It\u2019s sometimes said that rail passengers want a \u2018boringly reliable\u2019 service. In other words, one where it\u2019s unusual for a train to be late or, worse, the railway to be closed.<\/p>\n
Sadly, for a whole host of reasons, the railway isn\u2019t boringly reliable at the moment. There\u2019s the industrial relations. After last week\u2019s welcome news of a possible breakthrough in the RMT dispute with train companies, ASLEF strikes have been announced for early December affecting many passengers in England. And then there\u2019s the weather! From Agnes, Babet, Ciar\u00e1n to Debi, the various named storms already this autumn have shown that the railway is far from resilient. Passengers in various parts of the country have been affected by flooded tracks.<\/p>\n
But even on days when neither strikes nor the weather are a problem, the railway seems fragile. No end of signalling problems, short-formed trains and overhead electric wire issues. And from 9 December until the end of the year Avanti West Coast is having significantly scale back its timetable on Saturdays because of staff shortages.<\/p>\n
So, what is Transport Focus doing for passengers?<\/p>\n
We\u2019re asking Network Rail about the fragility point. Why are signalling systems so susceptible to developing faults? What can be done about it?<\/p>\n
Some Great Western Railway passengers are currently experiencing crowding because trains are running with fewer carriages than they should. We\u2019ve written to Great Western Railway about this.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re asking for better data to be in the public domain to help understand if the performance trend is going in the right direction or not.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll be making sure that the rail industry clearly communicates what will and won\u2019t be running during the Aslef strikes in December.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re also putting together plans for a major piece of work to help the rail industry improve the way it manages service disruption. Clearly, it would be better if the track, signals and trains didn\u2019t fail in the first place. But increased focus on passenger experience and minimising inconvenience when something does go wrong will help. The railway needs to show that it cares and that it is on passengers\u2019 side when something goes awry.<\/p>\n
The post A \u2018fragile\u2019 railway?<\/a> appeared first on Transport Focus<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s sometimes said that rail passengers want a \u2018boringly reliable\u2019 service. In other words, one where it\u2019s unusual for a train to be late or, worse, the railway to be closed. Sadly, for a whole host of reasons, the railway isn\u2019t boringly reliable at the moment. There\u2019s the industrial relations. After last week\u2019s welcome news of a possible breakthrough in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-camcab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3438"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}