I thought was interesting...


Apparently the safety hammers have been removed from all carriages on all trains because of lessons learned from the Virgin train derailment in February 2007 (BBC - One dead in Cumbria rail crash).  The lessons, according to the guard were:

1. The hammers will only shatter the windows if they are used to strike fairly small areas of glass in the corners of the windows.  Failed attempts to break the glass increase the panic levels.
2. Where people do smash the windows, they can put themselves in more danger when they get out onto the track.

All very logical, and I have to say that I was impressed by the professional way that the London Midland staff member dealt with the question.

Since over-hearing this conversation I've kept an eye out and can confirm that every hammer box I've seen has been empty except one.  That box with hammer enclosed was immediately next to the First Class area on one of the Desiros. 

I'm sure that leaving this hammer behind was an oversight since it would be far too ridiculous to suggest that perhaps London Midland have a touch of the White Star Line view on the importance of looking after the better paying customers (Titanic and First Class passengers supposedly given places in the lifeboats in front of women and children from steerage...)

15 year franchises?

The BBC are reporting on a Coalition Government proposal that rail franchises could be granted for periods up to 15 years (see Train franchises to double under government proposals). 

The Government's proposal also includes giving the train operating companies more freedom to determine the frequency of trains and the stations served.

So what does this mean for our line?  The current London Midland franchise is up for renewal in September 2015 so the parent company, the Go-Ahead group would undoubtedly welcome an extension.   If the Government proposal went ahead and the terms & conditions of the franchise were made less prescriptive then the management would welcome this too (anyone interested in seeing how the Department of Transport have dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't' should look at DfT - current franchise agreements).  But would this result in improvements?  The jury has to be out on that one.

A cynic might suggest that the reason why this has cropped up now is that the Government is willing to consider any option to reduce costs, and the subsidies that they are paying out to the train operating companies offer plenty of scope for shaving tens if not hundreds of millions off the annual bill (London Midland subsidy for 2010 = £185 million - see "How much?!!).


There will apparently be consultation on this.  I eagerly await the opportunity to comment  :-)       

Not a great day...

I normally try and keep to a single subject per post, so I hope you'll forgive me if a I do a bit of a 'moan dump'.

None of today's incidents were major or unusual (and some of them have become routine), but I don't normally have this number of things to whinge about in such a short period of time...

I still can't buy a paper at the station (see Bletchley station shop).
The air-conditioning in the end carriage of the 07:00 to Euston wasn't working.  The conditions were well described by a travelling companion as "warm and humid".

As usual, the 07:00 arrived at Euston early (timetable flab).  As we got out onto platform 11 at 07:39 the four coach train pulled into platform 10 (on time at 07:40). The result was two train-loads of passengers trying to squeeze past the narrow end of the platform and through the barriers at the same time (see Platform planning).

I did get a paper at the W.H.Smiths on the concourse at Euston.  The trouble was that as I walked out of the station I realised that I had two sets of the Sports and Business supplements.  I may be an idiot but I'm an honest idiot.  I walked back and returned the extras.  the look I got from a member of the shop staff was priceless...

Coming home, in the scrum that is the queue to go through the manual gate onto platforms 8-11 (see Ticket failure), I was elbowed in the side by a woman who was standing back like she was in the queue for the ticket office one minute and then determined to fight her way through to the front the next (the comment she made when I objected was classic - "get a life").

Boarding the 18:29 I found a half decent seat (with a table so I could do some laptop work) in the last but one carriage of the train but in the last few minutes before leaving the guard announced those fateful words "would passengers intending to travel beyond Northampton please make their way to the front four carriages".  Now we know that the train splits at Northampton with the front four carriages going on 'up north' (for this train that being all stations to Crewe), but there really is no rush to move. 

On the Desiros passengers can make their way through the train to the front at any point in the first hour of their journey and there's at least 5-6 minutes in Northampton itself to do the switch.  All London Midland are doing by making these announcements at the last minute before departing Euston is causing people to panic, shifting people from seats at the rear of the train to the front where they sometimes end up unnecessarily standing.  (This time the guard did actually make an announcement after Watford that he'd seen people stepping off the train and rejoining further up, taking the risk of missing the train altogether!)

Like many people who get off at Bletchley, I sometimes work my way down the train after passing Leighton Buzzard to get closer to the doors which stop nearest the bridge steps.  I don't object to people sitting across two seats with their feet out over the narrow alleyway, but why oh why do some of them refuse to move to allow others to walk past?

I got off at Bletchley thinking the troubles were over.  Silly me, I'd forgotten the people who insist on driving the wrong way out of the car park (see One Way?)


Thank you for listening, I don't know if you enjoyed reading the above but I feel much better for having got the gripes off my chest  ;-)

... and statistics

For a while at Bletchley we've had the London Midland performance poster for the period 7 Mar - 31 Mar up in the station building, but this week the edition for the four weeks ending 26 June 2010 has appeared.  For anyone who is unfamiliar with these stats, the latest edition along with an archive going back to 2007 is available at Performance : London Mdland.

So what are the highlights for May-June?  London Midland have said that:

1. 92% of our trains arrived within 5 minutes of the scheduled time
2. Overall passenger satisfaction was 86%

I found these figures interesting and wanted to know more.  I've still to study the detail (so more to follow on eustontrains.co.uk), but I figured that others may want to do their own research so here's where the source data can be found:

• The punctuality stats are reported through the Office of Rail Regulation.  Anyone wanting to see the detail should visit National Rail Trends
• The passenger satisfaction stats are produced by Passenger Focus ("an independent public body set up by the Government to protect the interests of passengers").  The detailed stats quoted by London Midland, along with an explanation as to how the fieldwork was done, can be found at National Passenger Survey - Spring 2010 - London Midland

Horror on the rails...

Imagine the scene:  It seems like a normal day for the commuters on the (insert train) to Euston... Little do they know that their lives are going to be changed forever...

The train pulls into the next station...  The passengers who aren't asleep or reading their newspaper look out to see the usual crowd waiting to board.  No one notices that today they look a little different different.  The dead look in their eyes and the distortion of the mouth...  Little do they know that they are about to meet the mutant vampires from (insert station name).

The vampires board and the attack begins...  Each bite turns a man or woman into another mutant...  At following stops more people board and they too are overcome until the entire train (almost) is filled with fiends... The guard (Sean Bean?), a female passenger (Helen Bonham-Carter?) and the driver (Pete Postlethwaite?) are the only ones not taken.  They barricade themselves into the cab... 

As the train approaches London it slows and the driver jumps...  The guard nearly joins him but realises the woman hasn't followed so stays on board...  They've missed their chance...  They first try to stop the train but realise that that will just leave the vampires on the loose, so they decide to take it all the way in and crash it at Euston, thereby saving the people of London, England and the World...  In the final scene Sean and Helen are seen clinging together seconds before the train turns into an inferno as it crashes into the buffers on platform 9...


The above was a completely idiotic idea I had for a film as my train pulled into an intermediate station this morning.  I looked out and saw these people boarding and the mind went racing...

So why have I written about the above here?  The reason is that I think it illustrates the inbuilt prejudices that many of us seem to have about passengers from other stations.  I know from talking to people who board at Bletchley that we acknowledge that we have irrational views about our fellow commuters from the other stations like Milton Keynes ("they take all the best seats") and Leighton Buzzard ("they shove themselves in...")

Why do we do this?  Is it down to some kind of tribal need to identify with one group with whom we have most in common and be cautious of those who are different in some way (even if that difference is just the geographical location of our homes)?

Some reading this may have already dismissed this as rubbish written by a raving fool.  If so then my apologies.  Please don't go away - you might find the moans and groans about the various aspects of our rail service in the other blog postings more interesting and relevant.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.  Eustoncommuter would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused  ;-)



(Ps: I wouldn't have had time to come up with this of course if we had a paper shop at Bletchley station).  Someone is apparently refitting the shop but there's no indication of a reopening date...) 

Ticket failure

We've always had problems with the magnetic strip failing on our tickets, but in the last year to eighteen months the problem seems to have got a lot worse.  Last year I probably renewed my ticket 5-6 times and when I renewed for 2011 the new one lasted less than 24 hours.  The railway could be right when they say that the problem is with mobile phones, but nothing else I carry seems to be affected by them!

It does look like London Midland may be doing something about this.  According to their own website (London Midland to hold its first Smartcard trials in Worcestershire). 

This innovation is only a trial at four Midland stations so there's no guarantee that we'll ever see the introduction of "The Key... a credit card sized piece of technology that will easily fit inside a wallet or purse" at our end of the line, but we just have to hope that these smartcards are a success as it would be great to put an end to having to either:

1. Go to the inconvenience of routinely queuing up and filling out the forms to get the current paper season ticket renewed, or
2. Have to go through the regular gate at Bletchley and London Euston (it seems a terrible waste of someone's time at Bletchley to have to man the gate early in the morning/evening and at Euston it's a real 'bun fight' with people trying to get through the gate both ways)

Come on London Midland - We pay £3,300 plus for an annual season ticket and deserve something a bit better than a piece of thin card with a magentic card which loses its stored data when it comes within a centimetre or two of an active mobile phone!

Best station garden?

The plants growing at Bletchley leave me wondering if perhaps London Midland is trying to win some kind of award.  Once upon a time the vegetation was restricted to hanging baskets and perhaps the odd-well placed pot or two, but at our home station this year we seem to be going for the seriously natural look:

< The north end of platform 3 (arrival platform for trains from London).  To be fair, the ramp down to the trackbed has been covered in weeds for some time, but this is a walkway used by staff and there is surface cabling in this area.





The north end of platforms 4-5 (main platforms for London bound trains).  Here the vegetation is concentrated mostly up the central drainage culvert but there's also weeds growing in the gaps between the stone slabs and the tarmac surface close to the platform edge >

< Platform 6 (Bletchley-Bedford trains).  This is the worst platform for the weeds which now appear to be approaching knee height in places.

What must the staff who man the station think of this?  It must be difficult to take pride in your job and your station when your management is happy to have it in this kind of state. 

Even if London Midland and Network Rail don't care about the views of their staff and passengers, it's surprising to see these weeds allowed to grow on the platform given the railway industry's obsession with health & safety.  Regardless of whether anyone could trip on them or not, they are growing into structures which in places must be riddled with electrical cables and pipework.  

Is it stretching the imagination too far to wonder if one day that the 'signalling problem in the Bletchley area' that delays the trains might be caused by the slow-growing roots of a weed?

No one seems able to remember the platforms being in this state any other year, so there's an assumption that whatever weedkiller used to be used has been banned.  I don't know if that's the case or not, but one person armed with a hoe, shovel and a wheelbarrow could clear the main platform areas of the stuff that's above ground in a morning.  The roots would be left so the weeds would be back, but at least the growth would be stemmed.

See also:

• Network Rail on managing vegetation

What a shambles

This piece is going to start with the text of the seven emails received via the London Midland email alert service as I think these quite nicely tell (part of) the story of the mess at London Euston this afternoon:

London Midland at 1630: "Disruption has been reported to services between your selected stations London Euston to Bletchley.  General disruption along the line caused by a trespass incident may lead to cancellations and delays to the following services: The 17:24, 17:51, 18:05 and 18:29."

London Midland at 1704: "Services from Euston were suspended this afternoon due to reports of a person walking along the tracks, and further disrupted by a London Overground train breaking down just outside the station a couple of hours later."

London Midland at 1750: Disruption has been reported to services between your selected stations London Euston to Bletchley.  The 17:34 will be delayed by about 20 minutes due to an earlier broken down train."


London Midland at 1810: Disruption has been reported to services between your selected stations London Euston to Bletchley.  The following services will be delayed after leaving: - The 17:51 by about 17 minutes caused by an earlier broken down train. - UPDATE: The 17:34 by about 35 minutes caused by an earlier broken down train."

London Midland at 1828: "Disruption has been reported to services between your selected stations London Euston to Bletchley.  The 18:05 will be delayed after leaving by about 20 minutes due to an earlier broken down train."

London Midland at 1847: "Disruption has been reported to services between your selected stations London Euston to Bletchley.  The 18:29 will be delayed after leaving by about 10 minutes due to an earlier trespass incident."

London Midland at 1851: "Disruption has been reported to services between your selected stations London Euston to Bletchley.  UPDATE: The 17:34 will be delayed after leaving by about 38 minutes due to an earlier broken down train."

At London Euston all of the VDUs mentioned the trespasser but not the broken down train.  I arrived at 17:40 and waited on platform 8 for the doors to the delayed 17:34 to open (rumour had it that they couldn't open the doors because they had no train crew).  At one point they announced that passengers for Watford Junction, Berkhampstead and Tring could get on the 17:46 on platform 7.  This left half-full around 17:50. 

Afetr another ten minutes or so (with the doors for the 17:34 still not open) they told us that the 17:51 would go from platform 13 so I ran round there.  That left shortly afterwards (significantly less crowded than usual) and got into Bletchley at 19:07 (two minutes short of the half an hour needed for London Midland to pay out the less than generous £4.00 in rail vouchers for a delay of 30-59 minutes...)


Questions:

1. Why did the Virgin Trains appear to be unaffected by the problems this afternoon?
2. Why do London Midland not initiate the same sort of contingency arrangements used by Silverlink when this kind of problem occurs - Half hourly all stop services from Euston to Northampton (fully utilising the trains and crews available, and ensuring that passengers going to some stations are not unfairly disadvantaged)?
3. Why was the train crew from the 17:46 not put onto the 17:34 which called at the same stations plus a few more?
4. Why at the station were we only given the trespass incident as the cause of the delays?  Why no mention of the broken down train?
5. Why weren't passengers allowed to board the 17:34?
6. Why was there no apology issued either by tannoy announcement at Euston or on the delayed train?
7. Why when passengers are paying £3,000+ for their season ticket and London Midland are receiving £185 million as this year's government subsidy can't we have a better service?  OK, so the trespasser incident was a problem not of their making and trains do break down, but why did this cause so much disruption?